I opened my eyes to gaze at the shifting play of firelight on the roof and thought of the clawed darkness that had pursued me through my dreams the previous night. ‘Come back soon, Rushton,’ I whispered. ‘Come back while there is still a little time for us …’

When at last I slept, I dreamed of Cassy.

The Beforetime girl lay on her back, her hands by her sides, legs straight, hair pulled back tightly and tucked out of sight behind her head. Her dark skin had an ashy purple tinge, and for one horrible moment I thought that she was dead and laid out for burial. Then her eyes opened. She squinted and blinked as if the light hurt her eyes, though it was only a dim reddish glow. After a little, she seemed to grow accustomed to the light and she gazed around with a puzzlement that quickly became dawning apprehension. Finally she lifted her hands and groped upward into the ruby darkness. It was only when her fingers stopped and flattened at the tips that I realised she was touching glass or plast. Cassy struck out at it, a look of panic in her eyes.

There was a great violent crack and I sat bolt upright, heart pounding. Another deafening crack shook the air and then rain began hammering down on the roof shingles. Thunder, I realised, and lay back relieved. The storm had broken at last.

My senses told me that it was still very early morning and I turned on my side to ponder my odd, unsettling dream of the Beforetimer, trying to make up my mind if it had been a fragment of a past-dream or merely a dream.

I had first dreamed of the Beforetime girl soon after my arrival at Obernewtyn and I had dreamed of her often enough since to build up a picture of her life in the Beforetime. These dreams of the past could not be provoked or controlled, so there were gaps in my knowledge. I knew that her mentor, Hannah Seraphim, had foreseen the end of the Beforetime, but I had no idea whether Cassy had dreamed of it too.

My guess was that Hannah alone had dreamed of the Beforetime and of me, initially, since I had never seen Cassy use her futuretelling Talent in any of my past-dreams. It had been an ancestor of the Agyllian birds that had beastspoken the young Cassy to tell her of the kidnapped paranormals being held in the Govamen compound her father directed. The same bird had sent her in search of Hannah, and later, Cassy passed on to Hannah material that the captives had smuggled out, which led to the revelation that those developing Sentinel as a means of preventing violence and war had secret connections to the powerful weaponmaking industry.