I was glad, to be honest. I’d been delaying telling the others about Haden for much too long.

TWENTY-SIX

We were driven back across town to the underground garage, from where Louie ushered us back upstairs to the transfer stage. I had the feeling it wasn’t the main stage, though. It was hidden away in a building that was clearly decrepit and, so far as I could tell, deserted. I felt sure there would be others, perhaps tucked away in military bases.

We watched the ballroom fade from view and found ourselves back in the main hangar by the base.

For the first time, there was no rig technician on duty to greet us. Instead, there were unfamiliar men in military uniforms, all of them armed, although from the way they acted, it was clear they had been expecting us.

We looked around at each other, then made our way unchallenged out into the morning of a new day. We didn’t have to look too hard to find evidence of fighting: there were bloodstains on the concrete just outside the hangar entrance and bullet holes in the doors.

I motioned to the others to gather around me once we were far away enough from the hangar we wouldn’t be overheard, and pulled the envelope out of my pocket.

‘What is that?’ asked Chloe.

‘Haden gave this to me,’ I said, and for the first time told them about my encounter with him outside Retièn.

‘That’s impossible,’ said Randall, some minutes later. He looked shaken; they all did.

‘Explain this, then,’ I said, taking the scrap of paper back from Yuichi, who had been staring obsessively at his name and the transfer coordinates beneath it for some minutes.

‘I don’t know,’ he muttered, his eyes darting away from mine. ‘You invented it, maybe.’

‘Oh, for fuck’s sake,’ said Selwyn, regarding him with disgust. ‘What is it with you?’

‘But if it’s real,’ said Randall, ‘then . . .’ He shook his head and lapsed into silence.

‘I’ve got a theory,’ I said. ‘Or at least, something that makes some kind of sense.’ I paused before continuing. ‘Maybe Haden’s a stage-builder.’

They all looked at each other. ‘You’re serious?’ asked Winifred.

‘Well, either he’s that,’ said Yuichi, ‘or he really is an alien with those damn eyes of his . . .’

‘Or it’s a cruel joke,’ said Chloe. ‘We’ll never know until we actually try and use some of those coordinates, will we?’

‘Question is,’ I asked, ‘who goes first?’

‘I will,’ said Randall, his jaw set. ‘If those coordinates can really take me home . . . then I want to go home.’

‘Randall,’ said Winifred, ‘remember what I said back at the Mauna Loa, about how you can never really go home . . .’

‘Oh, shut the hell up,’ Randall snapped. Winifred glared at him, and he reddened.