“Julian,” she said, as Cam’s legs unfolded. He’d been asking her what the matter was for a while, but she hadn’t had the mental space to deal with it. “Julian.” She hugged him tight, buried her face in his chest as, in her mind’s eye, everything that there ever was collapsed inwards into nothing.

As they descended, she could see forever—through the glass towers of London, the bird people’s snowy wilderness, the rats’ busy cities, the Cousins’ rural idylls—all the way back to the prolonged Ediacaran period, the true and original state of the world. She could see that singular, static entity that had once dreamt a dream of difference.

She felt, through the Ice Mind, precisely when that dreamer diminished to the point where it could no longer nurture the fruits of its imagination. She felt the complex artificial structures that Kay and her peers had put into place take the strain, and crack, and fail.

Even as Julian instinctively put his arms around her, as though he could shield her from anything, it all came down, and there was nothing more.

17/1.

I

As Kay outlined her plan, Alison became aware of another, in that icy mental space she was plugged into. It was Rove, albeit Rove on the back of someone else. He was using Charen Volkovska, spirited away years ago, now Rove’s personal ambassador to the court of the Posticthyans. Alison watched, holding her breath, as Rove’s presence moved through the same models and diagrams. She was unhappily aware that he probably grasped it all just a little better than she did.

Even as she watched, she saw him come to a decision, expressed purely through his interaction with the model. Rove looked at the tangled structure, Kay’s grand plan and his own parasitic addendum, and sent a single instruction to his agent in the machine.

Proceed.

She refocused, seeing the man with her real eyes. He was looking at his phone while Khan talked, as though the science had burned through his attention span and he was checking his mail. Every input was an order, though. She had the sense of a series of organizational blocks slamming into place, each of them held in readiness for this moment.

And then, without fuss, he tapped his lackey on the arm and they slipped out, unnoticed by anyone save Alison.

She was tempted to break into Kay’s lecture with the news that Rove was doing…something. But if there was something amiss, greater minds than her would have spotted it—Kay, or certainly Cam…After all, she was just Alison Matchell, painfully middle class and brought up in the grand tradition of not making a fuss.

Instead, she tugged Julian’s sleeve and murmured, “We need to speak to Rove. He’s up to something.”

Julian raised an eyebrow. “How? He’s stuck here with us.” He glanced around and saw that Rove had in fact disappeared.