As he slung the car along the M1, heading for Rove Denton’s usefully windowless office, he had his phone beside him. He was texting one-handed whenever the traffic let him. The texts vanished the moment they were sent, which was all very mysterious but a pain in the arse when you couldn’t remember what you’d written previously. Rove’s replies—sent with his own pointy fingers from wherever the fuck he was—appeared and waited to be seen before fading away like bad dreams.

There was a flurry of what he thought was steam or smoke across the windscreen, and he swerved slightly. Behind, Dominic swore. Pryor was tense now, hunched in. In retrospect he should have just shown her his ID again, because it was a good fake. Still, he felt that taking the hard line was playing fair. She deserved to know she was in the shit.

“Fuck’s sake,” Dominic spat. “Is that snow?”

“Don’t be stupid,” Lucas told him as another brief curtain passed over them, light as gossamer. “It’s July. There’s a fucking heatwave, mate.”

He met Pryor’s eyes in the mirror again and was profoundly disconcerted by how they’d lit up. She knows something.

Abruptly they were ploughing off the road, thundering down a bank to carve through a broad stream. They scraped half their paintwork off against a gnarled tree that simply hadn’t been there before—and neither had any of its many, many friends. They were rattling and jolting over a topography of roots and mounded dead needles under a canopy of dense, interlacing boughs, the summer sun turned almost to twilight by their shade. Lucas wrenched at the wheel, weaving drunkenly between tree trunks, all those half-forgotten lessons about driving under adverse conditions surging back to him. Then they’d ploughed into another watercourse, coasted to the far side with water rising over the hubcaps and ended up axle-deep in mud.

A further flurry of snow passed over them and was gone.

Lucas stared out at the forest, gloomy and receding into darkness on every side. In the rear-view mirror he saw Michael’s car, drawn up on the other side of the stream. There was no sign of the third vehicle. Maybe it was still…back there, where there were things like roads and sanity.

Dominic was swearing steadily, and Lucas told him to shut up. He tried his phone: no signal, go figure. Behind, Michael and Becca had left their car and were staring about them. Lucas elbowed his door open, and cold air sawed into his throat. “Holy fuck,” he rasped out. It was midwinter out there. He fumbled for his coat, the shock of the sudden temperature change like a weight on his chest. The air was full of flies, scratchy with unfamiliar birdsong.

He waved at the others.