‘I don’t reckon there’s anywhere to go,’ said Ryan, following her to a turn in the corridor. ‘That means we have to try and take charge of this place. It’s not gonna be easy. We’ll all have to work together.’

‘Against the Ratts?’

‘Yeah. And, um – them.’ Ryan pointed over her shoulder to the end of the corridor.

With metal tendrils snapping smartly, four of the streamlined robots were zinging through the air towards them.

Ace was falling through a nightmare of past, present and endless futures. The Wraith that had held her was gone from her gaze and she was rolling and tumbling in a thousand guises as each moment ripped apart into a million possibilities.

She saw herself emerging victorious, standing over Halogi-Kari’s bloodied body. Then she saw him standing over hers. She saw the Doctor killed by the Astingir, a gold-shod hoof plunging down towards her face. Horrified, she turned away from the sight and found herself gazing out over the desert dunes as Wraiths rose up from the sands and into the free wilds of space … then she saw the Astingir fleet blasting them relentlessly, the bodies dropping to earth like falling stars.

There were so many futures crowding her, too many to take in. Ace felt sick, felt she was drowning in a sea of shadows longing to be cast by the light inside her. Helpless, hopeless, she closed her eyes.

And when she reopened them, all around her was night-dark. A Wraith floated before her, its hand like the silhouette of a winter tree as it brought it down on her shoulder. It seemed to pass through her flesh and grip hold of the bone.

She felt more than its burning touch, though. Their minds brushed and she felt the Wraith’s loneliness, the ache in its cells and its soul.

‘What do you want?’ Ace demanded. ‘What do you need?’

Its mouth flickered open and it whispered into her, a voice like dead leaves trodden into thick frost:

‘We … need … YOU.’

‘No,’ Ace said. ‘No, please. You don’t have to do this …’

‘But we do.’

Ace felt a flash of fear: flickering, moving close then darting away like silver fish in a dark, dark ocean, Ace saw one of the robots, identical to the machine that had joined Kim to the Wraith outside.

Now, she knew, it had come to do the same to her.

In quiet, intense concentration, Halogi-Kari sat cross-legged on the floor behind the first of his three great protective vault doors. With his mind fed both by psychic emanations from the Wraiths and by the hyperspatial sensors of his quantum-boring machines, he could almost catch the psychic whispers of the meeting of minds in the mouth of the Anvil.

The details were unclear but, still, every heartbeat of the encounter was being recorded by his robotic psychosurgeon, straddling a stream of realities as it stood ready to conjoin Wraith and Earth-Child.