To Ted’s surprise, they survived the night, the two of them crouched in the ruins of St Giles’. No food or water, but that scarcely mattered now.

And with the dawn came the sound of thunder. Ted went outside, with Hamish’s collar grasped in his hand — Hamish-Bran seemed passive, beaten — and he climbed a ruined wall, looking for a vantage.

The Moonseed was on the move. The Moonseed pool was spreading like a silvery stain across the ground. The remains of buildings, of homes, with whatever tokens and bodies and memories they held, were cracking and falling, subsiding into the glowing mass. Ash was rising in diffuse clouds. There was a stink of ozone.

Inexorable. The word might have been coined for the stuff.

Where Holyrood Road used to be, a man, a soldier, was running before the spreading, flaring pool, somehow separated from his mates. He was far enough away to be reduced to a stick figure, his face a white blur.

He wasn’t running fast enough. The Moonseed was faster.

Ted pointed. “Look.”

“What? For God’s sake, what?”

“Did you ever see anything like that? The fox that couldn’t outrun the hounds. The child caught by the tide. Jesus, Jesus.”

In the last moment, that white point of a face turned to Ted, as if imploring.

“Nothing I can do,” Ted murmured. “Not any of us. It’s a tide of death. Come all the way from the stars, to wreck our homes, and kill us… And there are always little bastards like you, out to make it worse for everybody else.”

The Moonseed pool, hissing, overwhelmed the soldier. It was mercifully brief, from Ted’s point of view. One minute he was there, the next, in a flail of limbs, he was falling, and gone.

And now Ted turned to face east.

It was coming, crackling, bursts of light like a second dawn, the sound of rock breaking open like eggshell, washing up Castle Rock in a tide of light. Seconds left, no more.

“What do you think?” Ted asked gently. “Still expecting a great beam-up to that party in the sky?”

Bran was begging now. “Let me go. Oh Jesus, oh shit, let me go.”

Ted tightened his grip on Bran’s collar. “Burning witches in the Highlands, eh. Good for them. Maybe the Highlands will survive. Maybe the Highlanders will come back down here, like William Wallace, and stuff the bloody Moonseed back where it came from. Eh?

The smell of ozone was stronger. Just like the beach, he thought. He remembered what Henry had told him, nuclear fusion or fission or some damn thing going on as the Moonseed spread. He smiled.

“Maybe we’ll get a sun tan,” he said to Bran.

Bran, panting, his trouser legs stained wet, turned a dirt-streaked, tearful face up to him. “What? You crazy old fucker. What?”