He crosses an ankle over his knee. “You want a neat Quantum Physics explanation, is that it?”

“I want proof.”

“You’re here,” he says, locking his hands behind his head and leaning back, entirely comfortable in his own skin. “This is not your world. There’s your proof.”

“That’s not an answer. It doesn’t explain why.”

Malik drops forward and sighs. “You ask a lot of questions, you know that?”

I shove my hands into my pockets. The fingers of my right hand worry the edges of my phone. My phone! I haul it out and hit the power button.

Malik watches me. “Who are you with?”

“What d’you mean?”

“Your carrier. Vodafone? O2? Orange?”

“What’s the difference?”

He gives me a rueful smile. “A network provider that offers reliable service across two universes? Good luck with that.”

I look at the black mirror screen. My reflection stares back, gaunt and hollow-eyed. So, that’s it. My only link to the real world is a dead weight of metal and glass. I’m cut off. Adrift in a world I know nothing about, and my only compass is him.

I spin the phone, facedown on the table. Malik watches me and says nothing. I draw my hands back, sit upright and look around the deserted club. The fan throbs. “All this…it happened to you? You Fell, like me?”

Malik hesitates, gazes into the distance. “Car accident,” he says. “I survived, but when I woke I didn’t recognise the world. And my family…they were gone. Then, when the Reapers came for me, I ran. Been on the run ever since.”

I see it. The Reaper that took Bea. It crawls through the carriage. Naked and hairless. Sinewy legs. Black veins under pink skin.

“What are they?”

Malik looks hard at me. “Reapers are a manifestation of everything wrong in the world. All the pain and suffering in all of existence.” He must clock a horrified reaction in my face then, because he adds: “Don’t worry. This place is protected.”

“You make it sound like a game. Like we’re in the safe zone or something.”

This is a safe place, Ana. Nothing can hurt you here.

Dr. Augur. Was that only last week? It feels like another lifetime.

“The club’s a Haven,” Malik says. “We’re OK, for now. But as soon as we walk outside that steel door, they’ll come for us again, you can be sure.”

“And they want us…dead?”

“The ride over here didn’t convince you?”

“I’ve never seen anything like them.”

“Stay in your own world and you’re fine. But if you Fall, they come. Reapers have been hunting Pathfinders a long time and they’re not about to give up now.”

It occurs to me then he’s said nothing about taking. Hunting. Killing.

Not abducting.