“At the museum, I saw creatures,” he told Alison. They were in his office, despite the fact that he had always fastidiously refused to eat so much as a biscuit at his desk because of crumbs. He wanted to get the words out, but his nerve failed. “I cannot account for anything I’ve seen, Matchbox. The rats, that thing on the Dorset coast, those machines they found in Morocco. It’s so much past anything I understand that my mind isn’t even trying. I’m going on with my life as though it’ll be ironed out by next week and then I can forget it ever happened.”

“Instead of…?”

“Instead of everything being changed forever. Which is how it is.” He gave her an almost pugnacious look. “How are you still holding up, Matchbox?”

“You ever watch old horror monster movies? I mean ones from the sixties, mostly. They’re still trotting out the same old monster tropes from the thirties, except now it’s science everything. Films like The Quatermass Experiment, Frankenstein, that kind of thing. So we still have vampires, werewolves or some silly rubber monster—but now the hero’s a scientist and everything can be explained away, scienced away. We learn a rational explanation conquers all, explains even the inexplicable.”

“You know Frankenstein was a book before—”

“Spiker, pedantry is your least attractive personality trait.” But she was smiling, and that was good, at least, one small light in the darkness. “And you know what? That’s how I’m seeing all this. ‘Sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,’ right? So there is an explanation, we just can’t see it yet. That’s what I’m getting, from my contact.” He shuddered at the thought of her reaching across an unthinkable gulf, to something cold and vast and yet compliant. An operating system that gave her fragmentary backdoor access to the mind of God.

She must have seen his less than convinced look, because she grinned again. “When the Plug-uglies grabbed me, I got to watch them work. They wizarded me out of my bloody kitchenette, but they didn’t blindfold me. They were like any covert team working under adverse circumstances, rather than mad wizards. Except they bitched at each other less. And that made me think ‘rational explanation’ too.”

He felt a keen stab of envy—that she could skate so easily over the morass that was dragging him down. It must have shown, because she grabbed his hand.

“Spiker, we’ll have it, soon enough. Sometimes I can almost see…It’s like I could just draw a map of the whole thing, with Earth marked as ‘you are here.’ And I can see where the other places are rubbing against ours, breaking through.”

II