But after a time the sight of every battleground fatigued him. He withdrew by degrees. Nights in that other place he read cheap books pilfered from drugstores and late-night gas stations. He read by candlelight in the abandoned buildings where clochards sought shelter. Days on the Escapement he spent walking, or riding the hopping cars on the rails, or hitching rides on slow-moving wagons. All he knew was that he had to keep moving.

Gradually, by degrees, he got to know the others. Esther, Bill, others who belonged in neither place. Liminal, they moved like ghosts, unseen by passers-by. They banded together for comfort. They drank by open fires and slept under the clear and distant stars. They had no purpose, no ambition but to simply be.

“Bring it up, bring it up.” The ropes tied round the fish made it easier to drag it along, but it took their combined force to pull it out of the footprint-like crater and back onto the horizontal plains. Finally they brought up the surviving donkey and it was the donkey who was tasked with pulling the fish, and the rest of them took turns helping.

Mathieu didn’t mind the labour. He welcomed the exertion, the fact that with the weight of the fish each step became a world, and there was no room left for anything but the act of pulling. It made him uneasy, the thing, and when he wasn’t pulling alongside the donkey he was troubled by the way Davide and Esther walked close together, and how their shadows trailed behind them, and how the shadows seemed larger than their source. And he was troubled by the fish itself, and how it seemed alive, this elaborate, mechanical contraption, inimical, a mimic, a simulacrum of life.

They walked days across the plains and saw not another storm. On the seventh day they saw an edifice rising far in the distance, a giant structure that jutted out of the ground as though, long ago, it had crashed into it. Currents of lightning flashed in complicated shapes all across the dark body of the edifice, which cast a long shadow over the plain. It took a two-day hike to reach it, and they were glad, for it was known that substance could often be found near such an edifice.

This close, it almost resembled a passenger ship, buried nose-first in the ground. The metal looked strangely organic, and it occurred to Mathieu, unpleasantly, that it could have been something else entirely, something alive: like an egg. They camped under the edifice that night, and the fish, agitated, kept flopping on the ground where it lay, its mouth opening and closing as though it were trying to bite prey or bait that wasn’t there. All through the night the blue electric lights flashed as they snaked over the body of the edifice like living tattoos.They trudged on across the plains.