Mrs. Stig was speaking softly to him, sounds that weren’t words Lee knew, and not from any language group she’d ever encountered. Her hand came up, a slab as big as both of Lee’s. When her fingers moved in the air, though, it was with the delicacy of a magician.

And the air did magic. Lee saw it for a moment: glimmering lines, depths and glints of icy light, and the temperature dropped several degrees for just a second. She thought she heard great hollow slabs grinding against each other, from a distance not contained within the darkness of the tunnel.

Khan had heard it too; Lee could see it in her expression. More, Khan had perhaps understood it, in some small way. Her face was abruptly ashen.

“Where are we going?” she asked.

“Out, away,” Stig told her. “Come.”

“I am not going into any dark tunnels with you, Stig, love, until you tell me where we’ll end up.”

Lee waited for Stig to get pushy with them, for all that raw physicality to overflow into action. Instead he seemed to pull in on himself, abruptly abandoning the venture and sloping off into the darkness.

“Kay’malkan,” the woman said, intoning “Kay Amal Khan” as though the name belonged to a mysterious deity. “You came because we sent you truths you could understand. We sent to you because you could understand.” Her voice was more strongly accented than Stig’s, even though her speech was more confident. “We need your understanding. We need all the understanding there is. Please.”

Khan had stepped past Lee, still out of reach should the big woman try to grab her. “And where are we going, love? Because I don’t think we’re just riding the train.”

“We will open a door through the boundary that separates this branch from our branch, from where you are to where we are. The potential for such a door exists here, you understand?”

From her expression, Khan did understand; then movement caught Lee’s eye from the far end of the platform.

She thought it was an optical illusion at first. Nothing there, but a nothing of a different quality, a nothing that funnelled into some vast unseen space like water spiralling down a plug. Even as the image came to her, she started thinking about things that might be coming the other way, bristling things, thronging things, pushing their bodies up through the plumbing of the universe and squeezing into places they shouldn’t be. Like here, like now. She saw them; they were coming.

She registered a congealed mass of movement at first, something flowing from elsewhere to here. A writhing mass of discrete long bodies, twisting and serpentine. She saw heads blindly questing, thin limbs that reached out with weirdly twisted hands, long, whiplike tails.