It had been like this after Mal vanished. It hadn’t been the underground dark, though. Instead, she’d avoided parks, open spaces, trees. She hadn’t wanted to leave her room. Post-traumatic stress disorder, they’d said: a perfectly normal response to a harrowing experience. And she really had been fighting PTSD, but the harrowing experience had been anything but normal. And now she had seen a world of seething rodents overflowing from their cramped tunnels into her own world. And where was safe, if things like that could happen?

Lee hurried away from the station, wondering where the hell she could go.

She toyed with the idea of a hostel. But if she used her card, her pursuers might trace her. They could trace her by magic super-detectors anyway, but would using her card speed things up? Make things easier? Maybe they had a deal with her credit card company too. Selling her personal data to the rat-men sounded like something that banks did all the time. In the end, a night off the dark streets seemed worth the risk. She took out all the cash she could, a depressingly small amount, then threw the card away—just sent it sailing off onto the road, as though that would make any difference.

She found a hostel in King’s Cross and was starving by then. The receptionist sold her coffee and a packet of cheese and onion crisps. Her smile almost had Lee breaking down in tears, just at that little human contact and kindness.

When she collapsed on the bed, she was physically shaking, unable to stop. Everyone else in the dormitory was there with coats, backpacks, luggage: students and travellers on the cheap, come to explore the jewel of British cities. None of them had come to see squirming hordes of weasel soldiers with razorblade guns or dinosaurs in ice-age forests. Or even the weird, broad-faced men and women who made magic out of thin air and were trying to save the universe.

Her panic was a boat in a swelling sea. It kept her afloat as long as it could, but at last sleep dragged her down so that dreams could take up where real life had left off.

Later, she jolted awake when a weight hit the mattress at her feet. Lee froze, her mind a collection of jumbled fragments, reality and fantasy understandably difficult to separate. Someone was sitting on the bed in the dark. Someone had found her.

“Please.” The word escaped her lips in a whisper. She wasn’t even sure what she was begging for.

“Hey.” A light sprang up, the glowing screen of a phone. It flashed in Lee’s eyes, illuminating a pale, pointed face.

“Come on,” Mal said. “It’s time to go.”

III