Julian shuddered, and she was telling him something. Words were spilling out of her mouth in a futile attempt to patch this one wound that she cared about—sod the universe, frankly. The man who’d shot Julian glanced her way and clearly wrote her off as a threat. He was still holding Khan and shouting something about extraction, evac…A woman attacked him—Mallory, who’d been with the Plug-ugly at Khan’s place before. He backhanded her contemptuously. Then the Pryor girl slammed into him. Alison felt the shift even as she saw its effects. Whatever force had brought the overspill of frantic rodent-people here now rose up like a fish through deep water, jaws agape. It opened about Khan and Pryor and the gunman, snapping shut to drag them out of this Earth and back to its own.

She felt Julian convulse, and for a sickeningly awful moment thought she’d lost him. However, he’d been watching the same thing, and she realized it was the loss of Khan that had moved him. He was trying to go after them, even though wounded, in agony. The Mallory woman was plainly of the same opinion, shouting her rage at the empty space.

But the Icenet remembered their route: Alison felt its freezing touch at her temples, as it helpfully stabbed an informational migraine into her mind. Here was the fracture point where that force had intersected her own reality, here was the crooked path that had been opened, here…was where they had gone.

She hugged Julian to her. He was saying something, and she hated herself for not being able to listen. She had her job, though, and she had the tools—right now in this moment and perhaps never again. Everything was so close to the surface: she could just reach out and touch it.

She reached out and touched Mallory, or asked the Ice to open a link between them. It was a tiny stress fracture in the already mauled fabric of reality. She stabbed the information she’d been given into Mallory’s mind, sharp-edged and raw. It left the woman with a map on the inside of her skull, a snapshot of reality and all its broken channels.

Go get them, she thought. And in the next instant Mallory was gone, swallowed by the world, swallowed by a world, and Alison could only hope it was the right one.

Then she was yelling for help, because Julian’s chest was awash with blood and he was dying.

IV

When the world lurched sideways, Lee closed her eyes, holding Khan with one hand and Gym Bro Cop with the other. She was braced against the cold, but instead the world tilted and tipped her into muggy, rancid-smelling humidity. Then Gym Bro shook her hand away, like a dog with a rat, before dumping her on the hard metal floor.