Amin finally arrived in the car, and Lucas told him to get Josef and Terrence into the back before anyone started asking questions. Amin was wise enough to have no questions of his own.

“Mr. Rove,” Lucas reported, and gave a concise summary of just how everything had gone to shit, his voice flat.

“I see.” Rove sounded more distracted than anything else, to Lucas’s relief. “I’d hoped to avoid this, but I’ll send the other team in.”

Lucas just nodded. Of course there was another team.

“You stay put. Have your man keep the App up, in case they get flushed out”—and Rove chuckled unexpectedly—“like rats.”

III

Lee had followed Mal’s voice in her ear all the way from the hotel, seeing no sign of pursuit but assured at every step that it was there.

The phone was a new one Khan had found in the hotel room. It came with earphones and a mic, and Lee had conducted a sporadic conversation all the way, whilst trying to appear casual.

“What’s the plan, Mal?” she asked.

“Working on it,” came that familiar, achingly distant voice. “We need to get you and the doctor out. But we need to open a door, you get me?”

“Not to the cold place, please.”

Mal’s reply, tinnily amused: “Well, you have a choice of cold places, Lee. Not to the very cold place, no. That…that was my mistake. Sorry about that.”

“No more dinosaurs, please.”

“Can’t promise anything on that front. They’re lovely when you get to know them, honest.” Mal sounded harried. Lee tried to imagine her, but the situation was so shorn of context she couldn’t. Was this new Mal, of the long dark hair and the lean, muscled body, standing in a snow-swept forest clearing? Was she sitting in a supervillain room full of monitors, seeing twenty variations of the same scene around her?

“Mal,” she said wretchedly. “What’s going on?”

“Complicated.”

“I know it’s complicated, Mal. It got so complicated I almost froze to death.” She was fighting hard to keep her voice composed and, from Khan’s expression, not doing so well. “Why am I…why am I important, Mal? I get that Doc Kay is a maths whizz who can save the universe, and the bad guys want to stop that happening for ‘reasons,’ but…” Her voice wobbled. “And I will help, right? I mean, it’s my universe too. I will fetch and carry for her, and I’ll do whatever you ask me, you know I will—but why do they want me?”

Mal was quiet for long enough that Lee thought she’d lost contact, hearing only the ghostly tides of static like waves on a beach, wind moaning through lightless chasms deep within the Earth.

“You’re almost there,” said Mal at last. “But they’re almost on you. Move, Lee. Just run.”

“Mal—”