Khan looked at her sharply. “No. She approached me in a club, actually. But why do you say that?”

“It happened to me.” I think it happened. “Mal called, but there was no sign of it. No trace on my phone.”

Khan was nodding slowly. “When I was in the safe house, after the break-in, they got in touch again. Went straight to my laptop without needing any kind of connection. I wonder if they’d have been able to do it without the thing even being on. And okay, they had something to show me, but the contact in itself was like a proof of concept, you know? Saying, ‘We can do this.’ ”

“Proof of what concept?” Lee asked.

“Cryptic Informational Transformation Space,” Kay told her brightly. “And if I’d been naming it now I’d have found a word with an L to stick in after ‘Cryptic,’ but I was more of a shrinking violet in those days. It’s my field. Theoretical physics. Or it was supposed to be theoretical. We could never actually generate a manifestation of it in the lab.”

After that, she insisted Lee go out for supplies, which she did with her hair combed halfway over her face like an emo teenager in case surveillance cameras identified her. The way she saw it, Khan might be the important one, but she was being chased by at least two groups of people, some of whom were probably the real police. She spent the brief walk back trying to work out what “Cryptic Informational Transformation Space” was, and returned with a somewhat underwhelming conclusion.

“We’ve both spent our lives hunting something ‘cryptic,’ ” she told Khan weakly. “Does that count as a link?”

“You’re thinking your monsters might be real too?” Khan asked.

“Maybe they exist in Cryptic Transformer Space?” Lee managed a smile.

Khan opened her mouth to dismiss that, then shrugged. “Fuck it, maybe they do, love. Since whoever-the-fuck proved to me that it actually exists, I don’t feel I’m the expert I used to be on the fucking subject.” She spat the expletives out with relish and lit up, tokenly near the window. To be honest, the whole room smelled of smoke.

“So who booked this place?” Lee asked.

“They just told me it’d been done.” Khan nodded. “And you’d think super-secret Russians or whoever they are would have something a bit glitzier. Keep me in the manner to which I’ve become accustomed, don’t you know? But it’s this shithole instead. I haven’t met any of them since probably-your-friend said hi to me in that club.”

“But they proved this cryptic theorem thing and then they…showed you the world was going to end? I mean, if you are going over to the Russians, or whoever, I guess you’re taking them seriously.” Not the Russians, Lee thought. Not unless the Russians have dinosaurs. It’s got to be aliens.