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murky light. But nothing burst into flame. That was good, Turk thought. Then he thought: but it could be toxic. It could be any fucking thing. “About time to move indoors,” he said.
    Tyrell, the headwaiter at Harley’s, was a guy Turk had briefly worked with on the pipelines out in the Rub al-Khali. They weren’t big buddies or anything but they were friendly, and Tyrell looked relieved when Turk and Lise finally abandoned the patio. Tyrell slid the glass doors shut and said, “You got any idea—?”
    “No,” Turk said.
    “I don’t know whether to run or just enjoy the show. I called my wife. We live down in the Flats.” A low-rent neighborhood some few miles along the coast. “She says it’s happening there, too. She says there’s stuff falling on the house, it looks like ash.”
    “But nothing’s burning?”
    “She said not.”
    “It could be volcanic ash,” Lise said, and Turk had to admire how she was handling all this. She was tense but not visibly afraid, not too scared to venture a theory. “It would have to have been some kind of tectonic event way out over the horizon, something at sea…”
    “Like a sea volcano,” Tyrell said, nodding.
    “But we would have felt something before the ash got to us if it was anywhere close—an earthquake, a tsunami.”
    “Been no report of any such thing,” Turk said, “far as I know.”
    “Ash,” Tyrell added. “Like, gray and powdery.”
    Turk asked Tyrell if there was any coffee back in the kitchen and Tyrell said yeah, not a bad idea, and went to check. There were still a few diners in the restaurant, people with nowhere better to go, though nobody was eating or celebrating. They sat at the innermost tables and talked nervously with the waitstaff.
    The coffee came and it was good and dense, and Turk added cream to his cup just as if the sky weren’t falling. Lise’s phone buzzed repeatedly, and she fended off a couple of friendly calls before shunting everything to her voice mail. Turk didn’t get any calls, though his phone was in his shirt pocket.
    Now the ash began to fall on Harley’s patio, and Turk and Lise moved closer to the window to watch.
    Gray and powdery. Tyrell’s description was on the money. Turk had never seen volcanic ash, but he imagined this was what it might look like. It sifted down over the wooden slats and boards of the patio and drifted against the window glass. It was like snow the color of an old wool suit, but here and there were flecks of something shiny, something still luminous, which dimmed as he watched.
    Lise pressed up against his shoulder, wide-eyed. He thought again of their weekend up in the Mohindar Range, marooned by weather on that nameless lake. She had been just as self-possessed back then, just as balanced, braced for whatever the situation might throw at her. “At least,” he said, “nothing’s burning.”
    “No. But you can smell it.”
    He could, now that she mentioned it—a mineral smell, slightly acrid, a little sulfuric.
    Tyrell said, “You think it’s dangerous?”
    “Nothing we can do about it if it is.”
    “Except stay indoors,” Lise said. But Turk doubted that was practical. Even now, through the glittering ashfall, he could make out traffic on Rue Madagascar, pedestrians scurrying down the sidewalks covering their heads with jackets or handkerchiefs or newspapers. “Unless—”
    “Unless what?”
    “Unless,” she said, “this goes on too long. There’s not a roof in Port Magellan built to bear much weight.”
    “And it isn’t just dust,” Tyrell said.
    “What?”
    “Well,
look.‘”
He gestured at the window.
    Absurdly, impossibly, something the shape of a starfish drifted past the glass. It was gray but speckled with light. It must have weighed nearly nothing because it floated in the weak breeze like a balloon, and when it reached the deck of the patio it crumbled into powder and a few larger fragments.
    Turk gave Lise a glance. She shrugged, incredulous.
    “Get