Coldbrook(100)

‘Who knows?’ Moira asked. ‘Could be others on other continents. But we don’t travel. People came from France six years ago,’ she said, shrugging. ‘Three years before that, a group travelled up from South America. They brought news, but none of it good. So there are travellers, but not many. And their life expectancy is short. Knowledge is dying.’

‘But you have your casters,’ Jonah said.

‘Between veils,’ Drake said. ‘But not across oceans. That would be like you using your breach to travel to the next town – impractical and, so we found, impossible.’

‘How do they work?’ Jonah asked.

‘Our casting engines create mini-black holes, we stabilise them, and the casters move across the resulting Einstein-Rosen bridge.’

‘How do you deal with the Hawking radiation?’

‘Hawking?’

Jonah frowned. ‘No Hawking? Well . . . the overflow radiation.’

‘Oh. We feed it back via a second black hole within the first.’

‘Neat,’ Jonah said. ‘But only their consciousness goes through?’

‘Of course,’ Drake said. ‘They want to come back.’

‘Jonah, the processes don’t matter!’ Holly said. ‘It’s sharing our knowledge of the furies that’s important.’

‘Mannan,’ Jonah said.

‘Yes,’ Drake said, pouring them all another drink. ‘We’ve tested his blood, transplanted his DNA, examined every part of him again and again. Brain scans, cell cultures. We regularly try to impregnate volunteers, but we fear he’s infertile. That could be bad luck, or something to do with his immunity.’

‘I want to meet him,’ Jonah said.

‘You’re a doctor?’ Drake asked.

‘No, but I know one. Marc Dubois, the best.’

They drank. The air between Jonah and Drake was loaded, with positive potential rather than with tension.

‘I know something about your world,’ Jonah said softly. ‘More than Holly told me. I’ve been shown more.’

Moira’s eyes went wide, but Drake only nodded.

‘We thought so,’ he said. ‘We believed it was Holly to begin with, hoped it was, because she’s so strong.’ Jonah sensed Holly absorbing the compliment, and he hoped she was buoyed by it. ‘But then she mentioned you, and I knew.’

‘The Inquisitor,’ Jonah said. ‘I thought perhaps I was going mad.’

‘Are you keeping a diary?’ Drake asked.

‘No. Never been much of a diarist.’

‘Why do you ask?’ Holly said.

‘Because the woman whom the Inquisitor took from our world kept a diary before she went. We’ve gleaned much from that.’

Jonah looked past Drake at the other visitors poring over books, holding them like newborns as they turned the pages carefully. Perhaps they really were the most precious of things – their power could not be cut off, and their batteries would never run out.

‘He showed me things,’ Jonah said. ‘Holly, the morning we breached he showed me the death of the world we had just found our way to. I didn’t know it then, but now . . .’ He glanced from Drake to Moira. ‘It’s tragic.’

‘What did you see?’ Moira asked.

‘People dying. Being herded into trucks. An American flag with too few stars. Burning fields, black glass deserts. Stranger things, but all to do with the disease those furies are spreading, I guess. And the Inquisitor told me—’

‘“It is required that you accept”,’ Drake said.

‘From your woman’s diary?’ Jonah asked.

Drake nodded, glanced at the bottle, and Holly poured some more.

‘But it’s not all our world,’ he said softly.

‘What?’ Holly gasped.

‘What it showed Jonah. Those sights. They weren’t all views of Gaia.’

‘But . . . how can you know?’ Holly asked.

‘Your casters,’ Jonah said, a dreadful realisation striking home. He felt weak, numb. ‘Not just our world, Drake. How many others do you watch?’

Drake drained his whisky again, and his expression changed. Jonah had recognised his excitement at being there, and seen his own intelligence echoed in the man’s eyes. But now there was something else – something like fear.

‘Many. We don’t cast so much now. The energy levels required are massive, and our matter fields have been failing for years.’

‘But we’ve been watching your world, and it gave us hope,’ Moira said.

‘Not hope enough to stop something coming through,’ Jonah said.

‘And that guilt is on me,’ Drake said. ‘I should have posted more guards. Been more careful.’

‘But what of all the other Earths you’ve seen?’ Holly asked.

‘Over the past decade, I’d say that one in a hundred we’ve cast to is uninfected,’ Moira said.

There was a stunned silence.

‘I assumed it started in Gaia forty years ago,’ Holly said softly. ‘So how was your world infected?’

‘A breach, similar to your own but more violent. It caused a quake. It was thought that our casting attracted that Earth’s attention, but I don’t know. Now we believe there are endless people like you and us across the multiverse, striving to explore, looking to travel. And chance dictates that such undertakings will cross paths, here and there.’