Auger peered through the ceiling porthole of the rescue crawler, willing the red and green lights of the dropship to burn through the clouds and hoping that the clouds themselves would not become even more agitated. There was something wrong with the clouds tonight. Their talk was normally a slow and serene form of communication, revealed by changes in their shape, colour and texturing. Vast circuitlike structures of hard-edged blue-grey would take form over many minutes; these forms would gradually stabilise and then slowly fade. Tens of minutes later, new patterns would begin to emerge from the doughy grey of unstructured cloud. Such movements were merely the basic units of an exchange that might take hours or days to complete.

But right now the clouds were bickering. The patterns formed and decayed at an accelerated rate, with lightning a kind of emphatic punctuation to the dialogue. The clouds fissioned and merged, as if renegotiating age-old treaties and alliances.

“They do this sometimes,” Cassandra said.

“I know,” Auger replied, “but not on my watch, and not right over the city I happen to be investigating.”

“Maybe it’s not just happening over Paris,” Cassandra mused.

“I hoped so, too. Unfortunately, I checked. There’s a major argument in the weather system centred right over northern France, and it started thickening up at about the time we arrived.”

“Coincidence.”

“Or not.”

Lightning illuminated the scene outside, picking out a linear obstacle course of blocks, ramps and deep, smooth-sided trenches, all cut from pale-blue ice with laser-precision. On either side of the Champs-Elysées, the collapsed forms of buildings were glazed with thin traceries of the same pastel ice, neatly stepped and edged where the Antiquities Board’s remote-controlled excavators had halted when they sensed fragile masonry, steel and glass. Auger thought about the controllers who directed those machines from orbit and felt a growing desire to be up there with them, away from the hazards of the ground.