The night wind across Sector 4 was bitter. It carried the scent of frost, dry ash, and the faint, rotten-egg tang of the distant badlands.
At 02:45 in the morning, the outer edge of Mega-City 07 was shrouded in an eerie, expectant quiet. The heavy-duty sirens were silent. The spotlights on the high concrete curtain wall swept across the empty barbed-wire fields in slow, clockwork arcs, lighting up patches of frozen mud and abandoned entrenchments.
On the covered wooden porch of the old Vance family safe hall, a small cast-iron fire bowl burned with steady, cherry-red charcoal embers. The heat from the fire bowl pushed back the freezing autumn dampness. That created a warm, protected circle of light that smelled of burning cedar wood and savory beef broth.
Arthur Vance sat on an overturned wooden ammunition crate, a battered fine china mug of black tea held between his gloved hands. He wore his thick charcoal carbon-weave coat with the collar turned up against the draft, his magnifying glass resting loosely around his neck on its leather lanyard.
Curled tightly around his feet, forming a heavy, sixty-inch-thick wall of dense black fur, was Grimm.
The dire-hound was sleeping with his massive head resting directly across Arthur’s boot laces. His heavy ribs rose and falling with deep, window-rattling snores. In his sleep, Grimm’s paws sometimes twitched, chasing imaginary rabbits through the ash flats. But his body remained an unmoving anchor, pressing his master firmly to the porch boards.
