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The thing had no face. She provided it with one.

Screaming. Roz Forrester decided to give up everything else and concentrate on screaming. She felt the thing in her arm eating through the flesh, squeezing between tendons and bones, worming its way to the surface. Daniel was tugging at her shoulder, and then her wrist split open, split open like a ripe peach, yes another ripe peach, Sheol it hurts, dark flesh pushing out of the split, raw and wet like a new-born baby, out of her arm, out of her arm –

The sky opened up above Woodwicke, and the heavens were rent asunder with a sound like ice cracking on a frozen pond. The night sky had vanished, replaced by pure monster darkness; no stars, no smoke, no space. Just the dark.

Then Daniel started screaming. Then the whole of Woodwicke started screaming, too. Elsewhere, a clock struck twelve. And stopped.

The scalpel was hovering in front of the Doctor’s face. Was it really hovering, or were the hands that held it just cloaked by Raphael’s shadow? Still thinking like a human, Doctor. Stop that, stop that now. Let go. Lower the façade. Pieces of the cosmic clockwork will fall into place. Circuits completed in dimensions of thought. A pocketful of chance.

‘There’s one thing you haven’t thought of,’ he declared.

‘Oh?’ Raphael sounded genuinely interested, but the blade still came closer.

‘There’s one way out of this that you haven’t considered.’

‘Really? What’s that?’

The sky cracked open. Something huge and meaningless flooded into the world. Raphael looked up. For a split second, the Doctor saw his face, and there was an expression of absolute horror upon it.

‘ Deus ex machine,’ said the Doctor.

Erskine Morris looked up, and the sky was no longer there.

There were a hundred thousand possible skies, each one jostling for pride of place in the darkness.

Hellfire

Erskine looked away. Beside him, he saw Walter Monroe, and William Beaumont, and George Mistral, and all the other Renewalists, all of them staring up into the impossible aether, slits turned upwards to a Hell-coloured Heaven. Rainwater was slithering down their masks. The raindrops looked like tears.

and

And the carnival – what was left of it – had fallen silent.

The survivors were staring up in shock, wide eyes in ebony faces. Even the bloodied heap of humanity at Erskine’s feet, whom he briefly recognized as a man called Samuel Lincoln, stopped his hysterical whimperings and raised his eyes. It was as if the end of the world they’d been waiting for had finally arrived, and Woodwicke had at last understood the lesson that this evening had been trying to teach it; that every civilization is just one night away from armageddon.

buggery.

A charred muscle ground against a shattered bone. String nerves twitched. Words began to form in a throat full of rusty nails.

Matheson Catcher recited a formula of thanks. Isaac Penley opened his eyes and howled like the Devil.

There was a sun, somewhere up there, but it was black, an impossible fluorescent black, turning the desert into a great bruise-coloured shadow that stretched to the horizon and vanished over the edge of the world...

Chris gaped. For a while, he couldn’t think of anything else to do.

‘Where are we?’ he asked Marielle. She was standing just a few feet away, her back turned, as if watching the horizon.

– Exactly where we were, she said, and her voice was somehow more than it had been. More than just a voice. Chris shook his head. Was he hearing echoes?

‘There was a... I don’t know. A place of execution. A city.

Looked kind of old-fashioned. French, I think.’ He looked around, shaded his eyes against the black sun. ‘Where did all that go?’

– It’s still here, somewhere, said the voice. But Marielle is looking at it differently now.

‘ "Marielle"? What d’you mean, "Marielle"? You’re –’

And then she turned to him, a slight smile on her face. Her face... it was Marielle’s face, but just like the voice, it was something else as well. It shifted. Altered. Changed its mind about how the features should be perceived.

‘You’re not her,’ said