And Lee never gave up on the cryptids and the Forteana. Though neither did she go mad for it, like some Birdman-hunting Van Helsing. She kept on as she had been, wrote articles for local papers, then some national papers; contributed top-ten lists of weird shit to websites; was paid enough to make the rent and buy a sandwich. And every so often she imagined Mal reading those pieces and laughing at her. It made her feel close still, even when the fourth anniversary of her disappearance had come and gone.

Until Mal called.

Or someone called who sounded like Mal used to sound, a voice indelibly engraved in Lee’s memory. She wanted to meet, with no time for catch-ups and pleasantries and Lee’s What the fuck do you mean by this? Who is this? Why are you…What are you—Wait! Just a place, a time—pedestrian, ridiculously mundane. And a choice: to go, or not to go.

Lee went.

Interlude: The Wanderers

Excerpt from Other Edens: Speculative Evolution and Intelligence by Professor Ruth Emerson of the University of California

Over time, the tranquillity of the Ediacaran period’s sessile, quilted forms met its end. The low-energy biology of those supine species was replaced by an acceleration into the world of tooth and claw, competition and predation. This was the death knell of the Ediacaran epoch, when one species discovered that harvesting material from its defenceless neighbours was vastly more efficient than filtering detritus for a living.

There was an explosion of biological disparity. No more were quilts the fashionable things to be seen in. Whilst some creatures still sat and sieved, the world was moulded by new pressures. Life had an urgent need to move—towards, for predators; away, for prey—to hide, ambush, devour and protect.

Welcome to the Cambrian period.

Some species became swift, flexible, muscular: slender ribbons of life eeling through the water. Some burrowed into the sediment. Still more used a strategy borne of desperation: let the predators break their teeth and blunt their claws on their hard shells. Unwanted trace elements and compounds that had been building up within organic bodies like all-over kidney stones were secreted on the outside as armour. These creatures would be first on land, first in the air, in any timeline. For this is just one timeline.

In our world, those ribbons of flesh inherited something greater. The internal rod they attached their muscles to became, eventually, part of the spine. They became us, over the course of half a billion years. But not in this world.

Why? There is never a definitive moment when a finger is on the scales, tilting them away from the course our own history took. Perhaps it is only chance that dictates which seed of time will grow and which will not.