“Where … where?” It was all he could manage.

“Trafalgar Square. I don’t know about you, mate, but I could use a drink.”

Barbara could feel the moment of change, even through the screens and the headphones. The grim, stormy fog melted away, as if being sucked in by some gigantic vacuum. Many of the horrors that had been marching on the Cosmodrome vanished with it: creatures that had emerged from whatever place Horrorshow had tapped. And the rest, those that the fog had changed and twisted and deformed, whose minds had been taken and used … they were returned to what they’d once been. She saw them in the viewscreens: staggering, lost, confused, dropping the weapons they bore as if in disgust and horror, falling to their knees or raising their hands toward the sky as if in thanks.

Barbara sank back in her chair with them. “It’s over,” Ana’s voice whispered in her earphones, and she wanted to answer: No. Now the hard part starts …

But she said nothing. She closed her eyes. The hard part. Waiting to know if I will ever see Klaus again …

Marcus was screaming again. Silently, mouth full of blood, with frustration beyond anything he’d experienced before, he cried for his own death. He wanted nothing more. Only for everything to be over, for him and for the world itself.

He was so caught up in that that he kept screaming as the cell around him dissolved. He felt himself falling, but he thought it some part of the Harvester’s torment. He fell through flesh that disintegrated as his body pushed through it. He flailed. He lashed at the air like a drowning man. His tail searched for purchase that wasn’t there, and still he plummeted. He hit the ground hard, in a rain of filth. Himself, and a thousand others. The living and dead. Foul things, thudding to the earth on and around him.

Arms raised protectively over his head, Marcus squirmed upright. What had happened? he asked, and he beheld it. He saw it. Heard it. Felt it. Understood it. The Harvester had disappeared. All the beings trapped inside it fell to the earth in whatever state of life or death they’d been in. He watched other monsters vanish as well. A hog-like thing as large as a bus raised its head and bellowed as its legs disappeared. The rest of its body vanished before it hit the earth. Worms writhing on the ground undulated themselves into nothingness. Lumbering monsters became insubstantial mid-stride. Many of them howled as they vanished, but they may have been the lucky ones. They weren’t of this world. They were, Marcus thought, being transported to whatever hell they belonged in.