Summerland

23 THE CRIME HOSPITAL, 6TH DECEMBER 1938

It was nearly dawn when Rachel White and her little squadron broke into the disused Tube station at Brompton Place.

Joan turned out to be surprisingly handy with a hacksaw and made short work of the lock securing the iron fence that blocked the entrance, while the rest of them stood guard. The street was empty, and the sky had the faintest tinge of orange.

The grinding sound of the saw grated in Rachel’s teeth, and she breathed a sigh of relief when the lock fell to the ground with a clatter. It might as well have landed in her gut: there was a leaden weight there, and a metallic taste of fear in her mouth.

They had prepared as best they could. Helen had disappeared for half an hour and returned with gear and weapons: torches, a small automatic pistol with lethal bullets for Rachel and an old but serviceable hunting rifle for Joe. Joan refused to take a weapon, so Rachel entrusted her with her ectophone, plus a few emergency numbers.

When pressed, Roger had drawn the supposed medium bunker’s location on a city map. He also noted down a few other bits of information, including the combination to the code lock of the bunker’s entrance, which was in a service tunnel you could get to from a disused Tube station.

Helen stayed behind with the handcuffed Roger, with instructions to march him to Wormwood Scrubs if she did not hear from the rest of them within two hours. Rachel had considered calling for reinforcements from the Service immediately but concluded that it was not an option. Bringing Roger in would throw the Service into internal convulsions that would last for days.

Joe pulled the folding fence aside and they entered the station. Their torches revealed wood-panelled walls and ceilings, shelves piled with yellowing, ragged leaflets and broken light bulbs. Joe took point with the rifle, Rachel just behind him, holding a torch and her gun.

It was chilly on the platform. The torch’s cone showed faded Ovaltine adverts and the familiar Underground symbol on a greenish-yellow mosaic wall. They climbed down from the platform and proceeded into the darkness of the tunnel. Rats scuttered away, fleeing the lights. The smell of musty damp was overpowering. The tunnel floor was uneven, and Rachel could not help imagining a ghost train suddenly rushing at them, the rusty third rail humming into life.

Suddenly, there was light in the tunnel ahead and the rails shuddered with the wheelbeat of a train. Rachel grabbed Joe’s hand, but they saw a glimpse of a well-lit tunnel orthogonal to the Brompton one, a flash of train cars going past.

‘That’s just the Piccadilly Line,’ Joan said, but in the pale light she looked shaken, too.

They found the entrance to the service tunnel a few dozen yards further ahead. Rachel held the torch while Joan opened the lock with a set of picks. The heavy metal door swung inwards, revealing a narrow staircase that led farther down. They filed in, with Joe at the front, and for a while no one spoke. The noise of the train grew more distant.

‘Look at this,’ Joe said, pointing at the wall where the cone of light from Rachel’s torch fell. Coppery wires glinted in the greenish wall tiles in an orderly spiderweb. ‘That’s Faraday wiring. This is no ordinary service tunnel, I’m betting.’

‘The facility should be right ahead,’ Rachel said. She asked Joan to test the ectophone, but there was only static.

The stairway ended at another thick door with a code lock. Rachel consulted Roger’s notes and turned the dials. The lock clicked open. Beyond, there was a faint smell of disinfectant.

They emerged on a balcony overlooking a cavernous space, fifty feet high or more, dimly lit by florescent lights in the arched ceiling.

It was full of hospital beds in neat rows, all occupied. At least a hundred people lay before them, unmoving. Next to each bed stood a shelving unit with complex machinery and an IV drip. The place resembled a sinister underground forest of thin-stemmed mushrooms with transparent, fluid-filled caps growing from unmoving human beings.

‘Bloody hell,’ Joe muttered.

‘Welcome to London’s crime hospital,’ Rachel said. ‘Joan.’ Rachel took the other woman’s arm. ‘Looks like Roger was actually telling the truth for once. You go back up and call Special Branch. Bring them down here with you if you have to drag them. We are going to see if Bloom is here.’

The small Scotswoman nodded wordlessly and headed back up to the tunnel.

Left and right, metal stepladders led down to the polished white floor. Rachel descended while Joe covered the room with his rifle.

She scanned the beds’ occupants in the pale green light. There were men and women of all ages. Most of the men had beards; some of the patients had clearly been there longer than others. Several had bedsores, and the smell of decay was overwhelming. The IV machines gurgled and muttered as she passed. A number of the patients had spirit crowns of strange design that covered their heads entirely, with thick wire umbilicals leading to the machines next to them.

Trapped spirits, Rachel realised. It was not just living people who were imprisoned here, comatose; it was spirits as well. This was where Bloom’s handlers had hidden him to wait for transportation to the Soviet Union? Of course, a spirit could only occupy a medium’s body for so long until both the original soul and the flesh started rejecting it—unless they were both kept in a coma.

‘We should get out of here, too, Rachel,’ Joe said. ‘I don’t like this at all.’

‘Neither do I,’ Rachel said. ‘But if Bloom is here, I want to find him before the Service does.’

Grimly, she studied the rows of unconscious faces. Who were they? she wondered. Victims of crime, obstacles to Soviet operations, or both? The only face she vaguely recognised was a handsome man she was sure had attended a Harris soirée at one point. In any case, she had no hope of figuring out which body Bloom was in.

Then she noticed there were charts attached to each bed, with body temperatures and dates: it looked as if the place was run like an actual hospital.

‘Joe,’ she called out. ‘Look for people with yesterday’s date on the chart.’

Joe nodded, and together they criss-crossed the grid of beds, inspecting the pencilled digits on each sheet. Some of the patients had been down here for months.

‘Here’s one,’ Joe called out, waving Rachel over to a middle-aged, tallow-faced man with scraggly hair and grey stubble, his rangy legs sticking out from beneath the white sheet. A birdcage-like spirit crown hummed on his head.

‘Let us see if we can wake him up,’ Rachel said. Carefully, she extracted the IV drip from the man’s arm and rummaged through the shelf unit next to the bed. There had to be situations where crime hospital nurses needed to wake up the victims quickly. She found a vial of diprenorphine—an opioid antagonist—and a syringe.

‘Get ready,’ she told Joe. He took a step back and aimed his rifle at the unconscious man. Then Rachel emptied the syringe into the spirit-crowned man’s swollen blue vein.

The man jerked up like a puppet, so suddenly that Rachel dropped the syringe. His eyes popped open, showing the whites, and his face twitched. He let out a long, hollow scream, seized the spirit crown on his head and rattled it.

Rachel swore.

‘Help me hold him down,’ she said, grabbing the man’s arm. Joe leaned his rifle on a bed and took the other. They held the man down as he thrashed.

‘Listen to me,’ Rachel said. ‘Listen. What is your name?’

‘Rachel?’ the man said hoarsely. The voice was Bloom’s.

* * *

The events of the previous day and night flashed past Peter Bloom’s eyes.

After his escape, Otto and Nora had debriefed him in the underground hospital. It was cold, his temporary medium body was malnourished and a poor fit, and the clunky spirit crown model that held him in it was the most uncomfortable he had ever used. Only the certainty of his approaching final end allowed him to bear it.

He found his case officers’ intense questioning slightly odd, given that he was about to join the Presence as soon as arrangements could be made for him to rendezvous with an illegal like Shpiegelglass with the necessary equipment. Of course, anything could happen in the meantime, so it made sense to ensure the intelligence he had obtained was secure. Still, the way Nora probed and pushed for every single detail struck Peter as overzealous.

After a celebratory drink of dark Dutch beer, Otto briefly turned off the spirit crown to allow Peter to transfer the Zöllner images of West’s letter and the CAMLANN cipher key back to aether-sensitive photographic plates before they decayed in his memory. The entire space they were in was a Faraday cage, Peter realised: it warped the aether and prevented all spirits within from descending into Summerland, much like a giant spirit crown.

During the unpleasant process of memory transfer—much like picking out pieces of broken glass stuck to one’s skin—he could not help glancing at his handler’s soul-sparks. He had only ever met the twosome in the flesh. As expected, Otto’s mind was guarded and grey, a dull polygon. Nora’s thought-forms, on the other hand, were a blaze of emotion, a yellow spark beneath fanning petals of crimson and blue.

Suddenly, she reminded him of Rachel White. Just like Rachel, it looked like Nora was covering up something she did not want Peter to see.

The feeling nagged him even after he returned to the medium’s body. There was a strange hunger in Nora’s eyes when she looked at him. Still, her tone was less brusque than before when she made him recount every detail of the events leading up to his escape, taking careful notes. After a while, Otto left them to decipher the CAMLANN file, retrieved earlier from Rachel’s Cresswell safe deposit locker.

After two more hours, they were finally done, and sat in silence for a while. He remembered the last time he had sat there, Nora’s chisel in his neck. Suddenly, Shpiegelglass’s words rang in his mind. She has exhibited bold work in Rotterdam. What did that remind him of?

‘Did you say you were from Rotterdam?’ he asked.

She brushed a blond ringlet from her forehead. ‘It is a place. Now I go where the Presence sends me. I envy you, FELIX—or I suppose I can call you Peter now. You will be a part of him soon.’ She smiled, licked her lips and leaned forward. ‘Would you like to take a memory of me with you?’

‘But Otto—‘

‘Otto will understand.’ She stood up and walked over to Peter, crouched in front of him and ran her hands along his thighs. Her touch felt electric.

‘There—there is still one thing I don’t understand,’ Peter said. ‘Who warned Dzugashvili? No one except the Special Committee knew about the operation.’

‘Are you still working?’ Nora asked. ‘I thought we were finished working.’ She cradled Peter’s hand between hers and slowly licked his forefinger.

She is distracting me, Peter thought, breathing in her flowery perfume. What was it about Rotterdam?

Suddenly, Otto brushed aside the green curtain and entered, carrying a thin stack of typewritten papers. He saw Nora in front of Peter, but his expression did not change. When he spoke, his voice was thin.

‘It’s all true,’ he said. ‘The Cullers. Everything.’

Nora’s blue eyes widened. Then she stood up and smiled, cheeks red and dimpled, like a little girl’s doll. ‘That’s wonderful,’ she said, walked over to Otto and kissed him passionately.

The hidden emotion Peter had seen in her mind was joy, pure, unadulterated joy. With the realisation, a fragment from his briefing for the Special Committee leapt into his consciousness. Over the last decade, Dzhugashvili has been creating a network of agents and counter-revolutionary cells all over Europe, notably in Paris, Prague and Rotterdam—

Peter stared at his handlers and tried to stand up. The charter-body was terribly weak.

‘Let me get you another drink, Peter,’ Nora said. ‘You more than deserve it.’

Peter grabbed his spirit crown, determined to tear it off, then remembered the Faraday cage. He struggled to his feet.

‘The Presence will not let you—’ he croaked.

‘The Presence will be gone soon,’ Nora interrupted. ‘All we need is a war in Spain to wake the Cullers. Oh, Peter. This could have been so much more pleasant.’ There was a zapper in her hand.

Peter rushed towards them, felt a sharp sting in his chest, and then lightning took his consciousness away.

* * *

‘Just stay nice and quiet, lad,’ Joe said harshly, grabbed his rifle and took a bead on Bloom’s chest.

‘It’s all right, Joe,’ Rachel said. ‘Peter. It’s over now. We are taking you in. You are going to answer for what you did.’

Bloom inhaled a long, ragged breath.

‘You don’t understand. I was betrayed.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘My handlers. Otto and Nora. They are double agents. They work for Dzhugashvili.’

‘They are Stalinists?’

Rachel stared at Bloom’s caged face.

The Service had long speculated that there were Dzhugashvili supporters amongst the more senior ‘illegals’—unofficial Russian agents operating in foreign countries under false identities. Kulagin had exhibited a lot of the signs, now that she thought about it.

‘They were assigned to take over George’s—Kulagin’s—network after he defected and expand it if possible. Instead, they decided to exploit it to support Stalinist goals. They used me to get to CAMLANN.’ Bloom’s breathing was laboured. ‘What did you do to me?’

‘I needed to wake you up. It should wear off in a moment. Keep talking.’

‘Rachel, there is something you have to know. The information I was trying to get to the Presence. CAMLANN was a research project that found out where the Old Dead went. There are things called Cullers that rise from kata when there are enough souls to harvest and consume everything in Summerland. Any major war could be a trigger to wake them. What is about to happen in Spain might do it. I have seen the evidence. It’s all in that file. West gave me the key.

‘The Stalinists don’t want the Presence to know about the Cullers. If He is consumed, too, they will win. When I was extracted, I was supposed to undergo the Termin Procedure—be made one with the Presence—but they could not allow that to happen. He would have known everything I know.

‘You may not agree with what the Presence stands for, but He is better than the total oblivion the Cullers bring. And He is the only thing in Summerland powerful enough to have even a chance of stopping them. The Old Dead did not have anything like Him. Please. You have to believe me.’

He grabbed Rachel’s sleeve with a skeletal hand.

‘Take your hands off my wife.’

Joe pushed him back with the barrel of his rifle.

‘It is all right, Joe. I can handle him.’ She looked at Bloom. His face twitched and there were tears in his medium-blank eyes. ‘You killed Max Chevalier,’ she said quietly. ‘A spirit death. He Faded fully.’

‘I’m sorry. I was desperate. He would not give up.’ His teeth chattered and he hugged himself. ‘I never lied to you, Rachel. At least not about anything important. Everything I did was in order to serve something greater. The proof is in the CAMLANN file. You can’t tell the Service, you know. You can take it to the press, but the Dimensionists will try to kill the story, you are better off—’

Rachel’s head buzzed. The fatigue of the sleepless night and all the madness felt like the spirit armour, locking her in, suffocating her. She looked at Bloom’s face, remembered the night at the Blue Dog, how he had taken her hand. She remembered Max Chevalier’s voice, fading away.

And yet …

She had spent a good part of her two decades in the Service in small rooms with desperate, angry men, ready to say anything to win their freedom or to protect their comrades. She knew what lies sounded like, and her gut told her Bloom was not lying.

But what he was saying was too big to take in.

She pulled a set of handcuffs from her purse.

‘Enough, Peter. We are going to Wormwood Scrubs, and you can tell me all about it there. Not even your father can protect you now.’

‘No, you don’t understand, he is the one who wants the information out, the Cullers could come any moment if the war starts in Spain, everybody in Summerland is in danger, your mother—’

‘I said enough!’

‘Rachel, please—’

‘She said enough.’

Joe struck Bloom in the solar plexus with the butt of the rifle. He fell back, coughing.

The lights in the ceiling flashed to full daylight luminescence accompanied by the soft thunderclaps of high-voltage circuits closing. The ward became a white landscape of sheets and emaciated bodies.

Footsteps rang on the polished floor. Half a dozen burly men in rough-spun clothes and felt caps ran in, holding revolvers, truncheons and shotguns. For an instant, Rachel thought it was Special Branch, but no—two of them were dragging Joan between them. She raised her automatic as Joe whipped his rifle to his shoulder. The newcomers stopped instantly and took aim at them.

Fear was a glass knife in Rachel’s gut.

A smiling, round-bodied woman with cherubic curls and a dour-faced man in a black coat entered.

‘Please keep it down, ladies and gentlemen,’ the woman said with a faint foreign accent. ‘This is a hospital, after all.’

Rachel sought her eyes—this had to be Nora. She raised her voice.

‘We have reinforcements on the way! Put down your weapons now.’

Her words echoed from the cathedral-like ceiling.

‘Really? I think we will be gone before they arrive. If you put down your weapons, they may find you still alive.’

‘We both have Tickets,’ Rachel said. ‘We are not afraid.’

She clicked off the gun’s safety. One of the gunmen to her left reacted to the sound and immediately aimed a revolver at her, both hands around the grip, feet spread, clearly a marksman.

Joe swung his rifle towards the gunman in response. Clicks followed as five more safeties came off nearly in unison.

‘This room is a Faraday cage,’ the dour-faced man—Otto, presumably—said in a thin voice. ‘Your spirits will be trapped here, and the only way out is through the bodies we provide. But there is no need for unpleasantness. We are on the same side, Mrs White. And I believe that is Captain White with you?’

Joe grunted. A bead of sweat shimmered on his forehead.

‘Yes, this is Captain White of the One Hundred and Eighty-Seventh Aetheric Armoured Cavalry, and he is aiming between your eyes, sir,’ he said. ‘And gentleman though I am, I have no compunctions against taking out your lady friend as well.’

‘Whoever you are, you have an interesting definition of sides,’ Rachel said, trying to keep her voice steady. ‘If you surrender and cooperate, you will be treated well and compensated for any information you provide. That is the best offer you are going to get.’

‘Mrs White, your government is days away from starting a war in Spain. Iosif Dzhugashvili is the only man who can stop it,’ Otto said. ‘Our comrades have been hunted down all over Europe like animals by the NKVD. We desire nothing more than peace and an end to the abomination called the Presence that has swallowed millions of souls for nothing.

‘We are very grateful to you for providing us with our first weapon against it. You can change the world, Mrs White: just take Bloom in and keep him quiet.

‘Imagine if death meant something again, Mrs White. Imagine a world where war was something to be feared once more, where human well-being and health were cherished, where each citizen had to make the most of their allotted time. Where generational change and learning could be reinstated, instead of eternal rule by ossified queens and tyrants. Where everyone would understand what it is to feel true loss, as you once did.’

Rachel took a deep breath. Blood pounded in her temples.

‘We can make that world together, Mrs White, and all you have to do is nothing.’

Bloom spoke in a barely audible whisper.

‘They are lying,’ he said. ‘They will do anything to stop the Presence from learning about the Cullers. You can’t give up now. Imagine your Edmund Angelo. What kind of world would you have wanted him to grow up in?’

Joe threw a sidelong glance at Rachel. There was a question in his eyes.

Rachel’s heartbeat slowed until each thump in her chest was like a church bell tolling. A world with death, or without?

It was not her decision. She’d had enough of empires and dreams, and of the small men behind them. Bloom was right. She and Joe would end up in the crime hospital’s beds.

She looked at Joe. There might be a mad, terrible way out, she suddenly knew. Could she ask such a thing of him? He held her gaze, then closed his eyes in assent, briefly, like a tiny bird’s wingbeat.

She knew he had already made his decision.

‘You make some interesting points,’ Rachel shouted. ‘We are considering them. Why don’t you put your weapons down first, as a demonstration of good faith?’

Without looking towards the bed, she hissed between her teeth, ‘How much do you care about your mission, Peter? What are you willing to sacrifice to deliver your message?’

‘Anything. My soul.’ He paused. ‘Even to your husband.’

‘You had us worried there for a moment, Mrs White,’ Nora shouted. ‘But I am glad we can resolve this without violence—’

‘Goodbye, Peter. And thank you,’ Rachel said.

Then she shot Peter Bloom in the head.

* * *

For the second time in as many days, Peter Bloom tore through the disintegrating electric net of a brain, ejected into the Second Aether’s chill. This time, he struck something solid: the wall of the ward’s Faraday cage. He fluttered around madly in the enclosed hypercube until the momentum of his death died away and his hypersight started working again.

He saw the spiky thought-forms of Otto and Nora’s men, full of fear and rage. His deceitful Stalinist handlers, Otto cold and calculating, Nora a flower of malicious joy.

A swirling vortex where Captain White stood, pulling Peter in. An ectotank was an anti-medium, not a soul to be fought and subdued but a hole in the aether that was impossible to resist.

And then there was Rachel. As always, her soul was the most difficult to read. He thought he could see forgiveness in its angled, jewel-like petals, but he could not be sure.

Close enough, he thought, and threw himself into the mouth of the raging storm that was Captain Joe White.

* * *

Rachel dived to the floor as the Stalinists opened fire. The volley of shots boomed through the ward, stray bullets hitting unconscious bodies with meaty thunks. Feathers erupted from pierced pillows. She rolled under the metal-framed bed. It shook and rang in the rain of lead.

Rachel kept rolling and emerged on the other side. A silhouette to her right, two beds away, took cover behind a shelf. She fired from a sitting position. The man slumped to the ground, clutching his throat.

More shots. She moved into a crouch and dared a glance at Joe. He stood still, eyes closed. A bullet hole bloomed in his arm. Rachel screamed wordlessly.

It didn’t work, she thought. He is too weak. Two gunmen loomed low behind the cover of beds while another two advanced with shotguns.

Rachel braced her pistol on the bed frame and fired furiously at the oncoming men. The recoil tore at her wrists and lifted the muzzle. She took out a ceiling light in a shower of sparks.

Shotgun thunder. The bed next to Joe exploded in a fountain of crimson and torn sheets. An IV bag turned into rain.

Rachel struggled to bring her weapon to bear. The revolvers were taking aim. The next volley would go right through her.

‘Fockin’ cunts!’ Joan screamed, leaping forward. Something flashed in her hand, a knife. She sank it into one felt-capped man’s neck. Rachel fired at the other, missed. The sheets smoked from the muzzle flash.

Nora shot her zapper’s spikes at Joan. The Scotswoman went down, twitching.

The men with shotguns reloaded their weapons in unison. Spent shells clattered to the floor.

Then Joe changed.

Ectoplasmic whiteness erupted from his eyes and mouth, almost invisible in the harsh glare at first. It flowed over his skin in a thin film like milk, turned him into an eyeless, faceless marble statue.

The Stalinists fired. Rachel screamed. The buckshot stuck to the white membrane covering Joe’s face like metallic acne. He did not fall.

Instead, he rose.

Thick, fuzzy tendrils poured out of him like threads of candyfloss pulled from a child’s stick at a country fair. His body a white cocoon, he stood up on three spindly legs, a giant ungainly insect, brushing the ceiling.

For the first time, Rachel realised the ectoplasm was not white, but interwoven threads of all colours, the rainbow and hues she could not name.

The Stalinists stared up at Joe. For a moment, the guns were silent and the ward was deathly still. Then a bundle of hair-thin tentacles whipped forward from Joe’s central mass. Rachel looked away. Wet noises followed, the sound of falling meat, and one scream. Breathing hard, she crawled forward. The ectoplasm shell made a high-pitched, keening sound.

Nora looked up at Joe’s new form with an expression of utter wonder, like a little girl seeing a butterfly for the first time, and shoved Otto forward, hard. Then she turned and ran.

Otto stumbled and fell. He let out a cry of anger and fumbled for his pistol. Joe descended upon him like a stinging spider.

Rachel wrenched herself up and ran after Nora. The floor was slick and something warm fell on her face, like hot rain. The Dutchwoman was about to slam the door shut behind her. Rachel fired one wild shot in her direction. It glanced off the metal door and Nora fled.

Rachel followed the clatter of her progress up the stairs. She wondered if her gun was empty, and if Nora was armed.

Behind her, the scream of the ectotank creature continued.

Rachel stopped. Nora’s footsteps receded into the distance. She lowered her weapon and then let it fall to the ground. I am not going to let a Soviet spy get between me and my husband a second time, she thought.

She turned around and returned to the ward.

The ward resembled an abattoir. The white ectoplasm thing hunched in the middle, stained pink, a swollen mosquito, its legs folded in sharp angles.

Rachel covered her nose and mouth and walked towards it. The terror would return to her in dreams, later, but for now she closed it out. The creature twitched and keened.

‘I can see you, Joe,’ she said. ‘I know who you are. I am not afraid.’

A tentacle lashed towards her. She closed her eyes. It skimmed her face: it felt like a rough paintbrush. She kept walking. More tentacles came, wound gently around her body. She spread her arms and allowed the thing to embrace her.

As she walked, the tentacles started melting away like candyfloss in rain, and by the time she reached the centre of the ward, only Joe sat there, on the floor, hugging his knees. He cried soundlessly, shaking all over.

Rachel sat down next to him and gathered him into her arms. He pressed his face against her shoulder as she caressed his back.

‘Ssh,’ she whispered. ‘It’s all over now. It’s all over. It’s gone. It’s just the two of us.’

She rocked him gently in the remains of the crime hospital, amongst the dead and the dying and the spirits, until Special Branch finally came.

* * *

So this is what Fading is like, Peter thought.

He was falling, falling faster than he had imagined possible. He had pushed all his vim through Joe White until there was nothing left. The living world receded away from him, all the soul-sparks a starry sky above.

He felt cold. Suddenly, it was difficult to remember what had happened just moments before. Rachel. Nora. The firefight.

He smiled as he fell, and forgot why he was smiling.

He fell through all the layers of the Summer City, lacking the strength to stop his descent, leaving parts of his self behind on the way.

Then all was dark and quiet. He liked it. It was easier to concentrate and think. He was still moving, still falling, faster and faster. Movement equalled thought, he remembered. In Summerland, you could think yourself anywhere. He had read that in a book, but did not remember its title.

If you strip away everything that is not needed, he thought, there will be some axioms left. Some axioms that you cannot prove. And statements like the Liar’s Paradox that can never be true or false. He held it in his mind, from a lecture he had attended, a liar saying they are lying, remembered the infinity of mathematics hiding within, a snake eating its own tail.

The point of consciousness that had been Peter Bloom kept falling towards infinity. After an eternity, he saw an ocean below him, an ocean of light, and on the other side, a starry sky—