‘Your casters,’ Jonah said, a dreadful realisation striking home. He felt weak, numb. ‘Not just our world, Drake. How many others do you watch?’
Drake drained his whisky again, and his expression changed. Jonah had recognised his excitement at being there, and seen his own intelligence echoed in the man’s eyes. But now there was something else – something like fear.
‘Many. We don’t cast so much now. The energy levels required are massive, and our matter fields have been failing for years.’
‘But we’ve been watching your world, and it gave us hope,’ Moira said.
‘Not hope enough to stop something coming through,’ Jonah said.
‘And that guilt is on me,’ Drake said. ‘I should have posted more guards. Been more careful.’
‘But what of all the other Earths you’ve seen?’ Holly asked.
‘Over the past decade, I’d say that one in a hundred we’ve cast to is uninfected,’ Moira said.
There was a stunned silence.
‘I assumed it started in Gaia forty years ago,’ Holly said softly. ‘So how was your world infected?’
‘A breach, similar to your own but more violent. It caused a quake. It was thought that our casting attracted that Earth’s attention, but I don’t know. Now we believe there are endless people like you and us across the multiverse, striving to explore, looking to travel. And chance dictates that such undertakings will cross paths, here and there.’
‘As we did with you,’ Jonah said.
Drake nodded.
‘This breach into your world,’ Jonah said. ‘Something came through.’
‘We knew what it was. We’d been casting for ten years by then. The breach was half a mile from Coldbrook, and the army guarded it. It all went military very quickly.’
‘We should have guarded our Coldbrook better,’ Holly said, but Drake shook his head.
‘It would have made no difference. The breach remained static for almost a year. My father and his team experimented, sending in drones, animals. But it was solid, like a mirror. Everything I’ve read and the memory casts I’ve viewed . . . everyone thought it was benign. They built a structure to encase it, and closed it off from view. And then the fury came through. Chaos found a way’
‘It’s still there?’ Holly asked. ‘Their breach?’
‘Sealed up.’ Drake nodded.
‘And you never tried to go through?’ Jonah asked.
‘No,’ Drake said. ‘My father saw no point.’
‘So the Inquisitor,’ Jonah said, trying to take it all in, trying to absorb the end of everything when Coldbrook was always meant to be the beginning of something wonderful. ‘He spreads the plague?’
‘No, no,’ Drake replied. ‘There’s not one Inquisitor, but many. They oversee the spread, record it, and recruit a new Inquisitor for every world killed.’
‘And that means we now have a chance to fight back,’ Moira said.
‘But how do you know all this is true?’ Holly asked.
Drake sighed. ‘It’s largely conjecture. But maybe now we’ll have the chance to test.’ For the first time he looked away from Jonah as he spoke. To Jonah, that didn’t bode well.
‘The woman,’ Jonah said. ‘The diaries.’
‘Her name was Kathryn Coldbrook,’ Drake said. ‘My father worked with her fifty years ago, just after she and her organisation had performed the first casting through the veils. The casters became very famous.’ He snorted. ‘I have her biography. Our world was open to wonder back then, so my father told me. Receptive to it.’
‘Not cynical,’ Holly said.
‘Well, I think we’d barely be human without healthy cynicism,’ Drake said. ‘I don’t think Kathryn was a very nice woman. Father told me she was an unpleasant genius – single-minded, arrogant, and didn’t suffer fools gladly.’
Holly glanced at Jonah, one corner of her mouth turned up. He raised an eyebrow.