There was the tale of a man who was buried up to his neck in the ruins of the City Chambers. When they dug him out, the whole of his lower body was crushed flat, like a tiger rug, and he had time to see it that way, before he died.

Another woman had been trapped by her legs under a beam. Her son had tried to free her by, good God, amputating her legs. But he could only remove one before the flames beat him back.

…And so on; everybody had a story to tell, it seemed.

More and more people crushed into the Square. The fires were still growing, all around the skyline. New arrivals said the big fires on the south bank had leapt the Clyde. That big explosion was the fuel depot at the Central Station going up.

And while all that marched up from the south, another great blaze was licking its way down from the wreckage of the Buchanan Centre to the north.

She waited. There was nowhere to run. She just had to hope it would die back before it reached her. She cradled the bump in her stomach, shielding it with her hands.

While Geena and Arkady worked through their post-burn checklist, the craft left the land of shadows and sailed over brightening ground. The Moon filled his window now, a montage of pale tan and black, the edges and rims of the craters sharp and stark. Sometimes he lost his sense of perspective and the landscape seemed to flatten out, and the shadows looked like streaks of oil, sliding past his window.

But those streaks of light and dark were the mountains of the Moon.

Without air, compared to Earth from orbit, the view was remarkably clear. He flew over a landscape of craters: young, smooth, perfect bowls; random gouges; gentle hollows; tiny buckshot wounds; craters on top of craters. Here was a big old basin, with an eroded mountain at its centre, and on the smooth floor — and on the flanks of its mountains, and its rambling walls — he could see the pockmarks of younger impacts.

Craters on craters, everywhere: everything he saw, it seemed to him, was made of the rims or basins or central peaks of craters. It was like flying over some ghastly World War One battleground. It was a world of death, a world whose life had been smashed out of it.