He blinked fervently as his mind slatted suddenly down into layers, the subconscious falling back to where it belonged. He swallowed hard. His head felt as if it was imploding, reorganizing itself out of a chaos of unpicked shreds.

He heard Derkhan’s voice coming to the end of some announcement.

“. . . incredible!” she shouted. “Isaac? Isaac, can you hear me? Are you all right?”

Isaac closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them slowly. The night swam back into focus.

He stumbled forward onto his hands and knees, and realized that he was no longer held by the construct, that it had only been the slake-moth’s oneiric hold on him that had kept him standing. He looked up, wiping blood from his face.

It took a moment for him to make sense of the scene before him.

Derkhan and Yagharek were standing, unheld, at the edges of the wasteland. Yagharek had thrown back his hood to unveil his great bird-head. Both held themselves in poses of frozen action, ready to run or leap in any direction. Both stared into the centre of the rubbish arena.

In front of Isaac were several of the larger constructs that had been standing behind him when the moth had landed. They milled vaguely around an enormous shattered thing.

Towering over the Construct Council’s space in the dump was the enormous chain-dripping arm of a crane. It had swivelled away from the river, over the little defensive wall of waste, coming to a rest over the centre of the space.

Directly below it, burst open into a million dangerous fragments, were the remains of an enormous wooden crate, a cube taller than a man. Spilling from the smashed residue of its wooden walls was its cargo, a skittering mountain of iron and coal and stone, a chaotic aggregate of the heaviest detritus in the Griss Twist dump.

The mound of dense rubbish spilt slowly into an inverted cone, slipping past the shattered slats of the crate.

Below it, twisting and scrabbling weakly and emitting pathetic sounds, a mass of splintered exoskeleton and seeping tissue, its wings broken and buried beneath the crush of refuse, was the slake-moth.

“Isaac, did you see it?” hissed Derkhan.

He shook his head, his eyes wide in astonishment. Slowly, he pulled himself to his feet.

“What happened?” he managed to spit. His voice sounded shockingly alien to him.

“You were under nearly a minute,” Derkhan said urgently. “It got you . . . I was screaming at you, but you were gone . . . and then . . . and then the constructs stepped forward.” She looked, wondering. “They were walking towards it, and it could sense them . . . and it seemed confused and . . . and flustered. It moved back a little and stretched its wings back further, so that it was beaming colours at the constructs as well as you, but they kept coming!”