Get me out. Get me out. Get me out.

Trounce looked back and put a finger to his lips. He passed the torch to the king’s agent, but Burton’s hand was trembling so much that the illumination shuddered back and forth until Swinburne reached out and took hold of the device.

Pulling his pistol from his waistband, the cloned Scotland Yard man wrapped his fingers around the door handle, clicked it down, and put his shoulder to the portal. It swept open and he hurtled in, brandishing his gun.

The room beyond was large and humming with machinery. The wall to the right of the door was entirely covered with buttons, screens, levers and projecting valve wheels. A woman with pale, wormy blue skin was sitting on a high stool facing it. Her limbs—two legs and eight arms—were exceedingly long, thin and multi-jointed. Her slender hands bore fingers of outlandish length, extending across different sections of the control panel.

She turned her head as Trounce barrelled in. Her skull, horribly narrow and drawn upward into a pointed cranium, was dotted with a plethora of glittering black eyes. Her mouth, packed with crooked and spiny teeth, opened and produced an uncanny whistling as the detective inspector, having misjudged the force of his entry, collided with her and knocked her from her seat. She hit the floor with Trounce on top of her but immediately thrust him off with such force that he flew into the air, hit the low ceiling, and crashed back down with a loud grunt, the breath thumped out of him. His Penniforth Mark II went skittering across the floor into a corner. The woman scrabbled up, employing her arms as extra legs to quickly back away, like a monstrous arachnid.

“I ain’t doin’ nuthin’ but me job, m’lords,” she hissed. “I keep to the law, so I does.”

Burton stepped in and drew his weapon. “I have to render you unconscious, madam. It won’t hurt and you’ll recover in a little while.”

“Unconscious? Unconscious? I doesn’t want to be unconscious, m’lord, and I ain’t no madam.” Shook her head and put her hands to it. “I’m confused. Scared. Me head hurts.”

“The nanomechs in your system have stopped working,” Swinburne told her. “You can think freely.”

“I doesn’t want to think. You shouldn’t be ’ere. It’s the rules, m’lords.” She looked at Burton, at his uncovered face. “Oh gawd ’elp me, it’s you, ain’t it! I dunno what to do. I dunno. I dunno. I ain’t ready fer no revolution. I’m just a simple girl. I does me job an’ nuffink else. What should I do, m’lord?”

“Just sleep,” Burton said. He pointed his pistol and added, “Stun.”

Ptooff!

The technician fell backward. Her limbs spread outward. She twitched and became still.

“Poor thing,” Raghavendra said.

“The Lowlies are getting muddle-headed,” Swinburne observed. “We have to work as fast as we can. If we gain control of the Turing Fulcrum, maybe Lorena will find a way to use it to broadcast an encouraging message to them, something to calm them down.”

“And if we have to destroy it?” Burton asked.

“Then we’ll have to employ the old-fashioned method of word of mouth. We’ll recruit Mr. Grub. His was big and loud enough.”

Trounce retrieved his pistol. They moved past the prone woman and walked between two horizontal groupings of pipes to where a flat platform was positioned beneath a square hole in the ceiling.

Trounce said, “This lift will take us straight up to the second pump room on the palace roof. Inside, the air is heated and pressurised, but when we exit we’ll find the atmosphere too thin to breathe and freezing cold. Lorena will cause our BioProcs to compensate, but we’ll have to move fast, else the strain on our bodies will kill us.”

“It’s one thrill after another, isn’t it?” Swinburne commented.

The chrononauts mounted the platform, Trounce depressed a switch, and it rose through the opening into a dimly lit shaft. Looking up, Burton saw its four sides converging toward a far-distant vanishing point.

“It’s quite a way,” Trounce warned them all.

“And bloody slow,” Swinburne complained.

“When this is all over and done with,” Burton muttered, “I shall return to the desert where, in every direction, there’ll be nothing between me and the horizon.”

“Do you mean that?” Raghavendra asked. “Will you really go back?”

Burton looked into her eyes and felt a strange sensation in the middle of his chest, as if the lift was sinking rather than rising. “No,” he whispered. “I don’t suppose I ever will.”

He turned away from her.

Up and up the lift rose. After a while, the chrononauts became tired of standing, so sat and waited, glancing up frequently, hoping they’d see the top of the shaft.

“We must have travelled for miles,” Wells exclaimed after what felt like hours had passed.

“Up through the Underground,” Trounce said, “then out over the upper city, through the level of the royal parks, and on to the top of the palace. I doubt we’ve travelled a third of that distance yet, and we’ve been going for about thirty minutes, I’ll wager.”

“Just half an hour?” Swinburne protested. “Half a day, more like!”

“Funny,” Wells said, “how time feels different for everyone. I might say the day has dragged by, while you’ll say it’s raced. One man of fifty might feel sprightly, another feel that he’s in his dotage. I often wonder whether Chronos exists at all. Might it not be a figment of our imagination?”

“Could our imagination be the seed of all existence?” Burton added, remembering his earlier meditation—though it had occurred seventy-two years ago. “Is there any reality outside of it?”

“Is it possible,” Swinburne mused, “that the altitude is making you both delirious?”

Trounce chuckled. “And so the conversation is brought down to earth.”

“Great heavens!” Sadhvi Raghavendra cried out. “That’s a singularly inappropriate expression to use under our current circumstances.” She looked up. “No sign of our destination. It’s well past midnight already. It’ll be the small hours by the time we get to the roof. What can we expect, William?”

“We’re unlikely to find the greenhouse occupied at this time of night, so we’ll use it as our base of operations. Once we’re inside, I suggest you hold the fort, Sadhvi, while Carrots and I, and Richard and Bertie, split up and reconnoitre with the aim of establishing Her Majesty’s whereabouts. We may have to abduct a member of staff and drag them back for questioning.”

Raghavendra used her forefinger to give Trounce’s arm a hard prod. “So despite your childhood here in the twenty-third century, your nineteenth-century sensibilities haven’t seen any advancement. You still feel it necessary to deny the woman a meaningful role. Really, you’re thoroughly backward.”

“Not at all,” Trounce protested. “Any good general will tell you that the path of retreat must remain well guarded. If I were a chauvinist, I wouldn’t trust to leave the responsibility to you alone. If you want to exchange places with Carrots, I’ll be just as confident with you at my side.”

Raghavendra eyed Swinburne, who was compulsively drumming his left foot and wiggling his fingers.

“Thank you,” she said somewhat wryly. “I accept.”

The minutes ticked by, their number impossible to judge.

Burton squeezed his eyes shut.

You’re not underground. You’re rising high above it.

But I’m enclosed.

Not for much longer.

What if the lift mechanism freezes? What if we get stuck?

It won’t. This will end soon.

“The roof!” Wells exclaimed.

Praise Allah. Praise Jehovah. Praise Zeus. Praise every god that has or hasn’t ever existed.

The chrononauts got to their feet.

“Be ready,” Trounce whispered. “There might be another technician ahead of us.”

The platform slowed, slid up level with a floor, and came to a halt. They found themselves in a room very similar to the one they’d departed. It was unoccupied.