The balcony garden quakes; tiny brown leaves fall from branches. The final charcoaled piece of shipflesh falls from the sky, a fiery planet-sized ball of skin and meat. From behind glass in their living room, they watch as it disintegrates silently over Manchester. An infinite number of black meteor flakes spilling across the red morning.
They look over at the last of the melted black dots as they fall ashen against the windows of the Beetham tower.

There had been a party outside of the city in the Irwell basintown a week before. Glittering fireworks had shot into the air, exploding green and red. There had been music, real live music and the smoked barbeque scent had risen up into the tenement flats. Somewhere, they had thought, a Skinship had found something and was coming home. He never thought it was anything other than impossible. A Skinship coming back was…