She’d just started to give her horse some water when Nigel and Fergus both looked up in unison. That fast nervy reaction made her worry, but then everyone was edgy. Her u-shadow was telling her one of Nigel’s sensor modules was sending out an alert, supporting a stream of fresh data. Displays appeared in her exovision, but even with the u-shadow tabulating them neatly they were incomprehensible.

‘What’s happened?’ she asked.

‘Localized quantum field fluctuation,’ Nigel answered. ‘Spike’s over. They’ve reverted.’

‘Oh right.’ His casual, confident answer was obscurely reassuring after days of uncertainty. Of course, what it actually meant was another thing altogether. Her physics memory implant wasn’t terribly helpful, something about quantum fields underpinning spacetime, and some reference codes for further memory implants. ‘Does that happen much?’

‘Never. Not in the outside universe, anyway. In the Void – who knows?’

That was when the sound began – a distant clattering and banging. It made Kysandra jump. The desert had been devoid of sound since the moment they started trekking across it. Sound was alien here. Shocking.

They all stopped what they were doing, staring round, trying to pinpoint the noise. Kysandra realized it was coming from the exopods, and well up the hill if she was any judge. The clattering went on for a few moments more, then stopped.

‘What caused that?’ Madeline asked anxiously. ‘It’s the monster, isn’t it?’

‘No monster,’ Nigel said. ‘I’d say an exopod shifted about. It certainly sounded like that.’

‘Has another one landed?’ Kysandra asked. She studied the top of the hill, her infra-red scan trying to find an exopod that was a different temperature to all the others. They all remained stubbornly identical.

‘No such thing as coincidence,’ Nigel said. ‘Whatever instigated the quantum fluctuation knocked the exopods about.’

‘The monster,’ Madeline said in dread. ‘It’s coming for us.’

‘Now listen, all of you,’ Nigel said forcefully. ‘There is no monster. These corpses, everything we’ve seen here, it’s all three thousand years old. Whatever happened, happened back then. Today, here, now, you are perfectly safe.’

Whatever the sound was, it didn’t come again. They carried on putting the tents up. Kysandra kept using her ex-sense and infrared vision to scan around, making sure nothing was creeping out of the darkness. Just in case.

Once the tent was up, she went inside and took her robes off, slipping into the baggy white shirt. Nigel came in and unwrapped his turban, but left the rest of his sand-encrusted robe on.

‘What now?’ she asked, sitting on the mattress, hugging her knees.

‘We wait until daylight. Even with all the senses I’m enriched with – nice irony, that – I do need to have a clear field of vision to assess things properly.’

‘And when it’s light?’

‘Fergus and I will start a decent, detailed investigation of the exopods. There are well over a million of them piled up out there, stuffed full of solid state components. Sheer probability is that some processors and memory blocks can be salvaged, especially those that haven’t been crushed. And I saw a lot of array tablets jumbled up with the bodies. There have to be some files somewhere I can retrieve and download into my storage lacuna.’

She managed a weak smile. ‘I’m so scared,’ she confessed, on the verge of tears again. ‘Something killed that woman. All of her.’

‘That’s the bigger puzzle,’ he said. ‘Why so many? Nobody has over a million clones. It’s insanity. Whatever happened to her, it wasn’t as simple as a monster.’

‘Is it going to get us?’ she asked, hating how pathetic she sounded.

‘No.’ And he actually grinned, squatting down beside her. ‘I really meant it when I said we’re perfectly safe. This is probably the time to tell you. You see, the people on Querencia found out something else about the Void. Something utterly amazing.’

‘What?’

‘There’s a kind of time travel possible in here.’

It was no good; her mind had gone blank, unable to process what she’d just heard him say. ‘Time travel?’

‘Yes. You know, when you travel into the past.’

‘You can time travel in the Void?’

‘Yes. If you know how, and if your mind is strong enough. I tried it once, the day I landed. I can just do it; it takes a hellish amount of concentration, and I could only manage to perceive a couple of hours. But I went back in time. My first couple of encounters with Ma’s boys at the Hevlin Hotel didn’t go too well. But the third time, I knew what didn’t work, like trying to reason with them, so I just started straight in with domination. And . . . here we are. So you see, if anything does start to go catastrophically wrong, we travel back in time and avoid the danger.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘No, you’re just saying that to try and make me feel safe. Nice try, though.’

‘Listen, outside in the real universe, time is a one-way flow. We learned how to manipulate that flow in a wormhole, slow it down so we can take a relative jump forward if we want, but it is impossible to go back. Always. But here, the Void is different. Remember I told you it is made up of many layers?’

‘Yes.’

‘This layer, where we exist, is only one of them. The Heart, where you say your soul lives on in glory after death, that’s another. But there are two more layers that are critical here: the memory layer and the creation layer. The memory layer stores everything: you, your thoughts, your body’s atomic structure. And the creation layer, well, that can take a version of you from any moment of your life and physically manifest it.’

‘I can go into the past?’ she asked incredulously. ‘You mean I can go back and stop Dad from going on that sweep?’ Tears began to prick her eyes.

Nigel sighed. ‘I can only manage to go a few hours, I’m sorry. There was one person we knew of who could travel back decades, but he lived on Querencia a thousand years ago.’

‘I see.’ She dropped her head so he couldn’t see the misery that was written there.

‘The point is, if you produce a – I don’t know what to call it – a short circuit between the memory layer and the creation layer, you basically reset this whole section of the Void to the moment you’ve chosen. But here’s the important thing: anyone who does that remembers the future they just left. No one else does. You quite literally become the centre of the universe.’

‘Riiight.’

‘Stand up.’ Nigel stood and beckoned to her.

She thought about ignoring him, but this was Nigel . . . She stood up, and he took her hands in his.

‘I don’t know if I can take you with me, but—’

Kysandra perceived him gifting her a complex vision and let it stream into her mind. It was Nigel’s mental perception, but so finely focused she could hardly distinguish anything. He was perceiving the tent with the two of them in it, but pushing further, into everything. Pushing hard. And there behind the phantasm shapes and shadows that were her eldritch world lay a second image, identical to the first. Nigel’s sense probed at that, and another more distant image was revealed. Another, and another. They began to sink through them, and she saw herself shift back down to her knees where she’d been a few moments ago.

Somewhere in the real world she heard a gasp escape from her own lips. Then the images were racing past. Played out in reverse was their whole conversation. Nigel left the tent. Then she was alone sitting on the mattress having a good old wallow in misery. Then earlier still; she was taking off the shirt. The robe rose up from its puddle on the floor into her hand. And the perception froze. Her mind twisted through the image until she was looking out through her own eyes. The real world came rushing back in and she dropped the robe to the floor. Hot air licked over her skin. Kysandra yelped in shock.