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anywhere.
    She was facing west. Far to the horizon, I saw a tiny smudge of black, a miniature lick of flame that might have been lightning.
    It started as a whisper, grew to a mutter, then a rumbling thunder like a million horses running in panic.
    And then the flood came in a midnight wave,thundering down canyons below us. It was a thick, muddy wave with a crown of black mist, churning with the smashed remains of homes and businesses and corpses. It was vast, and it was sweeping the human world clean. Nothing could escape it. It slammed into the mountain where we stood, and I felt the world shudder. A cold, wet sigh spread over me, and then the wave split and went around us, thundering past and down, down into the black chasm of infinity.
    ‘Where all the rivers run,’ Sara said. Her eyes were terribly sad, terribly lethal. ‘Go home, child. Don’t come here to die.’
    The spot on my forehead where she – or Patrick – had thumped me flashed white-hot, burning, and then I felt myself losing my balance.
    Screaming.
    Falling towards the churning, foaming, stinking flood of death below.
        
    I jerked back away to the smell of ozone, and the prickly sharp presence of a close lightning strike. David was still driving, but the sky had turned dark grey. There was a thick purple-black centre to the clouds that told me trouble was coming, even without the benefit of using Oversight to look up on the aetheric. Rain lashed the road in thick silver waves. I glanced down reflexively at the speedometer, and found that we were still blazingalong at nearly a hundred miles an hour.
    The hair standing up on the back of my neck wasn’t just from the lightning strike.
    I turned my head and worked out a painful kink, ran my fingers through my hair (or tried to; it needed some major shampoo and a monster-class conditioner), and tried to swallow the cottonmouth I’d acquired during the nap. More lightning flashed on the horizon, blue-white with a delicate fringe of pink. It shattered into ribbons, striking four or five targets at once. The words of an elder Warden came to me: If you’re close enough to see it, you’re close enough to worry.
    David said, ‘I think we should stop for a while.’ He gave me a quick, impersonal once-over. ‘A meal, a shower, a good night’s sleep. Doctor’s orders.’
    ‘There’s a difference between being a doctor and playing doctor, you know.’ Reflex banter. I wasn’t trying to argue against it; the dream had knocked all the fight out of me. It had, in its extremely obscure way, been trying to tell me something. Not surprising that I’d dream about Patrick and Sara, the two who’d given up their existence to bring me back to the mortal world…but I could do with a lot less vague prophecy. How come the sage advice never came in plain language, anyway?
    David nodded at a blaze of green neon up ahead. ‘I’m pulling in.’
    The chiaroscuro blur resolved into a HolidayInn, and as another bolt of lightning tore its way out of the heavens and into the earth, resetting the delicate polarity of the battery of life, I realised that I hadn’t even asked the logical question.
    As David turned the ignition off, I turned towards him and said, ‘Is all this coming for us?’
    Another bolt of lightning lit his face ivory, turned his eyes into hot orange-gold flares.
    He said, ‘Isn’t it always?’

Chapter Two
    When I scampered through the pneumatic doors of the Holiday Inn, a rain-lashed, bedraggled mess, I had one of those shivery, disorienting déjà vu moments. Everybody gets them, and of course the important thing to do is just forget about it and keep moving on.
    Except that I took about six steps into the lobby, spotted the faux-rock fountain with its floating rings of silk flowers, and realised it wasn’t déjà vu at all. It was memory.
    I really had been here before. Six years ago.
    ‘Crap,’ I whispered, and fought a deep, clawing instinct to get back in the car and just keep