Each step to the gate takes an effort of will, as if I’m walking through still-wet cement. I stand at the gate, open it and walk through to the whitewashed front door. An ordinary wood, four-panelled door. I lift the brass lion-head knocker.

But before I let it fall, the door swings open.

“Moon!”

57

I stare at her with a clobbering heart, butterflies in my stomach, a tingle in my scalp. Here’s the face I know. Sharp-eyed and bright, the careless wedge of hair. The face I’ve dreamt of seeing for so long, the face that’s drawn me across seven worlds. She’s wearing the same outfit she wore on the Tube that day she was taken. A green jumpsuit no one else could ever get away with wearing.

“Bea—”

“Moon,” she says. “Where have you been?”

“But—”

“C’mon,” she says, laughing, holding the door ajar. “We’re having tea.”

Tea?

She steps aside and I walk past her in a daze, sword banging my thigh.

The hall is thrown in shadow. People laughing, somewhere within.

I glance back at the road and it’s gone, replaced by a field of golden wheat, rising and falling in a quiet wind. The sky above, a perfect blue. Bea shuts the door and we glide through the hall into the sitting room, and the voices there.

I feel nervous. Excited. Inexplicably frightened.

Beams of sunlight fall slanted into the room through windows thrown open, and a thousand motes of dust float in the light, whirling through the air like stars.

Here, sunk in armchairs around a coffee table, four adults.

Mrs. G. Bea’s mum. She wears a summer dress, looped gold earrings and a necklace of jangling stones. She looks up as we enter and smiles.

Next to her—wearing a suit with a white shirt, collar undone—a small dark-haired man. I recognise him immediately.

Avi Gold. Bea’s dad.

“Ana,” he says, standing. “Trouble on the Tubes? Should’ve taken a taxi.”

“Mr. G?”

“Come,” he says. “Join us.”

“But…you’re…I mean, this is—”

“Ana, love. Sit here. Next to your father and me.”

The voice snaps my head around. I’d almost forgotten the other two in the room. And, when I turn to look at them, my throat closes and the room spins.

Frankie. She taps the cushion on the settee next to her. On the other side of the cushion, holding Frankie’s hand, the Old Man. My mouth opens and closes and I walk towards them, joy bursting in my chest. Frankie and the Old Man. Together.

Not just together. Hand in hand.

I know this can’t be real, but I float to the couch anyway. And then, midstride, I stop. The sword. Not one of them has said anything about the blade tied to my hip. That is not normal. Not. At. All.

I look at Bea and I snatch her wrist.

“Hey!”