“You’re kidding me,” she said. Was it actually quoting…Jurassic Park? She forgot the pursuit. She forgot the killing cold and that she had fallen sideways into a somewhere she manifestly was not supposed to be. She had spent years hunting fruitlessly for non-existent mystery beasts. Now she was face to face with a genuine, bona fide cryptid—and it was making pop culture references at her?

“Mal. Clever girl,” it croaked, bobbing its head. It was watching her without meeting her gaze. Then, just as she registered the crashing that signalled the imminent arrival of Gym Bro, she heard a very clearly enunciated, “Run!”

She whirled around to see the big man and his friends stumbling through the trees. Gym Bro was soaked through and suffering for it, lagging behind the others. None of them looked amused, and the man in the lead—Dominic—was plainly considering shooting her after all.

As she stumbled away, something attacked him, dropping from the high branches to rake his face. He screamed, tried to dodge and ended up ramming shoulder-first into a tree. Lee thought it was one of the Birdmen, but the attacker was smaller, like a long-legged eagle. She took the opportunity to flee, screeching and cackling erupting all around her.

A shot rang out, and she turned to see a frozen tableau: two of her former captors were right on her heels, but past them Dominic stood over a broken feathery bundle. He was already putting a second bullet into it. In the next instant one of the Birdmen had swooped on him, using its beak to drive a spear between his shoulders with a shriek of rage that crossed all species boundaries.

Then Lee’s closest pursuer grabbed for her shoulder, and she ducked under his grasp. As she dodged around a tree, she knew there was no way she was getting away this time. They were fitter than she was, and her feet were like great blocks of ice on the end of jellied legs. Still, some iron core within her was not giving up. And so she stumbled on, to win a few more seconds of freedom in an alien world.

She lurched forwards, and then lurched further forwards still. She felt disoriented and suddenly had the sense of not going anywhere whilst simultaneously falling into an infinite abyss.

Then the cold hit her.