‘They bring in material from other places to build with,’ said the Vermiform. ‘There is nothing left for them to use on my entire planet.’

As we grew accustomed to the distance, we began to distinguish them: tiny specks scurrying over the plain, around the lakes and along the summits. It was like looking down into an enormous ant’s nest. I stared, forgetting this was a whole world, and imagined the mountains as tiny undulations in the soil and the Insects the size of ants, busy among them. There were single Insects, groups of a few or crowds of several thousands, questing over the grit from which everything organic had been leached. They swarmed in and out of their hooded tunnels.

The Paperlands bulged up in one or two places and paper bridges emerged, rose up and vanished at their apex. In other places the continuous surface of the roofs sank into deep pits with enormous tunnel openings; places where Insects had found ways through to other worlds. They were carrying food through-a bizarre variety of pieces of plants and animals: legosaurs, Brick Bats, humans, marzipalms. Countless millions bustled down there, pausing to stroke antennae together or layering spit onto the edges of the Paperlands with an endless industry and a contented mien. Their sheer numbers dumbfounded and depressed me. I said, ‘We’ll never be able to beat them.’

‘We could have defeated them,’ the Vermiform choired. ‘We were winning our war. We fought them for hundreds of years. We forced inside their shells, we wrapped around their legs and pulled them apart. We even brought parasites and diseases in from other worlds and infected them, but the Insects chewed the mites off each other and evolved immunity to the diseases, as they eventually do in all the worlds of their range.’

‘They’re tough,’ I said.

‘They become so, over many worlds, yes. We turned the battle when lack of air started to slow them down. We gained ground. We forced them back to their original tunnel and they built a final wall. One more strike and we could have driven them through and sealed their route. But then Vista’s world collapsed and its colossal ocean drained through. See those lakes? It was their larvae that did for us.’

‘Their young?’ I asked.

‘Once the Insects started to breed in their millions. Their growing larvae are far more ravenous than adults. They scooped up mandiblesfull of worms and ate the city.’

Cyan shrieked, ‘Look out! There’s one coming!’

Twirling antennae appeared over the escarpment edge and an Insect charged towards us. Cyan and I turned to run but the Vermiform shot out two tentacles and grabbed the Insect around its thorax, jerking it to a halt.

The tentacles snaked around the Insect, forced its mandibles wide-then its serrated mouthparts. The Insect ducked its head and tried to back off, but a third stream of worms began to pour into its mouth, keeping the mandibles open all the time. Worms streamed up from the ground and vanished down its throat.

The rest of the Vermiform still pooled at our feet waited. For a couple of seconds, nothing happened. Then the Insect exploded. Its carapace burst open and flew apart. Its innards splattered against us. Its plates fell in a metre radius leaving six legs and a head lying with a huge knot of worms in the middle where its body had been. They moved like a monstrous ball of string, covered in haemolymph, and reformed into the beautiful woman. The worms of her face moved into a smile. ‘We love doing that. Wish they would line up so we can burst them one by one.’

‘Ugh,’ said Cyan.

I said to her, ‘Keep watching for more Insects.’

Cyan said, ‘I hate this place. I want to go. I want to see the cave.’

‘The market was destroyed.’

‘No. This is my dream and I say it wasn’t. Take me back; there are too many bugs here.’

‘Why do you think I dropped you in the air?’ the Vermiform said bitterly.

It was easier to speak to the worm-woman than the amorphous bunch of annelids. I asked her, ‘What has the collapse of Vista got to do with you losing the war? Did Vista’s sea drown you, or something?’

‘It drowned billions of us.’ She pointed down to the lake. ‘The Somatopolis was dry before that, very hot and arid. That is how we like it; in fact we brought you here during the night because otherwise the sun would roast you. The waterspout surged from an Insect tunnel beneath us and forced up between us. It erupted a kilometre high and Vista’s whole ocean thundered out. We fled-how could we cope with running water? Still, it was salt water and we might have survived…But the ocean began to evaporate, clouds began to form and, for the first time ever in the Somatopolis, we had rain.’

The worm-woman indicated the pools. ‘Freshwater lakes formed deep among us. We recoiled from the water and erroneously left it open to the air. And the Insects began to breed. We tried to stop them. We kept fighting but, as our numbers diminished, we found it harder to cover the ground. Generations after generations of larvae decimated us, so we sought shelter under the surface. From there we Shifted to find a new world to colonise…as many worlds as possible from the construction of the Insect’s nest.’

The Vermiform woman dissolved into a snake and slithered to rejoin the main mass. ‘We hope the Gabbleratchet might destroy some Insects,’ it added. ‘Brace yourselves. We will try to shake it once and for all by retracing our steps.’

We looked around for the Gabbleratchet, in the cloudless sky, against the rounds of the moons, among the peaks of the Paperlands and directly down to the lake.

I thought I saw something moving in it! I blinked and stared. Something was swimming in its murky abyss. It became darker and clearer as it rose close to the surface. It moved with a quick straight jet, then turned head over tail along its length and disappeared into the depths.

‘What the fuck? What was that?’

A flash of green on the sheer rock face below us. The Gabbleratchet hurtled straight out of it. Empty white pelvic girdles and scooping paws reflected in the lake.

Cyan screamed. The Gabbleratchet turned; it knew where we were.

‘Now!’ The Vermiform lifted us off our feet, through-

– Plennish-

– Infusoria Swamp-

– Sauria-

– Precambria-

– Epsilon Market-

– Somewhere dark…?

Somewhere dark! Cyan cried, ‘Are you there?’

‘I’m here, I’m here!’ I felt for her hand. I opened my eyes wide, just to be sure, but there was not one shred of light. Then, seemingly in a vast remoteness I saw a faint glow, a thin vertical white beam seemed to…walk past us. It stopped, turned around and began to hurry back again with the motion of a human being, though it was nothing but a single line.

‘Where are we?’ I demanded. ‘You said we were going back to the Fourlands!’

‘Stupid creature! This is your world. We want to hide for a while in case the Gabbleratchet comes.’

‘But…’

The Vermiform said, ‘This is Rayne’s room. That is Rayne.’

I think the Vermiform was pointing but I couldn’t see anything.

‘She is pacing back and forth. She’s anxious; in fact, she’s panicking. Can’t you feel it?’

Curiously enough, I could. The intense emotions were radiating from the white ray and putting me on edge. ‘But what’s happened to her? That’s just a thin line!’

‘Hush. If we see the Gabbleratchet’s sparks, we will have to leave fast. This is the Fourlands, the fifth to the eighth dimensions. You occupy those as well as the ones you’re familiar with, seeing as you’ve evolved in a world with ten. You can’t see them with your usual senses, but you do operate in them. We are amazed that you never consciously realise it.’

Close by, Cyan shouted, ‘It’s talking crap! Tell it so, Jant.’

‘Hey, it’s interesting.’

The Vermiform harped on: ‘Emotions impress on the fifth dimension, which is why you can sometimes sense a strong emotion or see an image of the person who suffered it, in the same place years later. What other examples can we give? Acupuncture works on the part of you that operates in the sixth dimension, so you’ll never be able to understand how it works with the senses you have. And the seventh, if only you knew of that one-’