With a crack like the inside of a thunderclap, the beach exploded.

The universe rang like a tuning fork. She lay where the blast had thrown her. Her face stung as though sandblasted.

Her eyelids were clenched. It seemed like a very long time before she could open them again.

A crater yawned across three meters of sand, filling with groundwater.

She climbed to her feet. The Strip had leapt awake in an instant, fled outward, turned back and congealed into a ring of shocked and frightened faces.

Amazingly, she was still holding the billy.

She eyed the device with numb incredulity. She'd used it more times than she could count. Whenever one of Channer Vent's monsters had tried to take her apart she'd parried, jammed the billy home, watched as one more predator bloated and burst at her touch. It had been lethal enough to the fish, but it had never exploded with this kind of force before. Not down on the…

Oh, shit. On the Rift.

It had been calibrated to deliver a lethal charge at the bottom of the ocean, where five thousand PSI was a gentle burp. Down there it had been a reasonably effective weapon.

At sea level, without all those atmospheres pushing back, it was a bomb.

"I didn't mean—I thought…" Clarke looked around. An endless line of faces looked back.

Amitav lay sprawled on the opposite side of the crater. He moaned, brought one hand to his face.

There was no sign of the boy.

A thunderclap at midnight. Something exploded near a Calvin cycler just south of Gray's Harbor. A botfly had been coming around the headland to the south; it wasn't line-of-sight at detonation but it had ears. It sent an alert to home base and turboed over to investigate.

Sou-Hon Perreault was on duty. She'd swapped over to the graveyard shift the day she'd learned that mermaids came out at night. (Her husband, having recently learned about the special needs of vPTS victims, had accepted the change without complaint.) Now she slipped into the botfly's perceptual sphere and took stock.

A shallow crater yawned across the intertidal substrate. Tracking outward: chaotic tangles of heat and bioelectricity, restless as spooked cattle. Perreault narrowed the EM to amped visible; the heat lightning resolved into a milling mass of dull gray humanity.

The Strip had its own districts, its own self-generating ghettos within ghettos. The people here hailed mainly from the Indian subcon: Perreault set her primary filters to Punjabi, Bengali, and Urdu. She began asking questions.

An explosion, yes. Nobody really knew for certain what had led up to it. There had been raised voices, some said. Man, woman, child. Accusations of theft. And then, suddenly, bang.

Everyone awake after that, everyone in retreat. The woman waving some kind of shockprod like a club. The masses, keeping their distance. One man in the circle with her, blood on his face. Angry. Facing the woman, indifferent to the weapon in her hand. The child had vanished by this time, all agreed. Nobody knew who the child might have been.

Everyone remembered the adults, though. Amitav and the mermaid.

"Where did they go?" Perreault said; the botfly translated her words with toneless dispassion.

To the ocean. The mermaid always goes to the ocean.

"What about the other one? This Amitav?"

After her. With her. To the ocean.

Ten minutes past, perhaps.

Perreault pulled the botfly into a steep climb, panned along the Strip from fifty meters up. The refugees dissolved into a Brownian horde; waves of motion passed through the crowd far faster than any one person could make way. There: barely discernible, a fading line of turbulence connecting the crater to the surf. Milling particles, recently disrupted by the passage of something aimed.

She swooped down toward the waterline. Upturned faces everywhere, gray and luminous in the botfly's photoamps, following its course like sunflowers tracking the light.

Except for one, a ways down the beach, running south through ankle-deep foam. Not looking back.

Perreault widened the filters: nothing mechanical in the thorax. Not the mermaid. There were other anomalies, though. She was chasing a skeleton, a ludicrous emaciated throwback to the days when malnutrition was a recognized hallmark of refugees everywhere.

There was no need for starvation here. There'd been no need for years. This one had chosen to starve. This one was political.

No wonder he was running.

Perreault nudged the botfly into pursuit. It sped past its quarry in seconds, slewed around, and dropped down to block his escape. Perreault tripped the floods and pinned the refugee in twin beams of blinding halogen.

"Amitav," she said.

She'd heard of them, of course. They were rare, but not too rare for a label: stickmen, they were called. Perreault had never actually seen one in the flesh before.

Hindian. Sunken eyes, pools of sullen shadow. Blood oozing in a sheen of droplets from his face. One hand was raised to shield his eyes from the light; more blood rose from a raw stigmatum on the palm. Limbs, joints, fingers as sharp-edged and angular as origami protruding from his torn clothing. The soles of his feet had been sprayed with plastic in lieu of shoes.

The ocean hemmed him in on one side; strippers looked on curiously from all others, keeping clear of the halogen pool. Every segment of the stickman's frame was tensed, poised between equally-futile options of flight and attack

"Relax," Perreault said. "I only want to ask you some questions."

"Ah. Questions from a police robot," he said. Thin lips drawn back from brown teeth, the cracks between bloody. A cynical rictus. "I am relieved."

She blinked. "You speak English."

"It is not an uncommon language. Not as stylish as French these days, though, yes? What do you want?"

Perreault disabled the translator. "What happened back there?"

"There is no cause to worry. None of your machinery was harmed."

"I'm not interested in the machinery. There was an explosion."

"Your wonderful machines do not provide us with explosives," Amitav pointed out.

"There was a woman, a diver. There was a child."

The stickman glowered.

"I just want to know what happened," Perreault told him. "I'm not looking to give you any trouble."

Amitav spat. "Of course not. You blind me to test my eyes, yes?"

Perreault killed the floods. Black and white faded to gray.

"Thank you," Amitav said after a moment.

"Tell me what happened."

"She said it was an accident," Amitav said.

"An accident?"

"The child was—Clarke had this, I am not sure of the word, this club. On her leg. She called it a billy."

"Clarke?"

"Your diver."

Clarke. "Do you know her first name?"

"No." Amitav snorted. "Kali is as good a name as any, though."

"Go on."

"The child, he—he tried to steal it. While we were—talking."

"You didn't stop him?"

Amitav shifted uncomfortably. "I believe she was trying to show the child that the billy was dangerous," he said. "In that she succeeded. I myself flew. It left marks." He smiled, held up his hands once more, palms up. Flayed flesh, oozing blood.

Amitav fell silent and looked out to sea. Perreault's perspective bobbed slightly in a sudden breeze, as though the botfly was nodding.

"I do not know what happened to the child," Amitav said at last. "By the time I could stand again he was gone. Clarke was looking for him, though."

"Who is she?" Perreault asked softly. "Do you know her?"

He spat. "She would not say so."

"But you've seen her before. Tonight was not the first time."