I recalled what I had learned about those Pathfinders I had met so far: Selwyn Rudd had been a military engineer on his alternate, until orbital nukes that weren’t supposed to exist wiped out the rest of humanity. Winifred Quaker’s parallel had, like my own, ended at the hands of a genocidal cult. I had heard rumours that Winifred had actually been a member of the cult responsible, and had tried and failed to stop them once she realized what they were intending. Yuichi’s world had supposedly been razed clean by runaway nanotechnology.

Despite his appearance and the drawling, slightly stoned way he spoke, Yuichi had been a figure of some note in the field of molecular physics. He had confided in me that he feared his own work had contributed significantly to the demise of his alternate. Randall Pimms I had barely spoken to yet, but he’d apparently survived a mass epidemic that compelled the infected to attack and kill the uninfected. Oskar Boche’s home alternate suffered total environmental breakdown and mass starvation. Nadia and Rozalia had together survived a gamma-ray burst, a stellar detonation of a type that might also have been responsible for wiping out the dinosaurs, tens of millions of years before.

Haden’s origin was by far the most inexplicable of our motley crew. He had been found on an alternate much like the one on which we made our home, in that there was no apparent or reasonable explanation for why everyone might have vanished almost overnight. He could offer no explanation for his having been left unharmed, nor for the strange silver flecks in his eyes that made his gaze subtly eerie.

As for me? I only survived the end of my world by doing a favour for an old college friend investigating an obscure cult.

Nadia waved me over. ‘Look,’ she said, nodding over at Selwyn, still chatting with Winifred. ‘What a hypocrite. Now come on,’ she added, standing and leading me away from Rozalia. ‘I’ll introduce you to Casey and Wallace.’

We approached two men just as they were in the act of dumping a cardboard box full of assorted equipment directly beneath the movie projector. As they stood back up, their faces were momentarily overlaid with images of B-movie actors in rubber costumes. The taller of the two wore a multi-pocketed vest over an open-necked shirt stretched tight over a muscular chest, grey hairs curling out from beneath the stretched buttons. His chin and cheeks were lightly bearded, and he wore a battered cowboy hat perched on top of a thick mane of greying hair. He also, I couldn’t help but notice, had a gun somewhat conspicuously holstered to his right thigh.