Only a couple of seconds had passed since he began to say “watch this,” but my Spidey sense and the frankly terrifying sense of wrongness in my guts told me that we might be too late: whatever the thing flooding into the powered-up summoning grid was, it certainly wasn’t just a harmless class one emanation. I felt it tracking me as I stepped across the threshold, like a terrier that has spotted and locked onto a juicy mouthful of rodent on the run: cold and dank and terrifyingly alien, like something from the abyssal depths of another world’s oceans. I turned and pulled the door shut, then leaned against it and reached instinctively for the ward I wear in a small leather bag on a thong around my neck. “Andy,” I gasped.

“What? What?” He blinked, confused as I stared at him. Eyes: clear. No sense of possession—if I was a god-botherer I’d have given thanks right then.

The door behind me rattled. I shivered: it was becoming cold to the touch. I took a deep breath. “Andy, I need you to go get—no. First, I want you to send Trish home. Then I want you to go get Angleton.” I took a step away from the door, and turned to face it.

“I don’t understand! It’s only meant to summon a class one—” I could barely hear his spoken words over the gibbering din in my head emanating from the other side of the warded portal.

“Andy.” I spoke through gritted teeth. “Get Trish out of the building and to a designated place of safety. Then go and get Angleton right now. We will resume this conversation at a later date.”

“But—”

I glanced at him and he shut up. I’d never seen his face turn that color before: he nodded stiffly, then broke into a stumbling trot in the direction of the corridor leading to Angleton’s hole. Finally.

I drew another deep breath, heart pounding. The tense feeling between my shoulders was getting worse. Andy was old enough to know better.

A class one manifestation, in our charmingly indirect lexicon, is nothing you want to make physical contact with. Many years ago I’d been on a training course where a guy called Fred from Accounting—who’d been assigned to the course because of a typo on an HR form—ended up extremely dead indeed because he hadn’t understood that a voice responsive agent is a nasty little cognitive loop that can run on (and burn out) a human nervous system just as easily as a computing device.

Whatever was on the other side of that door was most certainly not a class one manifestation.