It's a small rig, as such things were measured. Nowhere near the city-sized monstrosities that once crowded the ocean hereabouts. Perhaps, by the time it was built, oil was already falling out of fashion; or perhaps there simply wasn't enough left to warrant a bigger investment. For whatever reason, the main hull is only two stories thick along most of its length. Now Clarke rises onto the wide-open expanse of its roof.

The rig's deck stretches over half the area of a city block. There's an elevated helipad at the far end, and a great crane whose tendons have been cut; it lies across the deck at a messy angle, struts and crossbeams slightly crumpled on impact. The derrick at the nearer end is relatively intact, thrusting into the sky like a wireframe phallus. Clarke rises in its shadow, into something that was once a control hut of some kind. Now it's a rectangular ruin; none of the four walls remain intact, and the roof itself has been thrown halfway across the deck. There were control panels and electronics here once—she recognizes the general outlines of half-melted instrumentation.

This is how completely the hut has been destroyed: Lenie Clarke can simply step onto the main deck over what's left of the walls.

All this space, this uninterrupted visibility, unsettles her. For five years she has hidden beneath the heavy, comforting darkness of the North Atlantic, but up here—up here, she can see all the way to the edge of the world. She feels naked, like a target: visible from infinite distance.

Lubin is a small figure on the far side of the platform, his back turned, leaning on the western railing. Clarke walks towards him, skirting the wreckage, suddenly oblivious to the wheeling of the gulls. She nears the edge, fights momentary vertigo: Sable Archipelago spreads out before her, an insignificant chain of sandy dots in the middle of the ocean. The nearest looks big enough from here, though, its spine sheathed in brownish vegetation, its beach stretching almost out of sight to the south. Off in that distance, Clarke thinks she sees tiny specks in vague motion.

Lubin's wearing a pair of binoculars, panning his head slowly from side to side. Scanning the island. He doesn't speak as Clarke joins him on the railing.

"Did you know them?" she asks softly.

"Perhaps. I don't know who was out here when it happened."

I'm sorry, she almost says, but what's the point?

"Maybe they saw it coming," she suggests. "Maybe they got away."

He doesn't look away from the shoreline. The binocs extend from his eyes like tubular antennae.

"Should we be out in the open like this?" Clarke asks.

Lubin shrugs, startlingly, chillingly indifferent to security.

She looks down along the shoreline. The moving specks are a bit larger now, some kind of animals from the look of it. They appear to be moving this way.