She stood slowly, waiting. Gone, it’s gone, she thought. Or never there. But that ship had sailed. No telling herself it wasn’t real, not now. She had seen…so much. An analyst’s dream. If there was some way of taming this thing, then what couldn’t she know? Know, and be unable to prove to anyone’s satisfaction, but know. She would be like the Oracle at Delphi, and the security services would approach her with gifts and sacrifices begging for her guidance.

And that was a queasy thought, because she was remembering that great landscape that stretched into the depths of time. There had been moments of contact going way back into history, a thinning scatter pattern of them. Did the Pythia have a connection to this same system, to make her prophecies? What other predictions came true?

Then the pragmatic part of her took over. Why is it getting…worse? Why are there so many more interstices now? The data had definitely had that kind of shape, plotting a phenomenon growing over time. Cracks, she thought. What if there have always been a few cracks between there and here, but now there are more and more, so many more.

What the hell am I going to tell Julian? And for a brief, happy moment she thought that was what weighed on her. She often had this problem with big emotions: the feeling and the cause of it became severed in her head. Her annoyance at A became stapled to B, much to innocent B’s misfortune. Right now the feeling she was dealing with was a wave of impending doom, yet for a moment it might have just represented worries about work–life balance, or the knowledge that she was almost out of dishwasher tablets.

But no, nothing could account for this. She could feel her anxiety levels spiking, and her heart was faster now than when she’d been in communion with the alien supercomputer. But I’m out of it now.

What if I’m not? The cold and the visual influx had gone, but did that mean she was entirely divorced from whatever it had been? The sense of something terrible about to happen was gathering like a storm cloud in the room, and she would love to believe that it was only an anxiety attack.

You’re an analyst, so analyse! To which the analyst in her replied, Inadequate data from unverified sources.

She called Derek. He sounded annoyed when he answered the phone, and she wasn’t going to make him any happier.

“I’m really sorry,” she said, “I can’t take the girls tonight. Don’t bring them round, sorry, sorry.”

“Well I can’t take them, it’s bowling,” he told her.