She heard the distant, Doppler-shifted wail of police sirens, the throaty flap of a helicopter somewhere overhead.

“Dad, what’s going on?”

“I don’t know. I’ll see you later.”

Jack was left standing in the doorway, wide-eyed. “Shall I start packing? What can I take?”

“First things first.” She swung her legs out of bed. “Go fix us some breakfast.”

Still sleepy, eyes gritty after being disturbed, she used the bathroom. Mundane details, bright in the unreal daylight: yesterday’s Edinburgh Evening News left folded on the window ledge by her father, a final shred of paper left clinging to the toilet roll in its holder, Ted’s irritating little habit. The sunlight on the frosted glass of the window was midsummer bright.

There was no bird song, she noticed absently. No morning chorus, save for the discordant wail of the emergency vehicles.

According to the News, the patch of “quicksand” on Arthur’s Seat had reached a thousand yards across by yesterday. The scientists were saying it was still growing, but it wasn’t a neat circle; in some places it was burrowing away underground, following the seams of basalt that underlay the city.

It wasn’t a big story. It was too slow and obscure and impersonal. There was more space given over to speculation about the transfer of a soccer player from Hearts to an English club, Liverpool.

Henry said it wasn’t quicksand. On the other hand, he didn’t know what it was, she reflected, and they had to call it something. Naming something is the first step to understanding it. Was that true? What if the underlying reality was so strange that it defied the neat labels, the metaphors and parallels, humans sought to justify it to themselves?

The bathroom was warm and peaceful. She felt reluctant to step out of here, to handle Jack’s questions, to deal with the way her life was slowly tilting out of balance.

But she must. She splashed cold water on her face and went out to the kitchen.

Jack was eating a bowl of Coco Pops, the milk already stained a revolting diarrhoea brown, and he had turned on the small TV that sat on the serving bench.

“Mum, look at this.”

A train crash. Carriages tipped off their track, spilled and split over the ground. The picture, a little shaky, seemed to be coming from a helicopter suspended over the scene. The tipped-over carriages were long and sleek, shattered windows glistening as if moist. Fire was licking from a couple of the cars, bright despite the intensity of the early sun. She could see ambulances, police vehicles, emergency workers in fluorescent yellow jackets, bright in the sun, others in drabber everyday clothes. There were people lying over the broken ground, being covered by blankets, surrounded by buzzing helpers.

A reporter was shouting over the whine of aircraft noise, something about subsidence under the line causing the derailment.

Jack asked, “Will we see Granddad?”

“What?”

He pointed with his spoon at the TV. “On the telly. Will we see him?”

She looked again at the screen, and something still half-asleep in her snapped awake. This was Edinburgh. Abbeyhill, in fact, not a half-mile from the house. The rail line came out of Waverley Station and headed east, tracking the coast, towards Dunbar. The derailment must have been the explosion she heard. Unlike herself, Ted had known immediately what it meant, what to do.

The helicopter camera was taking wider-angle shots now. The bulk of Arthur’s Seat was visible, a crude, grass-clad knot, surrounded by an encrustation of streets and buildings. She could recognize Holyrood Palace. Probably this house was in the image somewhere, if she knew exactly where to look.

On the Seat, the quicksand patches were clearly visible, rough circles shining a matt silver-grey in the morning light, like spilled paint. Millions of tiny eggs, she thought, waiting to hatch.

She wished Ted had stayed. She wished Henry was here now.

“Eat up and get dressed,” she said.

“Have I got to go to school?”

“Listen. Get packed. Not too much. Pack for me… and for Granddad and Mike too.”

“Pack what?”

“Clothes. Blankets.” She frowned, thinking. “Torches. The camp stove. The tent. The canned food from the larder. A tin-opener. Blankets.” She forced a smile. “As if we’re going camping. Candles. Matches. The bathroom stuff—”

“By myself?”

“You can do it. Remember we’ve all got to fit in one car.”

“What about you?”

“I have to go find Mike. I won’t be long.”

The image on the TV had changed. Now there was a picture of a fire at a petrol station. Fountains of flame leaping up from the cracked concrete, the sagging yellow-green canopy of the station forecourt blistering. Another Edinburgh disaster: more subsidence, it seemed. The station’s thin underground tanks had cracked, and there had been a spark…

She went to get dressed.

Outside, the light was strange.

The sky was a cloudless, mid-April deep blue; the last of the night’s chill was already dissipating. But Venus was clearly visible in the east, a bright spotlight: a third light in the Scottish sky, neither Moon nor sun.

And there was something else, a silvery-grey texture to the air, as if everything was veiled by a fine smog, leaching out the colours. It was the reflected light from the quicksand, tinging the air grey: quicksand, rock chewed-up and transformed by something from the Moon, glowing silver-grey by the light of the wreck of Venus.

This is a strange time, she thought uneasily.

She got in the car and snapped on the radio, flicking it to a rock channel. She started the car and turned south, towards Henry’s lab.

If Ted can face this, so can I.

It was a little after seven. The early commuter traffic, heading towards the city centre, was already building up. Men in suits, fewer women, strictly one to a car. More than usual? Less? She couldn’t tell. But there were other vehicles: a lot of four-wheel-drives and people movers, Ford Galaxies and Renault Espaces, some laden with possessions and kids, moving in every direction, east, west, north — every direction away from the Seat, to the south. Early evacuees?

Evidently Ted wasn’t alone in his intuition.

Of, course there were some who would relish this.

Perhaps there were survivalists, even here in respectable suburban Scotland, waiting for it all to fall apart — heading for the highlands with their cans of corned beef, ready to aim illicit shotguns at anyone who came begging. Or maybe they just wanted some place more challenging to take their 4WDs than the car park of Sainsbury’s. Riding out the cosy catastrophe, in Barbour jackets and Land Rovers.

“Fuck them,” said Jane aloud. In a year such folk would be starving, chasing sheep around the highlands, and in two years they would be dead.

There was a queue of cars forming already outside the hypermarket. There was even a line of pedestrian shoppers forming outside the Iceland supermarket.

Frozen food. Smart. Not that she’d thought to exclude that from the list she’d given Jack. But the kid was brighter than she was, in many ways; he’d probably figure that out for himself.

She ought to make sure he put in tampons, though.

When she reached the Holyrood Road she found herself in a stationary queue of traffic. She got out of the car and walked a little way forward, until she could see to the head of the queue. There was a pair of police cars parked crudely across the carriageway, blocking the way, and a tape stretched more symbolically across the road. Some cars were already being turned around and were coming back; the drivers looked irritated, business types with meetings they needed to get to.

The queue was moving, slowly; she realized that it was simply compressing, drivers inching forward in frustration, as if they could clear the obstacle by sheer psychic pressure.