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All these thoughts took less than four seconds, by which time Catcher’s finger was on the trigger of his gun.

A quarter to midnight.

Samuel Lincoln couldn’t remember the exact details of what had happened on Paris Street. He kept remembering that one simple sensation, the bottle breaking against his face, tiny pieces of glass sticking in the corner of his eye. He vaguely recalled lying in the rain, trying to swear at Hatchard. Shouts.

Samuel had looked up, and seen the hooded Renewalists approaching. More shouts. More broken glass. Fists.

He’d crawled away from Paris Street, and he was still crawling, though he couldn’t be sure where he was or how far he’d come. There were alleyways around him, but one eye was gummed up with blood and splinters of glass, and the other was thick with tears. He tried raising his head, then tried standing. It hurt, and he wasn’t very good at it anyway.

The woman stepped out in front of him and smiled.

Samuel felt himself drop to the ground again. The woman’s face seemed to shift and slide as he watched, perhaps a side–

effect of his blurred vision. Even her smile refused to stay in one place for more than a second.

Then she was gone. Samuel didn’t know where. In her wake there was just dust and music.

Music?

The music was real, he was sure of it. His ears were ringing, but even through the din he could hear the rhythm, beaten out on barrels and drums. Dancing-music. Who would play dancing-music at a time like this?

Samuel Lincoln forced his body up onto its elbows, and began to drag himself in the direction of the noise. He didn’t think to stop and ask himself why he cared.

There was just darkness. Marielle Duquesne would never have thought that possible; a place where there was just darkness, with no hope of the morning ever arriving. It reminded her of her childhood, when there had been monsters in the nursery.

Being young. Knowing exactly what it means to be afraid of the dark.

And were there monsters here, crawling out of the blackness? No, perhaps not; there were only possibilities, and you could see anything amongst the possibilities, if you looked hard enough. Sometimes, the things she saw (or thought she saw) broke the laws of nature, or the laws of physics, or the laws of time, or laws there weren’t even names for. Whenever she caught a glimpse of something impossible, her spine would burn and she’d spasm like a dying animal.

Perhaps if she found the right way of looking at this terrible place, she’d see something she recognized. Perhaps she might even find Christopher Cwej, as a man-shaped set of possibilities hidden in the shadows.

She concentrated. The world remade itself around her, and suddenly, she was standing in a suburb of Hell.

He had tried a simple distraction, producing an ersatz dove that had fluttered from his sleeve and vanished into the smoke.

The man with the scalpel hadn’t flinched.

He had tried a spot of hypnosis, a minor suggestion, staring through the spectacle-lenses and telling his opponent to look the other way for a second.

The man with the scalpel had just smiled a little harder.

He had even tried a touch of Venusian Aikido (because the old ways were often the best).

The man with the scalpel kept coming.

It was unthinkable. It was inconceivable. But it was happening.

The Doctor was running out of ideas.

He hurried along Paris Street, ducking whenever a fist was aimed in his direction. For the most part, the locals were too busy hitting each other to get in his way, but he realized – with some irritation – that nobody was accosting his pursuer at all.

They didn’t even notice the man as he swept along the street after the Doctor, a silhouette with a Cheshire-cat grin.

The Doctor batted away a low-flying brick with the end of his cane, and muttered an ancient Miasimian curse that contained an almost obscene number of ‘X’s. His usual repertoire had quite simply failed to work. He’d followed his usual procedure, adopting the basic thought-processes