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sharply. The dream he'd been having snapped like a wishbone, and he was awake, eyes open, knowing he'd been disturbed.
      He was miles from the beach. He was in the small apartment he had rented on Parmingale Street in Shaverton. There was a city and a deep stretch of wild coastal foreland between him and the sea. There was the city and the night.
      Falk got up. It was long after midnight. The windows of the apartment faced north and, beyond the soft amber freckles of the city lights, he thought he could see another glow, something softer and more diffuse, far away towards the north-west. The harder he looked at it, the more he couldn't see it.
      He turned on the apartment's box, but there was nothing on the news. He lit his celf. There were messages, mostly junk, two from Cleesh that he'd return later. He got a glass of water. It was too early to get up and too late to sleep. The moment he turned the night stand light on, blurds began to patter against the windows.
      He took another sip of water. Even the water was threaded with the lemony tang of Insect-Aside.
      Sleep seemed the only sensible recourse, but he couldn't shake that half-dreamt oceanic boom, the crash and draw. He ran a few last searches on his celf.
      A minor news hub, unaffiliated and unsupported by any network or SO mandate, had a story. An accident in northwest Shaverton. An explosion in the Letts district. No details.
      He waited thirty seconds. Suddenly, his celf began to chime repeatedly as all the query searches he'd launched on waking up began to return positive matches for his parameters. Small news hubs first, then quick responses from the associateds, then a flurry of independent correspondents who were monitoring the main links. An accident in Letts. An explosion. No details. Unconfirmed.
      Then the first main newsfeed carried it as a breaking story. At almost the same moment that his celf pinged it, the news channel playing on his box switched to developments in Letts. An explosion had occurred at 2.09. That was ten minutes earlier.
      Falk had been awake for ten minutes.
      The world caught up. In another minute it went from no stories to almost forty items. He tried calling Cleesh to see what she had, but there was no answer from her celf or her rental.
      He felt slight agitation. He put on some coffee and pulled on trousers and a shirt while the filter sputtered. Sixty-six items now. The first unsubstantiated details. A major explosion in a derelict industrial site on Letts, north of Landmark Hill, in a non-residential zone sandwiched between District Through and the Cape Highway. Two reports said unstable chemicals, oil condensates, improperly stored in an abandoned warehouse. Another said a meteor strike. No mention of casualties.
      The filter sputtered. He went back to the window and looked out at a flat, glazed night that wished to make no official comment at this time. Was that a fuzz of light in the north-west? A radiance? A fire? If the blast had been enough to wake him, it must have been big.
      He tried Cleesh again. Nothing. He tried two other correspondents he'd got to know. On the box, an SO spokesperson appeared on a live feed, talking calmly and solemnly. Behind her, the unfocused yellow glare of a significant fire, the silhouettes of emergency teams moving against it.
      Falk put the sound up. The spokesperson was live in Letts. She was explaining that meteor impacts were a rare but very present fact of life on Eighty-Six. Everyone had seen the shooting stars. The majority by far were atmosphere grazers or too minuscule to matter. Most bolides weren't significant enough to cause damage or hypervelocity impacts. The Letts district had been unlucky. Still no word on any casualties. City rescue was containing the incident.
      It was too early for the city's overground rail system, and cabs had become extinct. A driver in the ProFood luncheonette down the street from Falk's apartment told Falk he