There was a pall of smoke to the west, over whatever was going on in Edinburgh. Helicopters flitted, their lights winking brightly. Some of them appeared to be dumping water or some kind of chemicals into the continuing inferno; others were dropping crates of supplies under blossoming parachute canopies to the pockets of survivors that remained. The small human activity, probing and challenging the work of the Moonseed, warmed Ted’s heart.

Somehow, watching that, he found it easier to believe that Michael might yet have lived through all of that.

He found a purpose, coalescing within him. He had to return. I’ll go in for Michael. And if I don’t find my son, maybe I’ll find the arsehole who lured him in there. Then we’ll see.

He told Jane what he planned.

“What? That’s ridiculous.”

“But if it was Jack—”

“I’d go. I’d go without hesitation.”

And above their heads, the ash and smoke and steam merged into one hell of a sunset, a curtain of flame that reached to the police-blue zenith.

The Rest Centre was actually quieter that night. Many people had found billets, or had been allowed to leave to find accommodation in hotels, or with relatives.

Sleep again came easily to Ted. But he was woken at 3.00 a.m., by yelling voices.

A middle-aged man — still dressed in the rumpled suit in which he’d arrived at the Rest Centre yesterday, straight from his job as lawyer or bank manager or accountant — had strangled that yapping Alsatian with his bare hands.

4

The journey into Tokyo was an ordeal for Declan Hague.

May was the season for the school children to be taken in parties to the nation’s show places. Venus and the volcano ash hadn’t put a stop to that, and they seemed to be everywhere: on the trains and the stations and the streets, with their mobile phones and their laughing faces and their fashionable rad-gear and their electronic toys. And everywhere he went, they seemed to home in on him.

Well, he could understand why. He was a combination of two rarities for these kids: a gaijin — a foreigner — and a monk. Here they came in little groups of three or four, boys and girls alike in their ankle socks and navy or black uniforms and ties, grinning and giggling and holding up their disposable cameras.

The kids pursued most of the few gaijin on Tokyo’s crowded streets. But he thought there was more to it than that. About him, they probably sensed weakness, on some subliminal level.

Weakness. Fear.

Or even a whiff of danger.

After all, it was because of children younger than these teenagers that he had been forced to leave Ireland, leave the Church, and come all the way around the world to this place, to immerse himself in the placidity of another religion.