There were shots right after, and one of the Plug-uglies, a woman, was slapped off her feet, head snapping back. A couple of men were up on the stairs, shooting. Another handful were running down, heading for Dr. Khan. Even as she registered them, the man at the back seemed to miss his footing and fell…away, into that other direction. She had a sense of a great swell, a tidal wave from an Earth with radically higher sea levels, where England had been devoured by the ocean—and then he was gone. The Plug-uglies had brought all the wounds to the surface in their repair work, and Alison’s own reality was just a thin skin over them.

Julian pelted out from a side gallery, missing the armed intruders’ leader but bundling another man to the ground, fighting him for his pistol. The leader thundered a punch into the gut of a Plug-ugly who got in his way, which should have hit like a truck but barely staggered its victim. He followed with a gun butt to the face, though, and that was enough to get him to Khan.

Something else was coming. She felt it ramming through interdimensional space. It was an intrusion, forced through the fragmenting numberscape between worlds: a conscious effort from another Earth. She had a sense of vast, filthy machinery, of infinite maze-like warrens and massed chittering hordes.

She fell into the abyss too, feeling the ice enclose her. For a moment she saw it all, laid out like the most perfect case file—every connection annotated in such detail that one could lose a lifetime unravelling it. Dreamlike, she reached out and diverted the invading reality, sending it down a thousand blind alleys. She increased the effective distance between here and there without anything truly moving. Julian was wrestling, grabbing the other man’s gun. Another intruder stood over him, lining up for a shot. But if she encouraged the ice system to turn its attention to this fault line…Julian never saw the space expand behind him, the hapless gunman suddenly stranded on the desert bank of a Thames that had been dry for a thousand years. And she left him there, because she was not in the mood to mess about. In that moment she was the queen of all creation and she understood everything.