He needed to trace the call, fumbled his phone round, looking for the precise time. There was nothing in his call log. There was no indication the call had taken place at all, as though his own phone was gaslighting him. Even so, he called the office and had a long, heated and entirely unsatisfactory discussion with the technical team, who were patently left with the impression that Julian Sabreur was overdue a holiday. After that, he stood with the phone in his hand, waiting, but it didn’t ring again.

II

There had been a metal door separating the more touristy areas of Mount Pleasant’s postal rail line from the disused reaches beyond. There was no handle, but Stig had got it open. Probably he’d used some high-tech tool he’d plucked out of the air like these people seemed to do, but also possibly he’d forced it with his prodigious strength. Both he and Mrs. Stig seemed to be built on a different scale or be made of denser molecules than regular people. Their mere presence felt exhausting, as though they were using up all the air, all the energy.

And they could really run. They would plainly have preferred it if Khan and Lee could have kept up with them, loping wolf-like through the abandoned tunnels. Except Lee had already run more today than she would normally in a week, and she reckoned the same went double for Dr. Khan.

Stig and Mrs. Stig had a free and frank exchange of views on that quandary, views Lee reckoned were not complimentary to the fitness of either herself or Kay Amal Khan. “We will carry you,” Stig offered.

“The fuck you will,” Khan said.

“Carry you,” he repeated. He didn’t loom threateningly. In fact, he seemed to shrink from the doctor a little, faced with her refusal.

“I will walk, love,” Khan said. “This is not my day for being swept off my feet. And if the rats or those goons up top aren’t right behind us, then walk it is, because I have already turned my ankle once, capisce?”

Stig looked hurt, and he glanced sidelong at Mrs. Stig.

“Walking is good,” Mrs. Stig agreed wearily. “Long walk though. It is no shame to want help. You find it hard to accept it.”

“I do?” Khan demanded, but Lee murmured, “I think she means us, both of us…all of us.”

Khan glanced at her, frowning, but asked no questions, perhaps divining she wouldn’t like the answers. Lee had come to the conclusion that she had finally hit the jackpot in the cryptid game, only in a way she’d never be able to publish. She tried the phone then, because her instinctive thought, even after all this time, was to share the revelation with Mal. Except the phone was dead. Wherever Mal had been calling from was as severed from them as the world of the weasels.