Ralph refuted his instinct. What he was seeing was just too much, even though he knew they’d done this to entire planets. “They can’t,” he cried.

“But they are, General,” Acacia replied. “They’re leaving.”

The cliff was still ascending. Two hundred metres now, lifting with increasing confidence and speed. It was becoming difficult to look at as the light turned scarlet, casting long shadows across the valley. Three hundred metres high, and Ralph’s neural nanonics had crashed in the backwash of the blossoming reality dysfunction. On the ground around him, the battered blades of grass were wriggling their way back upwards again, shedding their cloak of mud to turn the camp into a verdant parkland. Fallen trees bent their trunks like the spine of an old man rising from his chair, cranking themselves upright again.

The vivid red light began to diminish. When Ralph squinted against it, he could see the cliff retreating from him. It was five hundred metres high, moving away with the majestic serenity of an iceberg. Except it wasn’t moving, he realized. It was shrinking, the red light contracting in on itself, enveloping the island of rock which the possessed had uprooted from Mortonridge to sail away into another universe. As it left he could see its entire shape, a flat-topped inverted cone wrapped with massive curving stress ridges that spiralled down to its base, as if it had unscrewed itself from the peninsula.

Air was roaring hard overhead, sucked into the space the island was vacating. It still hovered in the centre of the valley, but now it was becoming insubstantial as well as small. The light around it turned a dazzling monochrome white, obliterating details. Within minutes it had evaporated down to a tiny star. Then it winked out. Ralph’s neural nanonics came back on line.

“Cancel the other two assaults,” he datavised to the AI. “And halt the front line. Now.”

He scrambled cautiously to his feet. The reinvigorated grass was withering all around him, shrivelling back to dry brown flakes that crumbled away in the howling wind. Images from the SD sensors showed him the full extent of the massive crater. Its edges had already begun to subside, mountain-sized landslides were skidding downwards, taking a very long time to reach the bottom. Waiting for them five kilometres down was a medieval orange glow that fluctuated in no comprehensible rhythm. He frowned at that, not understanding what it could be. Then the vivid area ruptured, and a vast fountain of radiant lava soared upwards.

“Whoever’s left, get them back,” he shouted desperately at Acacia. “Get them as far away from the lip as possible.”

“They’re already retreating,” she said.

“What about the others? The ones on the island? Can your affinity still reach them?”

Her forlorn look was all the answer he needed.

Stephanie and her friends looked at the serjeants, who stared back with equal uncertainty. For the first time in what her dazed thoughts insisted must have been hours, the ground had stopped oscillating beneath her. When she looked up, the sky was a starless ultradeep blue. White light flooded down from nowhere she could see—but felt right, what she wanted. Her gaze tracked round to where the other side of the valley had been. The blank sky came right down to the ground, and the true size of their island became apparent. A tiny circle of land edged with a crinkled line of hillocks, adrift in its own eternal universe.

“Oh no,” she murmured in despair. “I think we screwed up.”

“Are we free?” Moyo asked.

“For now.” She started describing their new home to him.

Sinon and the other serjeants used the general affinity band to call to each other. There were over twelve thousand of them spread out around the island. Their guns worked, their electronics and medical nanonics didn’t (several had been injured in the waves of quakes), affinity was unaffected, and there were new senses available. Almost a derivative of affinity, allowing him to sense the minds of the possessed. And there was also the energistic power. He picked a stone from the mud and held it in his palm. It slowly turned transparent, and began to sparkle. Not that a kilogram of diamond was a lot of use here.

“Could you dudes like give this heavy military scene a break now?” Cochrane asked.

It would appear our original purpose is invalid in this environment,sinon told his comrades. he shouldered his machine gun. “very well. what do you propose we do next?” he asked the hippie.

“Wow, man, don’t look at me. Stephanie’s in charge around here.”

“I’m not. And anyway, I haven’t got a clue what happens now.”

“Then why did you bring us here?” Choma asked.

“Because it’s not Mortonridge,” Moyo said. “That’s all. Stephanie told you, we were frightened.”

“And this is the result,” Rana said. “You must now face the consequences of your physical aggression.”

We should regroup and pool our physical resources,choma said. It may even be possible for us to use the energistic power to return to the universe.

Their minds flashed together into a mini-consensus and agreed to the proposal. An assembly area was designated.

“We are going to join up with our comrades,” Sinon told Stephanie. “You would be very welcome to come with us. I expect your views on the situation could prove valuable.”

That last image of Ekelund popped up annoyingly in Stephanie’s mind. The woman had banished them from Ketton. But Ketton no longer existed. Surely they wouldn’t be excluded now? Somehow she couldn’t convince herself. And the only other alternative was staying by themselves. Without food. “Thank you,” she said.

“Wait wait,” Cochrane said. “You guys have like got to be kidding. Look, the end of the world is maybe half a mile away. Aren’t you even curious what’s out there?”

Sinon looked to where the island’s crumpled surface ended. “That’s a good suggestion.”

Cochrane grinned brightly. “You cats’ll have to get used to them if you’re going to hang with me.”

The breeze picked up considerably as they approached the edge of the island. Blowing outward, which troubled the serjeants. Air had become a finite commodity. Long rivulets of mud were sliding gently to the edge and spilling over, dribbling down the cliff like ribbons of candle wax. There was nothing else to see. No break in the uniformity of the midnight blue boundary of the universe that might indicate another object, micro or macro. The realization they were on their own percolated through all of them, growing stronger as they approached the rim.

It was only Cochrane who inched his way cautiously right up to the edge and peered down into the murky void of infinity which buoyed them along. He spread his arms wide and threw his head back, letting the breeze flowing over the island blow his hair around. “WAAAAAHOOOO.” His feet jigged about crazily as he cried out ecstatically: “I’m on a fucking flying island. Can you believe this? Here be dragons, mom! And they’re GROOVY.”