Right at the back of the room Eleanor saw a tall teenage girl with a pretty oval face, and long straight chestnut hair, wearing an expensive black dress. Julia Evans; shouldering her way past a big man and an imposing woman, arm rising to point a rigid accusing forefinger straight at Eleanor.

"SIT!" Julia barked in a voice so commanding that Eleanor's nerves went dead.

She heard a quiet sighing sound at her back, and turned to see a sentinel folding on to its haunches not a metre behind her. It licked its muzzle with a long pink tongue.

"Good girl," Julia enthused warmly. "Who's a good girl, then?"

Eleanor's legs gave out.

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

"Greg!"

"Huh, yeah?"

Monastic silence had enveloped the tower, the light diffusing into their makeshift prison reduced to the minutest candle glimmer from above. The basement was inky black.

Gabriel's strained face was ghostly pale. "Greg, we're going to die."

"Come on, Gabriel. Don't give the bastards the satisfaction."

"Screw you, Mandel," she hissed. "I'm not cracking up. I've got it back again, thank Christ. The future. It's all fuzzy. But I can see it, and it all comes to an end in about forty minutes."

Greg's cuffs clanged loudly against the rail as her words penetrated. He squirmed round to look at her, trepidation and hope heating his blood. Psi meant crushing Armstrong's mind inside his skull, raping every thought with obscene distortions, drowning him in his own agonising insanity. Making him love his own death.

Greg hadn't known he could hate someone that much. But he could do it. For Armstrong, he could do it. No messing.

The gland: quavering like a cardiac victim. He waited in a funk of anticipation for the tower to fade from sight, for his thoughts to levitate, liberating him from the confines of his own skull. But there was nothing, only the bitter sense of frustration.

"Are you sure?" he hissed back testily. "I still can't sense your mind."

"Sure? Course I'm fucking sure," Gabriel raged. The old Gabriel. Fabulous. But why hadn't his own ability returned?

"Can you see a Tau line which has us escaping?" Greg demanded.

"It's not like that. Not my usual ability. No Tau lines. There's only the one vision. Christ, Greg, the whole tower's just going to blow. Like an atom bomb, or something."

"A nuke?" he asked incredulously. He was picking up on the rising panic pulling at her thorax. He believed without the espersense. An event so powerful it'd burst through the twins' nullifying blockade. Which meant it was all too real.

There was the weirdest tickle at the back of Greg's throat. He knew if he opened his mouth it would burst out as a giddy laugh.

"I don't know," Gabriel protested. "There's no details, just a bloody great bang."