On the lip of the depression, a hand was splayed on rough stone, lopped off and cauterised in a precise cross-section at the wrist joint. I knew I hadn’t lost that much of myself, nor do I wear violet nail polish or a ring on the third finger. Fedora man had a matching ring, a thick band of unadorned gold. It seemed Portal had been laughing because it didn’t know. If it condescended to speak to its new guest, I wonder if she’d have been reassured to hear that she wasn’t far from home in purely spatial terms.

With a bulge of vertigo, I sensed slo-time winding down. I shunted all thought of our first victim to the back of my mind and took in my surroundings. I was on a wide esplanade in a world made of sandstone. On one side, an ancient wall rose from buttresses of dark silica which jutted into a sea of dark blue shimmering into green; rasping and sucking as it mauled the rock. On the other, buildings jostled for space on the shorefront and climbed uphill away from it in a jumble of terracotta rooftops, hotel balconies, crucifixes, aerials and satellite dishes.

What I took for tourists with skin tones ranging from snow-white to lobster-red crowded the street cafes. A police car idled in traffic a hundred metres away, the sole occupant’s gun hand tapping out the Morse code for boredom on the roof while the index finger of his other hand explored a nostril. At least a dozen people were looking at me and would start to react in half a second. I had my explanation for why a vermillion giant was standing naked near the dismembered hand of a respectable married woman and her screaming husband. The onlookers would no doubt find their own.

With the active camouflage utilities in my suit, I could have become nothing more than a thickening of the air and slinked away in my own good time. Still, I wasn’t without resources. As I snapped back into real time, I launched myself at the seawall, registering only a chorus of screams and the flicker of a policeman’s shades in a rear view mirror as I took flight. Whipcord muscles allowed me to fly as far as I fell, and I hit the unyielding silica hard. The shock reverberated through my endoskeleton and my vision blurred. I carried some of the shock into forward momentum and, inflating my lungs and pinching closed my lips, I pitched myself into the spume.

Pain warnings whined at me again as the salt found my scorched skin. I acknowledged and silenced them all as I dragged myself down. I was lucky to find no shallow littoral but an abrupt shearing of the land into dark depths. Schools of fish flitted and flickered around me, group minds with dumb curiosity. At fifty metres, I lodged myself in a rocky overhang, willed my heart-rate to a near standstill, and waited for dusk with a drip-feed of oxygen from my over-inflated lungs.