Malik takes the canteen back, still frowning. Obviously mulling over this news about Bea being in Kronos. He takes a drink himself. Winces.

“Ares,” Vidhan says, looking at me, squinting. “Not the worst universe, if you’re partial to freezing your arse off. Man, why’d ya have to go and Fall?”

I don’t bother telling him it was Mother’s doing, nothing to do with me.

I take a deep breath and put thoughts of keys to bed. For now.

“All this is crazy,” I say, looking at the razed buildings, the urban rubble and the floating ash. “This world. It’s—”

“Broken,” Vidhan interjects.

“I can’t believe it’s London,” I say, shaking my head in bewilderment.

“It’s not. It’s Londra.”

“Right. Fair point.”

“Tell me,” he says. “Whaddaya know about ecosystems?”

I shrug. “Only what I learnt at school. A community of living organisms linked together. They depend on each other to survive.”

“All this,” Vidhan says, waving his hands over his spiky dreads, “is part of a giant ecosystem, each universe woven into the other. And, if ya introduce something into an ecosystem that doesn’t belong—”

“It breaks,” I interject.

“Exactly. Ares wasn’t always like this. Shinigami caused it by bringing stuff from the other worlds—technology, weapons, ideas, things that have no rightful place here. It’s destabilising the multiverse. And now they’re telling everyone only the Order can fix things. Hell, they caused this.”

“So, let’s get outta here. Fall out of Bahram. Into the next.”

Vidhan shakes his head. “Way too bloody dangerous. The puking, the ringing in your ears, your teeth aching—these are all signs you’re putting yourself through the wringer. Your body needs time to recover. Fall too often and too far and…”

“And what?”

“You get lost,” Malik interrupts.

“Uh…what I’m trying to say,” Vidhan says pointedly, “is that Falling is not something you do lightly. Not every Fall takes you from one world to the next. Sometimes when people Fall—Pathfinders or Normals—they disappear, they get lost in the Between. Gone forever.”

Vidhan must see my stricken face because he hurries on. “I mean, that’s not what happened to Bea—she was taken, that’s different. But every Fall is a risk, Ana.”

“The idea,” Malik adds, “that passing from one universe to another is as easy as walking through a wardrobe is a joke—a lie, perpetrated by literature.”

He freezes suddenly. Listens. Strafes the area with his eyes. And I only realise just how impressive his senses are, how in-tune, when something—brown fur, bushy tail—shoots across the road and disappears behind a building. Just a fox.

But I’m wrong about that.

A pair of vagabond figures lurch from a side road into our path.