Rohan Quine, “The Platinum Raven”, 23 The point of silver in the dawn

As they both stand there, panting hard, an idea strikes her. She reaches into the metal cabinet on the wall and makes an adjustment, then crosses the room to a low door, which she opens. She ducks her head and passes through, beckoning to Scorpio. He follows her down a few steps to a small terrace set upon the side of the tower, two or three metres under the two brown windows. They wander over to the balustrade, between the pair of stone seahorses on the parapet, stand there and breathe in the fresh, cool air.

Turning round to gaze up behind the turret roof, where the dawn light is growing now beyond the mountain-tops, Scorpio yelps as a sudden dense cloud of fresh mirror mist belches from the low door and tumbles down the steps to the terrace. “Look, it’s on again!” he cries out. “Amber’s still down there—turn it off!”

She laughs. “It’s only turned on here, in the turret. Everywhere downstairs it’s still turned off. I just thought we’d have a final puff of silver here now—you know, it helps to break the ice at parties.”

“I don’t want to think about what we just saw,” he says. “Not yet. Later.” And with that, he hops up onto the coping of the balustrade, midway between the seahorses.

The Platinum Raven starts to freak out, staring aghast at what’s beyond the balustrade: that short slope of boulders, funnelling to that precipice of weeds in half a circle like a lip, around that lethal shriek of air one hundred metres sheer—

Then she decides she will just trust him in what he’s doing: after all, she knows he has the control of an acrobat and an almost alien lack of vertigo. So she stands there on the terrace, in the shadows of the Hajar Mountains, watching him in wonder as he starts to dance right there, his little pointed boots twirling deftly on the stonework; with mirror mist surging through the gaps between the balusters, out and down the shriek, to where a silver death awaits him if he trips…

The canyon below the tower lies in rocky shadow still.

Beyond it, the width of the desert spreads in subtle shades of brown and black enormity.

Beyond that, the city grid of Dubai is waking, its coloured points twinkling in the dying night.

And high above that circuit-board, one single structure is tall enough for its pinnacle to be caught by the rays spilling across the desert from behind the mountains in the east: a skyscraper’s point like no other in the world, shining silver and alone where the sky grows pale. It’s an elegantly complex, telescoping spike, of a stunning, otherworldly fabulosity—its beauty cool, mineral and icy in the sharp-edged light of the dawn.

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