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And then she was here. Here in New York State. Here in 1799.

At Christmas.

Lost.

As lost as you can get, in fact, with no way of letting the others know where she was or how to find her. There were no organizations here that might know the Doctor, no LONGBOWs or PROBEs, and no way of sending out any kind of distress call. The one possible means of communication she’d had – the damned amaranth that had presumably brought her here – had got itself lost. It had got itself lost. She was quite adamant that she hadn’t lost it. When she’d woken up in this timezone, finding herself lying in a puddle of frost and dirty water in the woods on the edge of town, there’d been no sign of the thing. She imagined it trundling away of its own accord, looking for a more interesting owner than Roslyn Inyathi Forrester.

Ah yes, Roslyn Inyathi Forrester. Professional fortune-teller and small-town oddball. A bitter, cynical woman who seriously believed that she used to travel to the stars with a diminutive magician, and who spent her poor, wasted life trying to find her way back to the delusion. Dementus futurus.

The best kind of lunatic.

Which is why she’d had to develop her own escape plan, why she’d spent the last two weeks planning, waiting and brooding, and why there was now something heavy and metallic and probably illegal nestling in her pouch. She’d only survived this long by setting herself up as an ‘attraction’, her tent supplied by showmen who took most of what she made as payment, but there was a limit to the time she could go on telling false futures for failed businessmen and using the same stories and answering the same questions and Goddess oh Goddess I have to get out of here this place is killing me I said this place is killing me.

It was half past eight on Christmas Eve when Daniel Tremayne heard the call. Of course, as far as Daniel was concerned, the time was just ‘night’ and the date was just

‘today’.

He was on Hazelrow Avenue when it started, standing in the shadow of the grey house on the corner, slipping into the dark spaces behind the porch pillars whenever a carriage rolled past. Making sure he wasn’t seen. No particular reason for that; Daniel Tremayne just didn’t like being seen. The people who lived in towns like this – the soft people, the ones who could stay in one place till the end of the world came for them, the farmers and the lawyers and the storekeepers – had built this world out of their queer politics, out of weird rituals like ‘Christmas’ and ‘Day of Independence’, and Daniel lived in the cracks of that world. Seventeen-and-a-half years of hiding in alleys. A lifetime of not being noticed.

The house looked ugly in the moonlight, uglier than he’d remembered it. The windows weren’t lit, and there were pools of darkness around the top-floor balconies, so it looked like the roof was being held up by shadows. The house had been kind-of-square, once, but the owner had stripped it down and rebuilt it so often that the place just looked like a shape, now, instead of being any shape in particular. Passers-by looked away when they walked past it, like they were embarrassed or something. The other buildings on Hazelrow Avenue were fine, all pearl-white pillars and marbled walls and cosy gas-lit windows, but the house on the corner... Daniel remembered the soldiers who’d fought the Revolution, men who’d been out in the snow so long that their arms and legs had twisted and turned black. The house was like that, like the town’s dead limb

Daniel Tremayne climbed up onto the stoop and stood there awhile, getting ready to knock. Rehearsing.

Mr Catcher? Don’t know if you remember me...

No. Catcher was too formal for that kind of thing. Last time Daniel had been through Woodwicke, the man had hired him to work on the cellars and the attics of the house, tearing out timbers and ripping up floorboards. Daniel hadn’t asked why, because he knew better than to ask questions, but Catcher had told him anyway. Something about the purity of the architecture, something Daniel