Branner went for the scope. Like he could miniaturise himself and climb within it, out of view.

A cool air. Wind sharpening.

The metal smell of his rifle.

He saw the man on the waste ground lift himself and lean back, hold something to the light. Saw it was not a weapon beside the man but a rod of some type. Some scientific thing.

It will be legit, Branner thought. Some survey. Something to do with the Dock.

There was a hiatus. Branner stayed in the scope, watched the man unpack vials, tubes. Reach for the strange rod.

Thought of the calm procedural tone the doctor used this morning, to break the news. His wife would die.

He saw then the younger boy, down on the empty riverbed. Throwing stones at the Overland as it passed above him. The scruffy thick-set mongrel dizzy round the boy’s feet.

Focus, John.

The hospital behind him.

The scene below an object now. A coin through a jeweller’s loupe.

Watch the bridge, he coached himself. Focus on the bridge.

The protest now was filtering. The crowd seeming to pour.

Something microscopic in the fact the smallest tap could send a hundred-and-seventy-grain bullet three-quarters of a mile.

Move your finger just a millimetre and you could end a life; but you cannot save one. Her. Not with the strength of your whole body.

Branner felt himself sliding again, away from the wider world. Into the big hole in his ground, the time ahead without her.

The pull of the chasm.

You need to focus now.

She is fading, you can feel it.

And there is nothing you can do.

Come on, he thought, come on. Happen, something, so I do not have to think of her.

LAKE

After the deafening noise and the cool dark of the pumphouse it took Cora a moment to adjust to the relative quiet and the bright sun.

It seemed impossible that the noise of the gravity loaders deep in the rock could barely be heard from outside. But they gave now only a low thrum.

Cora blinked in the light. Butterflies batted their wings as they sunned themselves on the wall of the pumphouse entrance.

There was the self-contained hum of the hoses as the train took on water.

Above the pumphouse, on the slope of the mountain, the gorse was egg-yolk thick. Pale sheep stood out against the grass.

Beyond the scrub and the scattered rock, the wall of the dam looked medieval. Geometric. Impassive.

It looked somehow far older than the mountain.

On the brow of the slope, like shepherds, were the wolf-grey figures of two guards.

The cloth tacked slightly to the ice as Cora adjusted her grip on the block she had brought from the pumphouse cavern.

They had collected the ice from the reservoir in January, those that were here over Christmas, stood to their waists in frozen shore water, pickaxing away.