The policeman stepped forward. His blue trousers and yellow jacket were stained green where he’d been thrown into the grass. “Who else? It isn’t too late yet. I’ll do all I can to get you down from here in safety.”

There was a stir among the cultists, and a stir in Mike’s heart. Not too late. Could that be true?

People were getting up around him, brushing off scuffed and torn suits. Sheepishly joining the copper.

But it is too late, Mike thought. It had been too late for them all, for the whole city maybe, from the moment he had brought those Moon dust grains to this place.

He had let Henry down, betrayed a trust. He had killed the city, even his family, and he deserved to suffer.

…Or maybe, as Bran expressed it, all he had done was to open the door, the hatch to the Airlock that was waiting for them all. And in that case, he deserved the peace and joy and endless light that would follow.

So he ignored the people losing their faith, scurrying down the rock after that copper like frightened rabbits. Perhaps there was nobody left but himself and Bran, but that was okay too. There would be room for them all later. Room for a planet-ful of lost souls.

He looked for Bran. But Bran had gone.

That was puzzling. But even that didn’t seem to matter.

“One hundred feet… eighty feet… eighty feet.”

“Roger that, eighty feet.”

“Power lines a quarter mile.”

“Roger, power lines. Pulling up.”

The surge upward caught Henry by surprise. His attention had been fixed on the evolution of the Seat; suddenly he was pushed down in his jump seat, his consciousness forced back into his fragile body, hurled around inside this clattering contraption.

“One twenty… one fifty… one eighty… five hundred feet now.”

“Five hundred feet. I have the lines visual. Over we go.”

Henry saw the power lines pass seemingly feet below the Chinook.

“Okay, going lower—”

The Chinook orbited over the south face of the Seat once more.

In the last few seconds, the landsliding had become intense. As Henry looked down, it was as if everything south of a line drawn east-west from the Salisbury Crags to the Dunsapie Loch was beginning to move. The nature of the movement was eerie — like nothing he had seen before — not truly a landslide, for there was no lateral movement; rather, the whole mass was rippling and churning up, basalt shattered and turned to a crude fluid by the immense forces stirring within.

And now, at last, the whole south side of the Seat began to slide southwards along a deep-seated plane. Already outlying billows of dust and ash were reaching Duddingston Loch and Prestonfield, the suburb to the south of the Seat, mercifully evacuated—

That was when the explosion came.