We keep moving, heading west. We walk silently, flanking each other, and pass buildings on fire that blaze with heat. Others are gutted and charred, like burnt skeletons. Eyes, gleaming, watch us from the shadows. Far away, behind us, a fading thunder of guns echoes across the annihilated city.

“Look,” Malik says. I follow his gaze and stop dead.

We’ve hit Piccadilly and here’s a parallel statue of Eros, afloat on its green plinth, covered in graffiti, wings chipped and broken. But this isn’t what catches my breath. It’s the giant, lumbering through the ash. I stare at it, speechless, half enthralled and half frightened.

“I’m dreaming,” I say. “None of this is real. It can’t be.”

“Oh, it’s real,” Vidhan says. “You’re out in the great multiverse now. And in the great multiverse, everything that can happen, does happen.”

Crimson moonlight flutes down on an enormous machine, four stories tall, with curved plates of steel and hanging wires and pipes. It stirs a dream-memory of War of the Worlds. Horrifying and mesmerising. Carrying it through the desolation are eight spiderlike, hydraulic-powered metal legs. I watch the behemoth in stupefied awe. Until finally, it disappears into the gloom behind a building.

By rights, I should be terrified out of my wits. But I’m not. And maybe that’s because I have a purpose—finding Bea. I will find her. I will.

That feeling courses through me, bright as a blade.

24

As the word implies, A HAVEN is a place of safety; of refuge. All Pathfinders are, from time to time, in need of security. This is the purpose of a Haven: sanctuary from the many vagaries of the multiverse. A Haven is unseen to the Normal, their locations closely guarded, passed only by word of mouth. They are safe-harbours. Sanctums. Protected by an elder COMMAND. A spell. The spell is absolute. It prevents Havens from coming under attack. Only were the multiverse to collapse would the spell fail.

“Get to the chapter on Falling yet?”

I look up from The Book of Seven, scraping damp curls behind my ears. Vidhan.

“C’mon,” he says, holding out his hand to me.

He hauls me up from my seat against a collapsed wall where we’d taken no more than five minutes of rest, and again we move.

Malik, Akuji, Vidhan and me. A Pathfinder clan in a dark world not my own.