“We cannot know what we do not know. We cannot see what we do not see,” he said, the words coming slowly, heavy with thought. “Dr. Khan understands the numbers behind the branches and the worlds, although that is not what she thought she was studying. She can help because, when we take her to where the problem is, she will have different thoughts to us. She will have ideas that come from places our history has closed the doors to. And it will not just be her and us. There will be other minds, all working. Only one needs to find the answer, but difference is strength. To save everything, we need as much difference as possible. Everywhere we have found those who can understand, looked for the brightest minds to take with us on the journey.” He took a deep breath, plainly embarrassed at having talked so much, all in one go.

One of his relatives said something brisk at that point and began moving her hands in mystic passes. A cold light glittered in trails where she’d touched, so that Lee could almost make out the shape of the vast invisible machine she was interacting with.

“We’re going now?” she asked, but then there was a screech of metal. Another Nissa man was shouldering his way between the lot’s barriers, carrying a bin bag over his shoulder. Something about his pantomime clearly communicated “Sorry I’m late” without any words needing to be said.

He dumped out the contents of another bag, revealing yet more clothes: fake furs, scarves, mittens, woollen jumpers. Just looking at them made Lee sweat.

“Oh, fuck,” Mal said. “We’re going there, are we?”

Stig nodded impassively.

“Narnia…?” Lee asked helplessly, and then she understood. The cold place—the really cold place.

If it was Narnia, it was a Narnia where the White Witch had won. Always winter, forever and forever, in a world that had died a hundred million years before lions might have evolved.

From the dull, surly heat of London summer to…this. Ice as far as the eye could see, a crystalline field of it beneath a sky ragged with torn strips of cloud. They raced along in a wind that seemed entirely divorced from the weather down at ground level. Here snow skirled and flurried in bands and tatters, seeming to form fleeting images against the clarity of the ice. And there were lights in that ice: Lee could look down and see vast, translucent depths where cold, clear radiances winked and moved like deep-sea fish. Patterns, patterns always shifting, but never anything that spoke meaning to her human eyes.