The sun was just clearing the ridge to the east when he arrived at the back door of Penobscot Power's abandoned enterprise. Phocoena and the doctor's MI had coexisted briefly in the bowels of those remains; her service tunnel had run along the spine of a great subterranean finger of ocean, sixty meters wide and a hundred times as long, drilled through solid bedrock. At the time of its conception it had been a valiant recreation of the lunar engine that drove the tides of Fundy, two hundred klicks up the coast. Now it was only a great flooded sewer pipe, and a way for shy submarines to slip inland unobserved.

None of which was obvious from here, of course. From here, there was only a scorched chain-link fence, carbon-coated rectangles of metal that had once proclaimed No Trespassing, and—fifty meters on the other side, where the rock rose from the earth—a broken-toothed concrete-and-rebar mouth in the face of the ridge. One of the gate's two panels swung creaking in the arid breeze. The other listed at an angle, stiff in its hinges.

He stood with his back to the gate. He raised his arm and held it. He remembered where the doctor had pointed, corrected his angle.

That way.

Just a few degrees over the horizon. That implied either a high distant sighting or a much closer, low-altitude one. Atmospheric inversions were strongest during twilight and darkness, Lubin remembered. They were generally only a few hundred meters thick, and they tended to act as a blanket, holding released particulates close to the ground.

He walked south. Flame still flickered here and there, consuming little pockets of left-over combustibles. A morning breeze was rising, coming in from the coast. It promised cooler temperatures and cleaner air; now, though, ash still gusted everywhere. Lubin coughed up chalky phlegm and kept going.

The doctor had given him a belt to go with the grenades. The little aerosol explosives bumped against his hips as he walked. He kept the gun in hand, aiming absently at convenient targets, stumps and powdered shrubs and the remains of fenceposts. There wasn't much left to point at. His imagination invested what there was with limbs and faces. He imagined them bleeding.

Of course, his witness had hardly been a GPS on legs. There were so many errors nested in her directions that correcting for wind speed was tantamount to adding one small error to a half-dozen larger ones. Still, Lubin was nothing if not systematic. There was a reasonable chance that he was within a kilometer of the starburst's coordinates. He turned east for a few minutes, to compensate for the breeze. Then he popped the first grenade onto his pistol and fired at the sky.

It soared into the air like a great yellow egg and exploded into a fluorescent pink cloud twenty meters across.