He still felt threatened almost every moment he was awake, and when he slept the dreams were often bad, haunting. In some ways he had learnt to live with the danger. The same had been the case in London when he was collecting relics for Fat Frederick Meloy, until danger had come looking for him. Here in the Fold it was part of every day, and as familiar as the air he breathed.

That didn’t mean he did not try to avoid danger. It simply meant that he built his life around it.

As the sun finally touched the hills he contemplated the view for the hundredth time. For some reason the Fold enjoyed gorgeous sunsets most days, and Vince saw every one of them. They were all different. They were all impossible. The world beyond the ridge line around the valley did not exist. There were no distant lands being touched by this same sun. There was no dark and light in the Fold, only dark or light. It was as perplexing as trying to consider where the river began and ended.

Eyelids drooping again, Vince vowed to one day drop a stick into the river close to where it entered the Fold, then wait to see if it was swept out the other side and in again where he sat.

But what about the air? he thought. What about the sky, if I were able to jump up and fly like a couple of the Kin? What about the ground if I decided to start digging down like Dastion the tunnelling dwarf?

His new home was as enigmatic as infinity.

With dusk falling at last he retreated to his cave and lit the fires. He had become adept at surviving in the wild, and it only took him a couple of minutes to spark an ember alight and coax it into flame. Every time he did so he experienced a thrill, because fire meant warmth and safety. It meant that he was surviving.

With the fires lit, he retreated into his small cave. It was cool in there, the heavy air always hidden from the sun and daylight. It smelled like air never stirred by life, and never felt against skin. He had found places like this in London, deep below ground or in buildings abandoned for years or decades. Back there, he’d always found a way home.

Near the rear of the cave he knelt down and uncovered the rucksack. It had travelled far in its lifetime, tracking back and forth across the globe on the shoulders of the Kin-killer Gregor. He in turn had been killed by Mallian, the master he had served. A fitting, gruesome end.

Sometimes when Vince looked through the contents of the rucksack, he wondered if he had saved the world.