Henry, irritated, shook his head. “That’s because you don’t know how to look at it—”

“Oh, my,” Arkady said now. “Will you look at that.”

Henry and Geena crowded to see.

Here she was, right on cue, as they completed their audacious orbit out of her sight for the first time in their lives: Mother Earth, right where she should be, rising above the surface of the Moon, a blue crescent hanging in the black sky.

Even from here, you could see volcano smoke.

“…Oh, man, that’s great,” Geena said. “Wow, is that pretty.”

Arkady started taking pictures of Earth with his Hasselblad. “I hope these come out.”

“You sure you’re getting it?”

“I think so…”

And so on. Henry sank back into his couch. It was Apollo 8 all over again, he thought, the astronauts ignoring the unexplored wastes below them, for the sake of a few tourist snaps of a place they’d spent their whole lives. It was such a cliché…

But he found a lump in his throat.

This is ridiculous, he thought. What am I, a salmon dreaming of the birthing river?

He tried to focus his attention on the Moon. But some part of him, buried deep in his hind brain, made him look up at the rising Earth, again and again, as Geena and Arkady crowded to take their pictures.

The sea was sharply cold, but when William’s head was out of the water he could feel it being cooked by the heat of the skeletal, smouldering wreck of the burning rig, so he had to duck under the surface as much as he could manage.

There were no lifeboats, but there was buoyancy foam here from a smashed boat, and he and four others were clinging to it, including Jackie Brown. William couldn’t get to a foothold, and his arms were getting weaker, but he didn’t want to drag some other guy off and back into the water.

There were people just floating in the water, screaming from the pain of their burns. There was nothing William or anybody else could do for them. There were bodies, too, strips of flesh peeling off them.

The air stank here, that rotten-egg sulphide smell.

And now there was a new explosion, behind him, from the ocean.

He turned in the water, clinging to his scraps of foam.

There were explosions coming towards him, in a line maybe five hundred yards long. Ash and steam plumed into the air, and fell back into the water. The steam was gathering into a cloud that soon drifted over the five of them, heavy droplets, hot and damp, that clung to their skin, and made it impossible to breathe without sucking in moisture.

William screamed. Not from pain — from bewilderment. Wasn’t the rig explosion enough? How could there be more? Wasn’t that one thing enough?

…But now there was something under his booted feet.

Surprised, he looked down.