He crossed the distance too fast, boots skidding on dust, and dropped to one knee at the center of the platform. Pain flashed from shoulder to hip, bright enough to blur his sight. He ignored it and put his hand to the stone. Still warm from the day. No grit from shattered paneling. No spilled coolant. Somebody had cleaned. Not casually. Thoroughly.

“No,” he said aloud, and his own voice sounded thin in the open air.

He searched in widening circles. The edge of the platform. The bordering grass. The path. He looked for drag marks deep enough to show mass, for wheel tracks, for score lines from lifting gear, for any sign that a machine weighing several hundred kilos had been hauled through a public garden. The ground gave him almost nothing. A few crushed stems near the rear edge. A faint print in the soil that might have been from a broad footpad or might have been his own from earlier. Near one low hedge he found a tiny dark flake of scorched composite. He pinched it up between bloody fingers and stared at it as if it might tell him who had taken the rest.

The removal had been fast. Efficient. Not the work of these drifting, smiling people with fruit on their hands and music in their heads.