I close my eyes and hunger for sleep. But it doesn’t come. My mind is whirring. He loved her. Does he still? I try to shake off the hurt and focus on Bea instead. And our journey—to France and the Seventh Gate.

“Malik?” I whisper into the darkness.

“What?” he groans.

“You think the seventh is a perfect world?”

He says nothing for a long time. Then, just when I think he’s asleep, he answers. “No such thing as a perfect world,” he says, voice low in his throat. “A real world, with crap bits and good bits all mixed together, that’s about the only thing makes any kind of sense.”

The freight train shakes and rolls, carrying us into the night.

I lie awake. And, by moonlight, I read.

THE SEVENTH

What is the seventh? This question has long enthralled Pathfinders of the Collective. Why is one world unreachable when others are not? Why do many pathways span six worlds when, it is believed, there is only one Path to KRONOS—the Seventh Gate? Answers to these questions are as arcane as the origin of the multiverse itself. Indeed, a hunt for the seventh has sustained generation after generation, bent on a powerful idea: that perfection is attainable. And that immortal power lies beyond the gate.

However, it is an empirical, unshakable truth that corruption of our values occurs most insidiously when the quest for the seventh overrides an in-born Pathfinder inclination to protect and serve the multiverse. It is bitter irony then, that a search for perfection may well deliver annihilation.

The words float and blur in front of me. Then drift away.

39

I wake before dawn, confused and startled. For a moment, I’m unsure of my whereabouts. Then I feel a hard rocking motion and I remember. I turn and look at the sleeping shape next to me—Malik, his chest rising and falling. I get an urge to stroke his cheek, to feel his skin’s heat.

But I don’t. I stand and stretch. Roll my shoulders to ease the ache out of them. I step past Vidhan and Akuji, still sleeping, and move to the open freight door. I grip the steel ladder, plant my feet and look out. The air is hot. The sky, the colour of lead. I watch light seep into the world and sharpen the edges of things.

Behind me, Malik rouses himself. I turn and see him sitting up, blinking, scratching his head. He comes to join me, clicking his neck, standing close.

I let my hand fall near his and I look away, ashamed of my body’s eagerness.

“Where are we?” I say, surveying the bleak landscape.

He yawns and stretches. “Northern Gaul by now, I reckon.”

“Gaul?”

“France.”

“So we’ve crossed the Channel?”

“There is no Channel in Tir.”

“Right.”