The A.F.R. raid on Antitoi Entertainent (pp. 484–485)
there are great quiet numbers of persons in wheelchairs moving in the room with him, in the shoproom, moving calmly into position behind waist-high glass counters full of wacky notions. The street outside is flanked on both sidewalks by defiles of wheelchaired, blanket-lapped persons whose faces are obscured by what look like large and snow-dotted leaves […] Wheelchair Assassins. Lucien has been taught the glyph of a profiled wheelchair with an enormous bone-crossed skull below.
Context
The en-masse arrival: military vocabulary ("defiles," "moving calmly into position") welded to the body-concealment uniform — lap blankets below, leaf-like masks above, the A.F.R.'s own two-part veil system hiding both what's missing and what's left. And the glyph: a wheelchair over crossed bones, disability itself the emblem of death, taught to Québecois children like a road sign.