They’d kept Alison in a rather nice apartment at first. Some rich family’s city pad, plainly not currently occupied by the owners. The furniture was covered with dust sheets the squatters hadn’t bothered to take off, though now they were rucked and snagged with being sat or lain on. Maybe the family were off on a month-long Caribbean cruise. Or maybe they’d come back early and been murdered by the intruders. That the squatters were capable of murder was something Alison well knew.

She had seen them before, of course, in photographs, video and images scattered across otherwise unconnected case files. There were half a dozen of them here. At first they’d all looked alike, but a few hours’ familiarity let her tell them apart by their faces, expressions, voices. Men and women, all squat, heavily built, no six-packs or thigh gaps amongst them, living in the space between other people’s lives.

They could do impossible things too, like spirit her out of her apartment into a dry, dead-looking place. She’d seen badlands and canyons where only grey-white lichen relieved the orange of the rock. One of them had lumped her over his shoulder and then they’d run with her, leaving her with a view of the barren horizon, of a bronze sky where no birds flew. The heat beat at her, a true, dry-desert heat, not just London’s midsummer burn. Her mouth turned into sandpaper within minutes, and nobody was talking to her. She passed in and out as they ran, constantly jolted back and forth across the line of consciousness. At one point, she felt a connection, a sudden space where the invisible walls of the world had been. Had she spoken to Julian? Was she about to wake and find herself back at home with Simms? But the next jolt found her still over the shoulder of her abductor, seeing their line of tracks stretching across the dust, crossed only by things like centipedes and roaches bigger than her hand.

Just when she felt her stomach was so bruised from the jolting that something would rupture, they stopped and the woman carrying her did…something. And Alison felt the shift, the connection to elsewhere. Not opening a door, but finding a hairline fracture and then applying the metaphysical crowbar until there was enough space to step through.