Lee stared at her. Maybe she’s the crazy one. Or she’s wrong. Because it’s not reasonable to expect me to have this conversation, not about something on this scale. For a moment she thought she was going to walk out, give up on this whole episode as a bad job. Then she was going to cry. In the end she laughed.

“This isn’t fair,” she told Khan’s raised eyebrow. “I saw a dinosaur. That should mean I’m the one with the big news.”

Khan grinned, red lips against white teeth. Then there was the muted trill of a phone. The doctor frowned and retrieved it from the tangled sheets of the bed.

“Hmm?” she said, then eyed Lee. “She did, yes. You’ll have to tell me how you did it, though, cos I can’t see the strings.” She nodded and held the phone out. “It’s for you, love.”

Lee took the phone tentatively. It was an old model, just a number pad and a tiny screen. “Hello?”

“Lee?” Mal’s voice, tinny and static-laced, from far, far away. “Are you all right?”

“I…I’m very confused, Mal. I’d really…appreciate being able to understand what’s going on right now.” She heard her voice shake, when she’d kept it level all through being told about the end of the universe.

“I’ll tell you. When I can reach you, I’ll tell you everything I know. But listen to me, Lee. You need to move on, you and Dr. Khan. We need you to get out of there. They’ve tracked you down.”

II

The new team was underwhelming, put together at short notice from whoever they had sitting on their hands in London. Lucas was already missing Dominic, Michael and Becca. Who no longer existed, apparently. There was no record of them on the Rove Denton system, no sign of anything they’d touched or owned back at the office. Lucas felt that this was an object lesson specifically for him about how Daniel Rove treated failure.

Amin seemed competent, another ex-forces lad, young but steady. Josef was a great beast of a man, not that fragile weight-lifter fitness that was all push and no endurance but someone who could hunt all day. Terrence came last in Lucas’s eyes; he had the feel of someone who was very keen to advance his position in the company but less keen to actually put in the work.