No, he had replied. Not the Moonseed. Something more specific than that.

Saying goodbye to her, and Jack, had been harder than he had imagined. But it had to be done. He had a job to do, and he had never shirked from duty before.

Anyway he was too damn old. They didn’t need him any more. It was better this way.

Blue and Ted had been dropped off at the city by-pass, a deserted motorway-class road, a couple of miles south-east of Arthur’s Seat — or rather, of the hole in the ground where the Seat had been. They walked along the Gilmerton Road towards the city, through the residential areas of Gilmerton and Hyvot’s Bank and Inch.

At first there was little sign of damage. Here, the evacuation had been complete: the houses and shops were closed up, and the road was reasonably clear, save for a couple of burned-out wrecks. There was barely a sign, Ted thought, of the calamity that had befallen the city, save for a few inert lumps of rock — lava bombs, said Blue — and the pervasive layer of ash. The ash gave the mundane suburban streets a strange, unearthly tinge, Ted thought, as if the colours had been washed out, only the discarded outlines remaining. And the silence was eerie. No traffic noise. No bird song. No insects.

Only the sounds of the suit, his own noisy breathing, the scuff of the heavy fabric at his armpits and crotch, the soft crunching of his footfalls in volcanic ash.

Like walking on the Moon, he thought.

But the air was still and hot and smoggy, a yellow dome that obscured the sky. There were fires burning somewhere, threads of black smoke that snaked into the sky. And when a road junction gave them a clear view of the Braid Hills, the site of a golf course Ted had played a few times, he could see the steely glint of Moonseed dust.

Blue was dismissive. “That’s a new infection,” he said. “We want to get into the primary nest, where the Seat used to be. See what the hell the Moonseed becomes when it matures.” So he stomped on, setting a tough pace that Ted had trouble matching, even more trouble pretending it wasn’t causing him any distress.

They passed the Cameron Toll, and now, barely half a mile from the Seat itself, the signs of damage suddenly became apparent. Volcanic rubble lay everywhere, rocks and pumice and ash; the housing stock was mostly standing, but with shattered windows and roofs, stove-in cars littering the silent streets.

And now, around Mayfield, they reached a place where the damage was much more severe. The buildings had been effectively razed, down to their foundations. The area looked something like a schematic street plan, in fact.

Blue grunted. “The pyroclastic flow came here. Hell on Earth, for a few minutes or hours.”

The ash was still warm underfoot.