She started to ask why they couldn’t just go through the Array, then decided she didn’t actually want to know – at least not yet.

‘Did you see the news last night?’ she asked him instead.

‘No. Why?’

‘There was a press conference . . . the heads of all three republics, including Mexical. Tey said there was no way to stop the growths. They said that they didn’t know what might happen next.’

She heard the sound of an engine revving, over the link, a voice muttering in the background. Mitchell, she guessed.

‘They’re lying. They know exactly what’s going to happen.’

‘How could you possibly know that?’

‘Well,’ she heard him reply, from a thousand kilometres away, ‘it’s kind of complicated. But you know how the Array allows for a certain kind of time travel?’

Olivia had felt like a passenger inside her own body as she got into a car, less than twenty minutes later. The surrounding streets had been quiet, with hardly any traffic at all. Somehow she hadn’t expected that, given the recent news. Most people, she guessed, were just staying at home. Where else, after all, could they go?

The car whisked her out of Jacksonville and on to a highway heading west. Half an hour later it pulled in at a regional airport and she boarded an otherwise empty hopper, spending most of the flight scanning through feeds that were all reporting on exactly the same events – the growths and the million and more people currently camped outside the Florida Array.

Aerial video shots made the Array itself look like a space-age castle under siege. Black Dogs and sonar tanks surrounded the main facility, forcing the crowds back whenever they came too close. Sphere governments were meanwhile demanding the resumption of normal gate services, and once again condemning the Coalition’s monopoly of wormhole technology. There were even ominous rumours of war, and unconfirmed reports that some of the growths had already been attacked with nuclear weapons.

She arrived in Phoenix less than two hours later, and soon located the hire car Jeff had sent to pick her up. He had already taken care of booking the hopper flight, with help from the Roses, since it was safer for her not to use her UP any more than necessary.

The car transported Olivia through a busy shopping district, where she saw people going in and out of fab stores, or walking their dogs, while all around them public screens displayed constant images of something enormous and obscenely alien tearing its way through the skin of their world. She realized how people did the only thing they could in the face of such an enormity: they went about their lives the same as always.

In that same moment it occurred to her she had not told Jeff about contacting Saul, and she could all too easily picture his look of hurt betrayal in response.