Alison was quite proud of how she’d handled that. She’d seen Julian take solace from it, at any rate, which had been the point. And it was true she was dealing with things better than he was, but not because she was hauling all the Weird down to ground level. Instead, she felt that her own feet were leaving the ground, that she was floating off at the insistent tug of an infinite bunch of balloons.

The ice interface wasn’t always there, but she was finding it more and more reliably. She could reach out and touch it, feel it through the gossamer substance of reality. It told her things, sometimes when she asked, sometimes without even that formality. In her mind it unfolded its dendritic map. You are here. And she could see the cracks spreading, each one a fissure between her world and another. Dead worlds, drowned worlds, worlds bustling with life. Alien worlds that were also Earth.

She could tell when others were walking the same roads, sometimes. She could feel the creeping encroachments of the rats, the Plug-uglies as they exerted their minds to part the seas between the worlds and walk across. The terrifying thing was how quickly Hind had come to believe her. All Alison needed to do was file a prediction and there would be a team on the way, racing to find whoever had been skulking through the shadows. She had lived her professional life constructing intricately designed castles of evidence, and now she felt like a fraud.

They had interrupted three bands of Plug-uglies and another two rats’ nests. She was a fraud who got results.

Sometimes, when her forehead crackled with frost and the ice cream headache had its fingers gripping the inside of her skull—when the architecture of the interface opened up to her like a multidimensional flower—she felt godlike, all of creation within her reach. She felt that all she had seen was a drop in the ocean compared to all that there was, but it could be hers if she reached just a little further. Better than any drug, better than sex, was the lure of infinite understanding.

Sometimes it was less sanguine.

She woke thrashing, fighting the bedcovers, that icy trance already on her. She could feel reality give way, cracks splintering inwards through the walls of the world like bullets aimed at her. They were coming through, right here, right now. She scrabbled, flung a pillow across the room, kicked her blankets off. There were figures in the darkness of her bedroom, standing at the very edge of her bed, waiting patiently.

And she was dreaming, of course she was. Her nightmares had been shot through with recollected contact with the interface and the mind-twisting sensation of all that other space. The frozen complexity existing next door.

She sat up, panting, the sweat she was drenched in chill on her skin.

Just a dream, after all.