There is a deep stirring somewhere and I start, tail bristling. In the darkest corner of the living room Night-time groans. He raises his head. His ears are ragged and there are deep slashes along his flanks, as if made by a knife. Dying, yes. But not dead. Not yet.

I think furiously. I can’t go up or out, but perhaps there is somewhere left to go, after all.

Hurt, he says, in a deep growl.

I know, I say. I am sorry. But I need your help. We all do. Can you take me down, to your place?

He hisses, a sound as deep as a geyser. I can’t blame him. He tried to warn me about Lauren.

Please, I say. Now, more than ever—now it is your time.

Night-time comes forward, no longer graceful, but limping and painfully slow. He stands over me and I hear his breath sawing in and out. He opens his jaws wide and I think, This is it, he will finish me. Part of me is glad. But instead he closes his mouth about my scruff and picks me up, gentle as a mamacat.

My time, he says, and the house is gone. We hurtle down, down through the dark. Something hits me with a terrible blow and now we are somewhere else entirely.

Night-time’s place is worse than I could have imagined. There is nothing but old, old dark. Great plains and expanses and canyons of black nothing. I understand that there is no such thing as distance here—it all goes on forever. This world is not round and you never come back to yourself.

Here, he says, putting me down.

I gasp, my lungs almost crushed by loneliness. Or maybe it is the last life draining from us.

No, I say. We have to go further down.

He says nothing, but I feel his fear. There are deep places even Night-time cannot go.

Do it, I say.

He snarls and bites me, deep in the throat. Blood gushes forth, freezes in a stony spray in the cold dead air. Bodies don’t work the same way down here.

I snarl and bite him back, my small teeth puncturing him in the cheek. He starts in surprise. We die if we go down, he says.

We have to go down, I say. Or we will certainly die.

He shakes his head and grabs me by the scruff and we sink into the black earth.