The bay glittered ahead, glimpses through the stone-and-glass canyon of streets mazing their way towards it. One slim shard of the sea cutting inwards from the coast, while the rest of it stretched implacable, unaccountable, a cracked and rippling mirror reflecting the horizon.

Several small shadows bobbed against that broken silver horizon, but none would venture over it. If they did, by bad wind or mistake, they would never return to tell Gullsinger what they found on its other side. The optimistic said it was because some things could still break for the better, and quick, kind currents had carried them to some safer shore. The realistic, that they would never know.

The pragmatic fished as close to the coast as they could. What they reeled in still seemed to be abundant and edible, so the optimists had that point in their favour, at least. And when it came to breakages that made the world better for what little of humanity had survived them, they could point, too, to Pike.

The dam that stretched across the bay did so as a dead, silent sieve, straining no energy from the waves. But the power plant at its near end blazed light and wailed with music, muffled source and echo of the same song that would be blaring from a dozen radios across the city. Even from blocks away, a beacon and a warning that someone with bleak humour and too many flags on their hands had taken the time to mark in yellow. Banners flapping as much in the music, it seemed, as the breeze, caution, cracks in the world ahead.

Not a total collapse, not imminent, proven danger, but sparks rising strangely or sound falling flat, time skipping beats or water starting to frost over well above the freezing point. The world’s equivalent of a rotten creak in the floorboards, the first crack in a load-bearing beam. Reason enough for seasoned travellers to seek an alternate route, but there was nowhere else to go ahead, nothing to be seeking but that crack in the world.