But the waiters knew Turk well enough to let him alone. So he stayed out a while longer with Lise and they watched the light of the flares, or whatever they were, dancing on the distant sea.

Not bright all the way down. He saw what she meant. The shifting, glittering curtains tailed into darkness well before they reached the surface of the ocean. Burned out, maybe. That was a hopeful sign. Lise took out her phone and punched up a local news broadcast, relaying bits of it to Turk. They were talking about a "storm," she said, or what looked on radar like a storm, the fringes of it extending north and south for hundreds of miles, the heart of it more or less centered on the Port.

And now the bright rain fell over the headlands and the inner harbor, illuminating the decks and superstructures of cruise ships and cargo vessels at anchor. Then the silhouettes of the cargo cranes grew misty and obscure, the tall hotels in the city dimmed in the distance, the souks and markets vanished as the shining rain moved up the hillsides and seemed to grow taller as it came, a canyon wall of murky light.

But nothing burst into flame. That was good, Turk thought. Then he thought: but it could be toxic. It could be any fucking thing. "About time to move indoors," he said.

Tyrell, the headwaiter at Harley's, was a guy Turk had briefly worked with on the pipelines out in the Rub al-Khali. They weren't big buddies or anything but they were friendly, and Tyrell looked relieved when Turk and Lise finally abandoned the patio. Tyrell slid the glass doors shut and said, "You got any idea—?"

"No," Turk said.

"I don't know whether to run or just enjoy the show. I called my wife. We live down in the Flats." A low-rent neighborhood some few miles along the coast. "She says it's happening there, too. She says there's stuff falling on the house, it looks like ash."

"But nothing's burning?"

"She said not."

"It could be volcanic ash," Lise said, and Turk had to admire how she was handling all this. She was tense but not visibly afraid, not too scared to venture a theory. "It would have to have been some kind of tectonic event way out over the horizon, something at sea…"

"Like a sea volcano," Tyrell said, nodding.

"But we would have felt something before the ash got to us if it was anywhere close—an earthquake, a tsunami."

"Been no report of any such thing," Turk said, "far as I know."

"Ash," Tyrell added. "Like, gray and powdery."