‘Incredible, I know. This must be very shocking. So take a quiet moment and try to relax a little. Why don’t you get dressed? And when you’re ready, I’ll take you over to see my spaceship. That should finally convince you. If it doesn’t, I don’t know what will.’

‘Then what?’ she asked.

‘Then we’ll talk. Once I know you believe, I’ll answer all your questions. And, trust me, you’ll have a lot of questions.’

She looked down at the patches of blue . . . stuff on her knees. It was like nothing she’d ever seen before. Instinct told her it really was something from beyond this world. And a Faller wouldn’t treat her like this. ‘All right,’ she said cautiously. Because if there truly was such a thing as a spaceship, she simply had to see it.

*

The blue dress did fit perfectly. It felt wonderful, too – clean and fresh. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d ever worn anything new. Sarara had always collected her clothes from a charity house in town, sewing patches onto worn cloth, darning sweaters. Badges of how poor they were. But this dress . . . Kysandra stood in front of the mirror and simply couldn’t stop the smile lifting her lips as she admired herself. Her red-gold hair fell over her shoulders in long waves, without any of the normal tangles that were so devilish to tug out. It was as if she’d spent a week in a salon. She hated Madeline with all her might, but had to admit the woman knew a lot about taking care of hair. I must make an effort to keep it like this, she thought. Then she instantly hardened her shell so he didn’t pick that up. When she looked a little closer into the mirror, she saw the zits on her nose, with more on her chin, one on her cheek. She sighed; would they ever stop?

Nigel was waiting in the hall when she came down the stairs. They’d been fixed, too; not one of them creaked when she put her weight on them.

‘Right, then,’ he said. ‘Ready to visit your first real live spaceship?’

‘I want it to be real,’ she said. ‘I do.’

‘I know. Come on.’

They walked down to the river, through the old pattern of fields that were now just squares of tangled weeds and vines separated by hedges that had grown wild. A small boat was tied up on the shore. Not a kind of boat she recognized. This one was circular and seemed to be made of orange fabric. It was alien – no other word for it.

There was a rope running across the river, tied to trees on either side. Nigel knelt in the bottom of the boat and used the rope to pull them across.

Kysandra had only crossed the river a handful of times. The wood that occupied the other side of the valley was gloomy and unwelcoming. Its great dark trunks had grown packed close, and they leaned against each other, seemingly merging together several metres off the ground to give an unbroken canopy of aquamarine fronds and verdant fan-leaves. Those trees that died stayed upright, buttressed by their neighbours, so they simply became pillars of vibrant orange and grey fungi. The narrow crooked gaps were filled with vines, as if some giant arachnid had turned the wood into an oversized feeding trap.

A passage had been cleared through the dense web of creepers, the cut ends still bleeding gooey sap. The ground underfoot was a springy loam that smelt vinegary. Tatus flies and larger stikmoths fluttered about in the shade. She could hear bigger creatures rustling through the creepers, though her ex-sight only ever perceived bussalores slithering down into their dank underground burrows.

Then her ex-sight perceived the thing up ahead. It must have come down almost vertically at the end, for there was no long trail of smashed trees. Instead it was in a small clearing of broken trunks.

She’d been right about the shape: a large bulbous oval with triangular wings on both sides; she thought the wings had been a lot bigger when it flew over the farmhouse. As she stood at the edge of the clearing looking at it, the surface was an intensely dark green where the sun struck; otherwise it appeared to be coal black. Surprisingly, her gaze was drawn to the twenty or so neuts that were milling about passively.

‘Why are they here?’ she asked.

‘I need manual help to restart the farm,’ Nigel replied. ‘They’re having their eggs shaped into useful genistars.’

‘Into geniwhats?’

‘You call them mods.’

‘Oh. Do you know how to adapt neut eggs?’

‘I know the theory, but the ship’s smartcore – its brain – is doing the actual shaping.’

‘The ship?’ She looked at the smooth foreign artefact that had ended its flight in such an ungraceful fashion by thumping to the ground here, and realized she wasn’t afraid any more. No, that had been replaced by very strong curiosity. And wonder.

‘Come on.’ He held out his hand.

She held it tight as a hatch opened in the side of the ship, a circular area which seemed to contract somehow, revealing a short white corridor that was lit as brightly as if the sun was inside. ‘It is real!’

*

Nigel was from the Commonwealth. The union of human worlds that existed outside the Void. A universe that was very different. He had come to find out what had happened to the ships that Captain Cornelius had flown into the Void.

‘Why?’ Kysandra asked. She was sitting on a round chair that had grown out of the floor in the blank circular chamber he called the main cabin. And Nigel had been right; there were so many questions her head was in danger of bursting open from the pressure of them.

‘We don’t know how they came through the barrier that guards the Void from the rest of the universe.’

‘But you came through.’

‘That was different. Some alien allies tore the boundary open temporarily, just long enough for me to slip inside. I’ve spent seven years in suspension – that’s a long sleep – while a Skylord led me to this world.’

‘You flew through space.’ It was just the most wonderful thing ever to think that humans could still do such a thing – that it wasn’t only Captain Cornelius who travelled between planets. Out there in the Commonwealth, where there were hundreds of worlds, all filled with marvels, people flew between them all the time. ‘Please take me out there, back to the Commonwealth you came from. Please, Nigel. I’ll help you however you want while you’re here, but afterwards . . .’ She gave him the most entreating plea she could, letting her yearning thoughts free so he could taste them.

‘Getting out is difficult,’ he said awkwardly. ‘I didn’t expect I’d be doing that.’

‘But you can do it,’ she insisted. Her hands gestured round the magnificent spaceship with its clean air and bright lighting. A machine that could fly! ‘You’re so clever. You know everything there is to know.’

‘Ha!’

His bitter laugh shocked her.

‘I’m the stupidest person in the galaxy, actually.’ He glanced meaningfully up at the blank ceiling. ‘Though I’m not alone.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘We thought there was only one planet in the Void where humans lived – Querencia. How wrong we were. We should have known, should have worked it out, but we didn’t; we assumed – which is always a foolish thing to do. We did it because all our power and knowledge brings a huge dose of arrogance with it. Well, thank you, universe: lesson in humility well and truly learned.’

‘There’s more than one planet in the Void?’

‘Apparently.’

‘And do people live there, too?’

‘They used to, Kysandra. That’s all I can tell you. They managed to get a message out to us. But it was a very long time ago. And I’m here now, not on Querencia.’

‘So what are you going to do?’

Nigel massaged his temples. ‘My original goal was to get to Makkathran – which is a living alien spaceship that’s managed to survive on Querencia – and send all the information it gathered back to the Commonwealth and its own species. But that’s going to be quite tough now. My ship can’t fly any more. The Void has affected its engines – or part of them, anyway. The closer you are to a planet, the worse it gets.’