There is no engine inside a Gruizer - only bioengineered muscle fibre, packed into the bay and fed nutrient solution from filling stations along the Hellsborough margin. What you feel through the decking when one runs at speed is not vibration: it is muscle working. Van calls the fuel juice and says the feeling passes, with the tone of someone who has had to convince themselves of it.

A sportster overhead for a thousand paces is either looking for someone else entirely, or it is not. When one followed me along the Dun for longer than felt comfortable, I dropped into the canopy and found a bunker I had never noticed before - completely invisible from the rear, recently visited, and littered with rockcrust paraphernalia. Which of those two discoveries should concern me more is a question I have not yet resolved.