“And…let’s get up high, out of the trees—keep going upslope.” He followed his own advice immediately, leaving Lucas to stumble along in his wake. Rove had never been much of a physical specimen, all angles and stick insect limbs inside his immaculately tailored suits. However, after twenty minutes of uphill walking he hadn’t slowed. Lucas, a route-marching veteran, had difficulty keeping up, and Rove cranked that smile up a notch. “Oh, I had quite the tuning-up when I was living with the rats, Lucas. Their medical technology was vastly in advance of ours, remember. And human physiology wasn’t too far from their own. I should have a good three centuries in me before I start to slow down.”

Lucas conserved his breath for slogging.

Eventually they broke from the trees onto a rocky, scrubby slope, surprising a herd of hyrax-looking things the size of sheep. They mostly ignored the humans, even when Rove and Lucas walked through their midst.

“Where,” Lucas demanded, “is this? Why here and not home?”

“It is home,” Rove said. “Or at least, it’s the world where home is now. I’d have preferred to be delivered to the door, but time and tide, as they say.” He had his phone out again, tilting it left and right, apparently satisfied with what it showed him.

“Some other Earth, fine,” Lucas grunted. “So what lives here? More rats?”

“Nothing sentient,” Rove informed him. “Oh, there was once, a prehistory ago, but it died off. Nothing’s arisen since with the wit to look itself in the mirror. Apparently there are some marine mammals that are both bigger and brighter than the average fisherman might like, but that will add a bit of spice when we mount our first whaling expedition, hm?”

“Who’s ‘we’?” Lucas asked. He was looking out over the trees below, which stretched most of the way to the horizon. Maybe it would have been familiar to him if he’d known Scotland, but he’d never spent much time north of the border. Then his ears finally acknowledged a sound. “Is that…a helicopter?”

“Well, I wasn’t planning to walk all the way,” Rove said.

A big, double-rotored aircraft manoeuvred over the trees, doubtless homing in on Rove’s phone signal. The grazing animals took fright and scattered across the hillside as it dipped low towards them, a ladder unravelling from its hatch. A figure in a dark uniform was crouched there, throwing a salute to Rove, who returned it idly. Lucas made damn sure he was firmly on the bottom of the ladder before Rove reached the top, just in case. Adding more people into the mix meant that he was suddenly less indispensable, even if just as an audience for Rove’s self-congratulatory speeches.