The dawn was no stranger to Sly, yet the sight unveiled by the brightening sky on this new world stole his breath and left his jaw on the floor.

  He discovered himself atop the pinnacle of the world, standing at a point from which everything plunged downhill and away. The light revealed his feet on a narrow ledge bordering a precipitous drop, with neither rail nor rope to prevent a fall. Immediately below, and for thousands of feet sloping down, cultivated terraces cut emerald steps into the mountainside. The distant end of that giant’s staircase was hidden by a thin ethereal mist, a torn, spider-lace coverlet draped over jade. Rugged sandstone pillars rose like islands in a fog-bound sea, and lonely subtropical trees wept vines from high ledges and clefts. Behind the shrouded towers, on the horizon, were craggy peaks as proud as any in Afghanistan’s Hindu Kush.

  Sly consumed the crazily beautiful scene with an open mouth. “Well, shit.”

  For all he wasn’t afraid of heights, Sly was thankful for the solidity of the stone at his back. He turned his head to look back at it, expecting to see part of a building, or perhaps another arch. Instead, he saw an obsidian wall three metres tall and two metres wide. His position was thankfully not as dramatic or hopeless as he feared during the hours of complete darkness, and to his left he saw a way down to safe and level ground. He also saw a narrow path circling the black glassy wall.

  With stubborn curiosity, he forced his feet to move and followed the path around. The second side was roughly the same as the first, making it an angular standing stone or an obelisk: the lovechild of Stonehenge and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland, perhaps.

  Before he could take a closer look a tiny light on his shades blinked red. The device needed a charge after a day’s relentless use, so he unhooked them from his face. He returned them into the small backpack, plugged into a solar panel built into the top of the bag. Without proper electric power he couldn’t charge the shades much, but a day’s sun might give him a couple of hours use tonight.

  Gus was back up. Sly checked the mapping function, hoping the AI had inferred which way was east. He was startled and pleased to see major landmarks mapped for a hundred miles north. The peaks were unnamed, for now, although he was sure Gus would suggest appropriate choices if he asked.

  Sly smiled wearily. Despite the extraordinary situation, he infinitely preferred the open air in daylight to Area 71’s dark tunnels. With a last glance to the magnificent, inescapable horizon, he started off the mound. Then he stopped, dropped to a knee and froze. He listened intently.

  And the sound came again.

  A cry of a bird, or an animal hurt? A jay or gull? But then it repeated, and Sly was caught by the familiarity of the sound.

  Was that sobbing?

  He hurried down from the obelisk mound, finding level ground and a broad path of hard compacted earth. Facing the precipice and the terraces, sounds of distress came from his right, roughly west. It was certainly the wail of a young child. All sorts of animals made sounds that could be mistaken for human distress, from foxes and cats to owls and even peacocks, particularly from a distance.

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  This was too near and too clear to ignore.

  With a last glance at the mound, its single standing stone reflecting the dawn sky, he hastened towards the sound. With both the path and the cries to guide him he made good time, and the noise became so loud he thought the child was around the next bend. Sly was nervous of a trap but was also concerned that his warlike garb wouldn’t help calm a distraught infant, so he slipped off his helmet and attached it to the back of his backpack through a loop before stepping out around the curve in the road, a hand not far from his gun.

  A six- or seven-year-old clutched the branches of an emaciated tree about a dozen feet above the trail, at the edge of the cliff-face. Sly caught glimpses of grey-brown raggedy cloth, a kind of homespun he’d seen in the poor communities of the world where even cotton tees were rare. The garment came down to just above dirty knees, leaving sturdy legs bare. One foot hand a sandal, but the left was bare.

  The girl wasn’t alone on the trail. Two long, lithe animals lay under the tree, panting, and one of them chewed hungrily on the remains of the girl’s other sandal. Each had the rangy legs and short, mottled fur of an African wild dog and was the heft of a Doberman. A third dog was standing on its hind legs, forepaws resting on the trunk, snapping up at the girl’s legs barely out of reach. Fresh tears streaked a grubby face under long, matted black hair as the girl stared down. She looked to have been up there all night, dark circles like bruises around her eyes.

  A burst of emotion overrode any thought of caution, and he shouted angrily at the dogs before he stopped to think. He considered drawing the Sig, but on the spur of the moment decided the risk of noise was too great and his hand found the knife. The wild dogs sprang up with yips, bounding down the path, away, and Sly thought they would keep going, but two of them recovered from surprise to wheel into a crouch, and the third came up behind them with a growl, baring sharp, yellow teeth. Sly momentarily regretted not choosing the gun, a tight coil clenched around his guts, but a moment was all he had before the nearest snarled and leapt.

  Instinctively Sly caught the dog with a left-cross to the head, which he followed up with a vicious jab of the ka-bar into the mutt’s coarse hard-spiked neck-ruff. A yelp, and blood showered the dirt of the path, but Sly’s eyes were on the other two animals a half-second behind. Angrily he swung a short, hard kick into the second dog, his steel-capped boot meeting its nose in a punt. The dog’s teeth clacked together hard. In the same movement, he hopped forward and thrust the knife forward at the third.

  He missed but glanced to the side and saw the first dog dripping blood, but not enough to put it out of the fight. He reversed the blade, crouched and spun, and knife stabbed deep into the big canine’s body behind the shoulder-blade. The dog convulsed in pain, twisting the knife from his grip.

  In a second it was all over. The writhing animal took off, carrying Sly’s ka-bar with it, and its companions followed, the last giving the girl a last hungry glance. The Sig was now in his hand but the wild dogs didn’t stop, loping away with his knife.

  He looked up at the girl half-hidden in the tree.

  When Sly became a dad, more than a decade ago, something had clicked in his head that made it impossible to see children in distress, either at home or on the television news, in the same impersonal way as before. It was natural then that he saw the girl’s anguish before he saw the angular black bird-eyes without sclera, grubby green-grey skin, sharp pointed ears, or the two tiny, upward thrusting tusks protruding from the crying girl’s lower lip.

  The girl was not human. The girl was…

  ‘Orc,’ Gus helpfully suggested. For once Sly cursed the AI's ability to autocomplete his thoughts, even when orc was exactly what he had in mind.