Now there was nothing but the hot, sour air and prickling pins and needles in her limbs as she knelt up blindly. Ace rubbed her eyes but, although she felt the pressure, as she blinked still she could see nothing but blackness: as if she were still travelling through a void smeared faintly with stars. She remembered in flashes the intense feeling of flight, of leaving her body, of plunging helplessly through bright nothingness, just the same as when she’d been blown away from her bedroom and found herself in Iceworld. Taken, snatched and set down on the other side of the galaxy; only she’d been young then, her body hadn’t ached like this, she’d not been so afraid because she hadn’t known all there was to be afraid of.

Ace tried to take a deep breath but choked on the sickly, sulphurous heat of it. She fell forward and cut one hand on something sharp. A stone, or glass even, or …

The realisation struck her cold:

I’m back in the nightmare.

Now Ace was afraid that her eyesight would actually return. She didn’t want the proof of it, didn’t want to see the lurid landscape that she knew, with sick certainty, must surround her now: that vast, glittering desert, sand blowing over raw crystal and razor-sharp rocks. If you’ve travelled faster than light, she thought, maybe your eyes are still in the dark? It was a child’s reasoning but that was just how she felt: like a frightened child, lost far from home.

‘Let me wake up,’ Ace whispered. ‘Please, God, let me wake up now.’

As if in response, her vision sparked back into a blur of colour. Yes, there it was, the wasteland that had held her in her sleep for so long, and that now held her for real. ‘Yaz?’ Ace called uncertainly, but she knew already that she was alone. What had happened to Yaz, slimed up and tagged and ready to go?

‘Your new golden girl’s messed up, Professor,’ Ace breathed. ‘Looks like we’re going old school.’

Three suns sat like cigarette burns in the filthy tarpaulin of the sky. Ace looked down at the stony, dusty ground, feeling sick. As her eyes remembered how to focus, she knew what she would see on the horizon.

It sat there like some giant spider in the distance, a crumbling alien castle of dark pumice. Even from here she could hear the grind of the engines inside and taste the smog belching from those vast, broken chimneys.

With relief, she saw she was still holding her baseball bat. The metal was stained with blackened red, and turned her stomach.

‘I didn’t start this fight,’ she reminded herself.