Left of the bridge the Ice Dock itself. Dust from the construction work within lifting from it like faint smoke.

Between the dry riverbed and the Dock was derelict ground. Bulldozered leftovers of cleared buildings piled around the site.

Branner scoped the area. A huge space but dwarfed by the Dock. The land of the old park behind.

Despite the high fences, there were signs of people. Spent fires. A hopscotch court. Graffiti.

Untidy patches of silver-grey scrub.

The broken opening in the waste ground caught him unawares. A memory that flipped his stomach. The dark opening like a section of blown-out pipe.

It brought a sudden bile of adrenalin into Branner’s mouth. His pulse thickened and he felt the walls of detachment shudder.

What was it?

He increased the magnification of his scope. It looked as if something heavy had fallen through the floor.

From the sporadic growth around it, Branner sensed the hole held water.

He felt the adrenalin turn soupy inside him.

Tried to call up a sharpness, to cut through the film that, since this morning, the doctor’s words had created between him and the rest of the world.

He wanted a jolt. Some flash to bring him back to earth. Hoped quietly for a crisis. Something that would require his whole mind.

A soft pulse in the chestconnect directed Branner to check the sectors he hadn’t yet. He swung the baffle. Had to. And there some quarter-of-a-mile away was the hospital. Like a cliff.

Through the scope he saw the square-looking white beds. The uniforms of the senior nurses the same blue as his police marksman cap. Not like the pale blue she’d worn the first time they met. Sewing up the wound in his jaw.

Branner wanted to stare the hospital down. Had the insane thought he could shoot the building dead and put an end to things. That if he killed the building, all the illness in it would be done.

There was the falcon again, on the building’s roof. A bolt-black silhouette the size of a bullet casing, against the pale squat structures of the windtwist generators.

He eyed it in the scope. Brought it bold and tangible. Alive with colour, detailed. Close. Then, as if aware of him, it dipped off the ledge, the sudden engine of its shoulders driving it into the sky and out amongst the buildings.

Branner turned away from the hospital. A scruffy dog trotted across the waste ground, stopped briefly and periodically to sniff, to mark. Went instinctively to the broken shallow and lowered its head to drink. Water.

The dog looked feral. It had the thick head and shoulders of an aggressive dog, but an energetic gait.

The dog brought scale to the ground. The fallaway section looked some three to four metres in length and half that wide.

Branner watched the dog, the skin around the scar on his jaw tacking slightly against the rifle stock.