In the dark.

 Dark closes around us, wraps us in wings of night and forces each of us to face our secret fears, all that we can see in the sunlight. In the dark we are alone with ourselves. And for most of us, that scares us.

 Darkness accentuates the remaining senses. We hear noises, and in the dark we give faces to those noises. We smell more acutely, feel the need to reach out, to touch.

 Bernice heard scrabbling noises from above, smelled the clay, the charcoal, heard the drip of water, tasted her own blood in her mouth. She reached out to find the damp wall. She filled the gap in her head with a word.

 "Sewer."

 Which meant that the scrabbling noise was probably a rat, and probably harmless. It also meant that they could probably get out. All it would take would be calm, persistency and a little bit of luck and

 And Miles was crying.

 She inched towards him, her feet finding themselves in soft things that she didn't want to think about.

 "Come on, Miles," she said, placing her arm gently around his neck. "We're going to get out of here."

 "Sorry," he said, and sniffed.

 She led him deeper into the sewer, her hand on one wall until she found the inevitable access ladder. She guided Miles to it first, let him climb up first into the dim twilight of a quiet alley.

 She was out of breath, and so was he, but as they lay there, exhausted, looking up at the stars twinkling above them, they laughed. First Bernice, then Miles.

 She looked at him smiling, for the first time in hours. His dark blond hair was streaked with dirt, he had something lodged in the cleft of his chin, and he needed a shave. He was shaken, arrogant, incompetent, knowledgeable, and in many ways a dead weight. He was no John Lafayette. But she kissed him anyway. The skin on his cheek tasted salty, so she kissed him on the lips. They tasted salty too, but it was better.

 "Bernice," said Miles eventually. "Do you think that Natalie woman was down there?"

 Bernice rolled back on to her back, throwing her arms over her head. "I don't know, Miles, really I don't. But I think she can probably look after herself."

 "And the totem?"

 "Is worrying."

 "It's a statue that throws fireballs and says 'HEHEHEHEHE DIE', Bernice. I think that counts as more than worrying."

 "It's worrying, and cliched. I think we should get out of this alley, and find somewhere to hole up and rest."

 "Back to the hotel?"

 Bernice shook her head vigorously. "We'll just get abducted again. I was thinking of somewhere less obvious."

 "Such as?"

 "We'll know when we get there - come on."

 She sprang to her feet, pulling him up behind her. Together they walked out of the alley, into a main street lined with local Din'l market stalls, and realised that they were completely lost.

 When she was six years old, she had stolen a marsh fruit from a stall in a busy market in Metrador, a holiday resort. She had smuggled it into her pocket, kept it a secret from Mum and Dad, carefully nursing it to make sure it didn't get bruised on the way home.

 That night, after everyone had gone to bed, she took it out and looked at it. In the soft glow of her nightlight it was the most beautiful marsh fruit she had ever seen - its flesh was pinker and healthier - its shape more perfect - and when she bit into it, her teeth piercing that soft skin, it tasted sweeter than any marsh fruit her Mum had ever given her.

 She devoured it with a mixture of eagerness and care, wanting to wolf it all down, and yet wanting it to last forever, knowing that she couldn't let the juices drip away in case they stained her bedclothes and her Mum found out.

 Later she buried the stone from the fruit near the back of the garden. It took root, and over time grew into a healthy sapling. Natalie had moved away by then, though, and she never saw it. But she always remembered the taste of the fruit in her mouth, the taste of it in her mind. Sweet victory.

 But the time she was twelve she was stealing consumer electronics. Datachips, slicing equipment, clunky AR headsets, skimmers, anything with a good resale value. It was all too easily traceable, though, with subatomic serial numbers hidden everywhere. So she turned to historical artefacts - where the mere act of etching a serial number onto it would render it worthless. Her first attempt - to steal an antique diamond milk jug from the dowager duchess of DuQuesne, backfired, though, when she was spotted by the butler, who yelled at her and gave chase.

 As she ran then she learned a couple of things. There is nothing like adrenaline for that extra push, to make you run faster, harder than you have ever run before. There is an exhilaration to it, a feeling that you can run forever, even though your lungs are stretched and you are grasping for every breath you take. Natalie discovered that she could run fast, and that she could run well, making straight for a crowd and shouting 'help!' at the top of her voice.

 Like the ocean, the crowd parted before her, closed seamlessly after her, and she was gone from sight within seconds. As she caught her breath back, she stopped to wonder why anyone would make a milk jug out of diamond. But she let it pass.

 The totem was still somewhere behind her, keeping pace with her, still hurling inaccurate fireballs. She had lost Miles and Bernice - she just hoped they hadn't fallen into the open sewer - and she was on her own again. Running. Again. Out of a narrow street, round a corner into a large square filled with ornamental fountains.

 A crowd of Din'l were standing outside the huge stone building that declared itself to be the Abbey of Perpetual Indulgence.

 "Help! Rape!" she shouted, hoping that she looked enough like a victim for the crowd to be sympathetic. There was some movement, some slight hopping from side to side.

 The totem rounded the corner behind her.

 "Hohohohoho, I've got you now," it chortled, throwing another fireball. Natalie threw herself forward into the middle of the crowd, which promptly fled in all directions, hopping away in all directions, and in one case up the side of the building and over the top. Natalie lay on the ground, her arms over her head, not daring to move.

 "What do you want?" she asked, hoping that the totem would hear her.

 No reply.

 "What do you want?" she asked again. This time, when she got no reply she dared to look up, to see that the square was empty, except for one Din'l hopping down the side of a building.

 "Where the fuck did you go?"

 One advantage of being a world-weary cynic, an intergalactic traveler with intertemporal experience, and lick-the-mirror gorgeous to boot is that you learn to make the most of things. Another advantage is the ability to see big pictures.

 When you've been around as long as I have, the sight of a miniature statue running around like a fire-chucking version of the Peking Homunculus doesn't really surprise you.

 [The following is covered up by a post-it]

 The first time I met the Peking Homunculus, incidentally, was in the late 57th century, when I was backpacking around Iceland. Oddly enough he was known as the Beijing Homunculus, and he was quite charming except for the business with the knife throwing. And he dribbled when he ate. Goddess, I'm side tracking again.

 [Continued via post-it]

 It wasn't the little bastard's projectile flame efforts that keyed me in to the big picture though, it was the sewers.

 Yup, sewers. That shows you what a smart arsed archaeology veteran I am thank you very much.

 Why would a race that only barely tolerate outsiders and have no need for sewers themselves, being as they are, anally retentive, build a major sewer system under their city?

 The more I thought about that the less sense it made.

 Then I remembered the totem, running towards me on its little legs. Why would it have little legs if it's the god of a monopod race?

 Answer: they had contact with bipeds long long long ago when they were a lot more susceptible to suggestion.

 Little light bulb appears over stupendously attractive archaeologist's head. Hypothesis time!

 Long long long ago, the Din'l were a happy, and indeed hoppy little race, cheerfully monopodic. They did whatever happy little monopods do, which probably included such diverse and idyllic occupations as designing windmills, composing symphonies and writing pompous letters to The Times. Then one day - zing - first contact.

 First contact is made by a race with two legs. They come down from the skies with their sufficiently advanced technology, and everything goes swimmingly. The Din'l worship the newcomers, and the newcomers revel in this. It's all fairly amicable of course, and the Din'l and their gods work together to build cities for them all to live in. The bipeds have normal sanitary needs by biped standards, so naturally, they build sewers.

 Then for some reason the bipeds leave. Reason: unknown. Maybe one of them farted in public and the race died out of embarrassment. Who knows? And somewhere around this time, the totems turn up. Either they're made by the bipeds as a gift for the Din'l, or they're made by the Din'l to remind them of the bipeds or (bizarre theory number 3046) they're what the bipeds turn into.

 Over time, the Din'l forget about the bipeds, forget about the sewers. Hell, they probably even forget about the totems, which leads us to where we are now, with the return of the little bugger and running around a lot and fireballs.

 That's all relatively sound theory.

 Next add the fact that the totem has square nipples, and speculate.

 The bipeds were the People. Capital P. Worldsphere. They left because there was a little treaty requiring them to abandon this galaxy. They left behind representations of gods, which are now walking around throwing fireballs. It's only a matter of time before we see an explosion of faith, and the whole Dellah thing all over again.

 At this point in my reasoning I swore, and Miles asked me why. I didn't want to say anything though - he was still shaken after the sewer, peering over his shoulder at shadows that were not there.

 So while part of me wanted to run my theory past him, check out his opinion as a fellow archaeologist, I kept it to myself, clearly labeled 'unconfirmed but too scarily plausible to be true'.

 I needed a beer, Miles needed a seat, and half way across the universe, an old friend needed shot.

 Extract Ends

 I can picture her now. She's sitting behind a large desk. I see it as oak, though they probably don't have oak there.

 She's pondering something. Something big and revolutionary probably, one of her groundbreaking treaties. Wondering which of her envoys to send this time - or perhaps she should send one of her holograms - such big decisions.

 The biggest decision is a foregone conclusion, of course. Naturally she pretended to have a debate about it, and naturally one of the council called her new-fangled ways an atrocity. But she got the motion through.

 Intervention.

 Once it seemed abhorrent to her kind. Now it's virtually commonplace.

 I can picture the moment when she finds out. She looks up from her papers - she has a taste for the archaic. It's one of the Cardinals, from one of the newer houses. He is an old man, his back bent. He walks with a stick. Somehow, in my mind's eye he looks as though his neck is too weak to support the weight of his collar.

 He clears his throat before he speaks.

 "Madam president, we have a flashpoint."

 She sighs. "Another one?"

 She sips at her tea - chamomile, with a little honey. Just how she liked it back on Earth.

 "Where is it?"

 "Din'el."

 She thinks about this for a while. Din'el is even more remote than Tyler's Folly, even less important than Dellah. It's nowhere. There's even a possibility that she may be able to deal with it on the sly.

 "What's the word from Him?" she asks.

 She says 'Him' meaning 'God' of course. She doesn't say His name any more than He would mention her name. It's probably in the treaty. Most things are. Mind you, God calls her 'that superior-minded bitch'.

 Anyway, this is the crucial question. If the People aren't aware of Din'el, she can make sure that they never do. She can use tactics that would probably count as treaty violations if she used them on Dellah, for instance.

 "No word."

 She doesn't have time to deal with the problems in Din'el. Ironic, that. So she decides to put the problem aside for now.

 "Time-loop them."

 That's it. A simple command, a little bit of intervention, and a planet is effectively indefinitely quarantined out of existence.

 And she can get away with it because God will never find out. You have to admire the cunning, the sneakiness, the sheer underhandedness of her. She is truly a daughter of her people.

 Which is a shame because I always kind of liked her.

 Extract Ends

 They were sitting at a street side cafe. Miles had insisted on ordering a coffee, which was exactly the wrong thing for him. He was twitchy, and seeing patterns in shadows that weren't there. He was right though. They were being followed.

 The couple at the next table were both working for the Cursed. They had been looking at their menus for almost fifteen minutes - looking over them rather. The Din'l barman had carefully not let them out of his sight. There was a figure in an overcoat, a hat pulled down over his eyes sitting across the road from them, who was almost certainly following them too. And their table was bugged. She had identified the bug as soon as she had sat down, running her fingers under the rim of the cast iron table.

 "I don't think so," she said. "I'd have noticed. You're just imagining it."

 She smiled and sipped at her almost-iced-tea-but-not-quite flavoured drink, hoping that he would calm down. She didn't hold out much hope. He was completely out of his depth, poor thing.

 Mind you, so was she. So were at least half the people involved in this little ballet. Her advantage was that she knew it. Not much of an advantage, admittedly.

 But she needed to lose their entourage, quickly, without Miles having known they were there. She needed a distraction.

 "Okay," she said, downing her not-quite-tea. "Let's go and find somewhere to crash out tonight. I think I saw a warehouse back there that looks pretty abandoned. All it needs is some throw cushions, a few flowers and it'll be as good as new."

 "A warehouse?"

 "It'll be secure," she said, trying to sound confident.

 He sighed, finished his coffee and followed her, back down the main road, down a side street and eventually up a fire escape and in to a second story door in what turned out to be an abandoned shoe warehouse.

 Benny quickly realised that this was a mistake. It was almost as dark in the warehouse as it had been in the sewer, and twitchy didn't begin to describe how Miles was behaving.

 The roof was falling down in places, held up by hastily assembled scaffolding. The insect rain fell through holes in the ceiling, and there was a constant patter of millions of tiny feet underfoot.

 And there was a noise behind them, a crunching footfall.

 And then it all went wrong.

 Benny caught a glimpse of the figure in the trench coat, and heard a voice trying to say something, drowned out by the scream of rage from Miles as he swung around.

 He was a blur, his arm raised over his head, something clutched in his fist that moved so quickly as he rained down blow after blow after blow on their would-be attacker's head.

 He was shouting. Nonsense mainly, about how this was how they treated spies on his planet, and Benny realised that she was shouting too, shouting at him to stop.

 The figure's hat fell off, and Benny caught a glimpse of her face as Miles rained down blow after blow into the pulpy mess that had once been the back of a human head. Benny kept shouting at Miles, grabbing at his arm, trying to pull him back.

 He kept beating her for almost five minutes after she was dead. Somewhere in the middle of that he must have recognised the form of Natalie Vergana.

 By the time he stopped, letting the piece of scaffolding that he had grabbed in his rage fall to the ground, he was sobbing, already aware of what he had done. Bernice just looked from the corpse to Miles, back to the corpse.

 "Fuck," she said.

 And high up above, a fleet of time vehicles materialised and quietly, discreetly, moved the entire planet into a little loop of space-time all of its own.

 To be continued...