1

THAT WAS HOW LYCHFORD came to be waiting.

Of course, that didn’t mean Lizzie and Autumn had had that luxury. As people started waking up on the morning that Finn had exploded, Lizzie had begun phoning around or physically going to see every local organisation, explaining to them the warning that had been delivered to her, why it had been so urgent, and why they now needed to prepare for the worst.

She’d found that to be an unexpectedly terrible process. The people she spoke to had, these days, every reason to believe her. Everyone in the town had now shared in the waters of the well in the woods. They could all see the things that lay beyond the everyday, the things they had been protected from for so long. But more importantly, they could all now feel, with extra senses, the fragile nature of the now really pretty slight barriers around their little Cotswolds market town, behind which were other realities, with other inhabitants, some of whom had now declared they were coming to get them.

What took Lizzie by surprise was that, even though they knew what Lizzie was talking about was real, they often still didn’t want to know. Their nervousness at what she was telling them became, surprisingly quickly, irritation. They seemed to want her and Autumn to deal with it. One or two, by the end, Lizzie felt, had actively started to blame her for the situation.

“It’s a bit much,” said Sheila Parker, a widow from Prince Street who’d seemed affronted ever since she’d shared in the waters, probably because she’d always hated Lizzie’s now deceased old friend Judith, the hedge witch, and positively disliked having new insight into what the old woman’s point of view had been. “I mean, it shouldn’t be up to us. We pay our rates.”

Lizzie had had to suppress a desire, during that particular conversation, to say that she wasn’t entirely sure the county council were up to funding the magical defence of all reality. And that if they were, being based in Gloucester, they had no more knowledge of the problem than anyone else who lived outside the bounds of Lychford itself.

She found, as she delivered her message in the next few days, this same negativity and deliberate obtuseness everywhere she went. It wasn’t going to happen. It was somebody else’s problem. Someone else would deal with it. Why wasn’t Lizzie herself doing something?

Lizzie had expected the population to flee. She had been comfortable with that. She and Autumn had already decided they could more easily defend the town, defend this focal point of all human reality, without worrying about saving innocent bystanders at the same time.

But no. These buggers, valuing the comfort of their lives over the continuing actuality of those lives, largely decided to stay put.

A few left—several of the younger folk with young families.

But in the next few weeks, to Lizzie’s horror, those started coming back.

“Well,” said Stacy Latislaw, who worked behind the counter at the town’s third best charity shop, talking to Lizzie at her kitchen table. “Luna didn’t really like it in Nantwich with my sister, and we thought, well, we can always leave again if whatever it is happens.”

“Whatever it is,” repeated Lizzie, numbly, sure that by now she was getting close to the end of her reserve of goodwill for the people of this town. She had preached from the pulpit, week after week, telling her congregation to leave. That was the opposite of everything the Church of England had trained her to do. They’d listened to her. They’d nodded. They’d stayed.

Lizzie had looked at the calm, placid face of Stacy Latislaw and thought of Richard Burton’s narration at the start of Jeff Wayne’s Musical Version of The War of the Worlds, and she wanted to swear at her. She wanted to run into the marketplace and bellow, “They’re coming!”

Perhaps there were some good reasons for this urge to stay put. Perhaps some of it was down to the fact that nobody outside of Lychford would believe or understand the reasons why anyone inside it had left.

Or perhaps the people of this town were just stupid, complacent sheep who loved their comfortable lives so much they hadn’t noticed the slaughterhouse in the next field.

Lizzie had struggled with her faith in God before. But all her extraordinary training in the ways of human life hadn’t prepared her to so lose her faith in people.

She decided, a couple of weeks into the waiting, to instead turn her focus to the town’s organisations. And, of course, the committee members of all of them had looked seriously at her and had nodded and agreed, and then things . . . a few things . . . had actually started to happen. The Women’s Institute, who were already doing a sort of neighbourhood watch scheme for the homes on the edge of town, had organised “magical self-defence” courses in which the (all organically sourced and fair trade guaranteed) protective charms Autumn had recommended were mass produced in jam jars and everyone was instructed in their use. The History Society had got their members to seek out useful occult books. (So far, according to Autumn, they had found one and a half, whatever that meant, and neither the one nor the half were any use.) The Festival committee were staging regular open mic nights at the Plough, which had seemed a strange response, but perhaps the best they could do.

The University of the Third Age had even invited Lizzie to speak to at one of their meetings at the Fincham Hall. She realised about a minute into what she’d planned as a talk about looking out for strange beings in one’s garden and putting extra magical defences around one’s house that members of the elderly audience were talking over what she was trying to say, calling out the refrain she was getting used to: if this was so important, why wasn’t she doing something about it? Why wasn’t that coloured girl at the magic shop doing something about it?

Lizzie wanted to walk off there and then. She got to the end of her piece. But she didn’t take audience questions. She’d already heard enough.

Perhaps there was one sign that, at least on some level, the locals were taking this threat seriously. Autumn’s magic shop, Witches, gradually became, in the weeks since the message, a centre of the town’s conversations, a place people went to like a favourite news website when they needed reassurance, when they needed grounding in tense times. But having too many customers to deal with on her own was, for Autumn, a completely new and rather taxing experience. Especially when they largely wanted nothing but reassurance. Especially when she was at the same time working out how to defend the town and how to bring a fairy back from the dead. She’d put up a card in the window of the supermarket, seeking an assistant, but hadn’t had any applicants. “They think,” she’d said to Lizzie, “it means they’d also have to, you know, defend against the dark arts. And that is something, as we’ve discovered, that they absolutely do not want to do.”

Lizzie felt that she hadn’t even begun to describe to her friend the despair she’d started to feel. There was still a distance between them, and she had no idea why. “I’m so scared for them,” she said. “And for us. I don’t know what they’ll do if and when anything actually shows up.”

“When,” Autumn had said.

The truth of which led to another source of dismay. Lizzie found that her email backlog began to again contain an increasing number of mundane matters. People were still dying, of course, baptisms were on the rise, and people from the town were once more feeling able to get married in her church. Her church wardens were starting to talk about preparing for Christmas.

“What the hell,” she said as she stared at the screen one evening. “We are the turkeys, and we are voting for Christmas.”

She was pretty sure that this state of complete denial and refusal to prepare was exactly what their enemy, whatever it was, wanted.

* * *

Autumn Blunstone sat behind the counter in her magic shop, looking at the stool where Judith Mawson used to sit. It wasn’t opening time yet. But already customers had appeared outside, nervously hanging about. She had regulars now. People who regularly wasted her time, that was. Who would have thought that, running a shop, she’d have to put up with the general public? She had a duty to serve them, but she didn’t feel up to it yet today, despite several coffees, so she was leaving it until she had no choice. She had a horrible weight in her head, made up of a sort of distant, complicated grief for Finn and a solid continuing grief for Judith, and also the fear that she didn’t have time for either. The lack of urgency on the part of the townsfolk that Lizzie kept anxiously reporting made her feel more urgent. How could the locals be like this? How could you fail to change, when you had this sudden awareness of where you actually stood in the cosmic scheme of things? She supposed it was like that line from Spinal Tap. There was such a thing as too much fucking perspective.

So it was all going to come down to just the two of them, wasn’t it? And it didn’t help that Lizzie was acting all weird since Autumn had told her about Luke. It had been a mistake to mention the sex. Still, she hadn’t anticipated this level of . . . whatever it was.

No. She had to concentrate. The weeks of waiting were ticking away toward . . . what? When would “they” come? To be something solid that she could fight?

Weeks ago, Autumn had put the . . . pieces of Finn . . . in several bags and carried them to her shop. They were now in a cupboard in the work room. She had tried to research the problem, had tried some divinations, but she hadn’t found any answers.

Luke, since he’d gained extra senses like the rest of the town had, had spent hours with her in that work room. He’d been delighted with immersing himself in the details of her world. She’d been in turns pleased about that and then perversely irritated by the strength of his interest. This was her thing. In the end, it was her responsibility. And he’d been neglecting his own work. Almost uniquely, in this stupid town.

The doorbell rang. Again. And it still wasn’t opening time. Autumn tiredly looked over, but saw Sunil Mehra, the pensioner who ran the town’s Indian restaurant. He was carrying a shopping bag. He had on his face a look of sadness and anger that he was just about containing.

Oh God. Sunil hadn’t been here for Judith’s funeral, hadn’t been here for the rain.

Autumn quickly got to her feet, unlocked the door, and let him in. “Sunil, I’m so sorry, we tried to find you.”

“I’m sure you did. This is what I get for going on holiday with no phone. I knew she was old. I knew . . . please, what happened to Judith? And what are my staff telling me about this . . . rain? Why has everyone lost their marbles?”

Autumn closed the shop again and led him into the back room. This was going to be a difficult conversation.

* * *

Her name was Zoya Boyko, and she was desperate. She was desperate as she walked her daughter, Jas, to school that morning, through the lovely streets of the market town, past the lovely fields of the Cotswolds, holding her daughter’s hand, repeating all the things she liked to repeat. “Go Jetters go, go go go. We need to go to school. Go Jetters go, Mummy!”

“Go Jetters go,” Zoya said, keeping her voice upbeat. Jas couldn’t pick up on how a lot of other people felt, but she usually could tell, immediately and deeply, when Mummy was showing signs of worry, of weakness. The little girl would fret about it, maybe melt down, might not even get to school, and today Zoya really needed Jas to get to school. They walked through riches, every morning, past houses with gates and driveways. They weren’t part of what they walked through. Zoya and Jas lived in “the backs” of Lychford, in a room in a flat, rented out by Mitch, who was nice enough, but who had troubles of his own. If Zoya couldn’t find the money to pay his rent this month, as he’d told her when she’d been a week late last time, he’d straight away have to find someone to take her place. He had a mortgage to pay.

The job at the shop wouldn’t get her enough, not after the days off she’d had to take for her daughter. She wasn’t on the sort of contract where they’d pay her for time off, and nor would she ever be, not with Jas. This month she’d be about fifty pounds short. What could she sell that’d be worth fifty pounds? But she couldn’t sell something every month. She’d already started looking for a cheaper place, but there was nowhere that cheap, not around here, where Jas’s dad had brought them and left them. And Jas was so settled in the school here, actually making progress, changing for the better for the first time, thanks to her wonderful teaching assistant, Charlie. They couldn’t lose that. Zoya wouldn’t let her lose that.

She made herself think about lunch. Lunch was when Zoya had an hour to herself and could read her books. She didn’t like to buy them, not even from charity shops, so she was making her way through everything Mum had left her. She wasn’t sure if some of them were stories or meant to be real, but they made her head spin, took her away from here. On some mornings when she walked the complicated way in to school that Jas insisted on, she ended up thinking about what she read, and for a while she could ignore the money sitting all around her and felt instead the world tipped at an angle, like people were watching, good people, from places above her and under her, from horizons she couldn’t see. It was as if part of her was being kept from her, kept in safety, just over there. Just beyond her reach. Some days it felt like a specific place, like she could turn her head until she was facing it and walk there, somewhere just to the north. It was like the feeling when she’d been at university and a new term was starting, that feeling of being about to learn, about to grow, about to see that new horizon.

She liked all these feelings, they were the only comfort she had, but they also scared her, because they were yet another sign of how apart she was from these townsfolk. How weird was the pressure making her, how much was she losing it because of how things were around here? In the last few weeks, a collective insanity seemed to have gripped this weird, privileged, English place. Everyone was talking about magic. Everyone was saying there had been a rain, a rain which had somehow penetrated through roofs and windows, that had given everyone the power to feel something they had not previously felt. These people were all boasting about it, and all nervous about it at the same time. It was like they’d gained yet another special level of privilege. Like they’d all been given a new leaf blower or something. But they seemed to expect it to be taken from them, or expected to have to pay for it, for once in their lives, and that thought scared them, so they didn’t accept it, they moved swiftly on.

Many of them talked about seeing weird or wonderful things. They’d suddenly point, look, on the hillside over there! But there was never anything to be seen. And then they’d say no, there couldn’t have been anything, not to worry.

These English were crazy.

But also it was all like a fairy tale from the town where Zoya had been born, from Odessa in the Ukraine. It was the sort of nonsense her grandma would have come out with, that her mother had told Zoya was all right in its place, but not to talk to other children about, because it might make them laugh at her family. But here, now, the school had even been talking about it in assembly. They had scared Jas for nothing, for this collective power trip. But, no, she mustn’t think badly of them, even that couldn’t take away how much they’d done for the little girl.

Oh God, they were both stuck between so many things.

Zoya had been in town when this rain was supposed to have come. She had been getting Jas ready for school as usual that morning. She had put her hand out, felt the drops, decided on a hooded coat for her daughter. It had taken her a while to even remember these everyday events when people had started spouting this bullshit. There had been no great revelation for her, no feeling of being able to see new things. Perhaps this was a Brexit thing, magic only for the real British! Zoya wondered as she got to the school gates if perhaps there was something concrete behind it all, pesticides in the air or something, a mass delusion, and the wind had just been in the wrong direction for her house. But the first she’d heard about any of this had been from her neighbours, so the wind seemed to have been pretty selective. And now she thought of that, she was worrying about Jas having breathed it in. On top of everything else. Her daughter’s lack of communication was such that it would be hard to tell if she had. It wasn’t like Zoya was going to start asking her about something that could scare her so much.

“Please take one.” That was Mrs. Cotton, the deputy head, who was standing at the gate, giving out sheets of paper to all the parents.

Zoya took the piece of paper as she ushered Jas into the playground and read it as her daughter dutifully went to stand in line, ahead of all the other children, who were still playing. The paper was a list of forthcoming meetings about “the new situation.”

She felt so angry. All the time. This delusion again. When she couldn’t afford her rent. Could she maybe make some money by telling a newspaper about this? It didn’t seem likely. It was all too odd. She could hear herself saying the words: “These bloody English seem to believe . . .” But how many of these newspapers would listen to her after she’d started like that, even? The stupidity, the dividing nonsense that had driven her from where she’d grown up, had followed her here. It had stuck her here. There was no learning to be had, not like she dreamed about. There was instead a lack of it, a turning away from it. And there seemed to be nothing she could do to make a better life for herself and her daughter, no way to get away from it. Something, surely, had to change.

She glared at the teacher, crumpled up the paper, and went to join Jas at the line.

* * *

Lizzie had just got up from her desk at the Vicarage after having a hack at her ridiculously mundane email backlog and was on her way to get a strong cup of flavoured coffee, when her phone rang. “Listen, it’s err . . . nobody wanted to bother you, but . . . I think there might be, I mean I know you’ve been saying something might be going to happen and, sorry, trying to speak around my new false teeth . . .”

Lizzie recognised the voice of Lydia Bates, one of her congregation, but just as she was about to ask what was going on, she heard the phone on the other end being taken, perhaps forcibly, by another hand.

“We can’t get out of town,” said Carrie Anne Christopher, the chair of the Lychford Festival.

“What?” said Lizzie, feeling a sudden awful chill in her stomach.

“It’s just started, just this last few minutes. I wanted to go to the garage to get a few bits, but there’s this . . . something. I can’t explain it. We’re on the hill at the top of London Road. I’m going to try to get a bit closer. There are lots of people here. Oh. Oh God. It’s horrible. You have to come. Sorry, I have to deal with things here.” And she rang off.

Lizzie tried Autumn, left a voicemail message, then called Shaun, Judith’s police officer son. “I’m already heading over,” he said, his voice sounding like he was running, “but I can’t get any backup. I can’t seem to get reception for any calls outside the town. Meet you there, Reverend.”

Lizzie grabbed her coat and ran out of the house.

London Road was a one-way route out of town that had been the best Lychford could do in terms of traffic calming. It was wooded on both sides, forested inclines leading down to the road as it made its way uphill. As she approached, she could see cars backed up all along the road. The drivers had mostly got out to talk to each other.

“Shaun jogged through here a few minutes ago,” called a young man Lizzie recognised as Chris the builder, who was still in the cab of his van. “He said he’d told the ones at the back to turn around and go home, but nothing’s changing, so maybe more have joined them. And listen to this.” He switched on his cab radio and turned up the volume so Lizzie could hear. It was just static, wherever he went on the dial. “Nothing on the digital either,” he said. “So, this is probably nothing to worry, right?”

“No,” said Lizzie, unable to stop herself from letting her pent-up irritation show, “no, it probably is something to worry about.”

Chris’s dad, Paul, stepped out of the other door of the van and came around to see her, a look of urgent concern on his face. She was aware that a crowd was gathering, looking to her. “Is this it, then?” said Paul. “Is this them?”

“It could well be,” said Lizzie. “I won’t know until I get to the front.”

She marched off before they could start offering everyday alternatives for what it might be. She was distantly pleased to sense a number of them follow her.

Some of the drivers the crowd passed, mostly the ones who’d stayed with their vehicles, were laughing or just annoyed, carefree compared to the more complicated, anxious verging on guilty reactions of the locals. These were the ones who’d been caught in the jam when they were just passing through town, she guessed. There was quite a division between the locals and those from outside.

Finally, they got to the front of the traffic jam, near the top of the hill, where Carrie Anne and Mrs. Caversham-Thoroughgood of the Women’s Institute were trying to hold back a growing crowd of people who were variously annoyed, disputing, starting to get scared. Most of them stepped back to let Lizzie pass, leaving a few, the nonlocals, to stare in puzzlement at what a vicar might be bringing to this situation. “Let her through,” called Mrs. Caversham-Thoroughgood, her voice commanding with the volume required of a hundred junior gymkhanas.

“Thank God you’re here,” said Carrie Anne. “I think this might be it.”

Lizzie was grateful to find one of the few people who’d taken her warnings to heart right at the centre of this. “Thank you,” she said. “What’s going on?”

“A lot of weirdness,” said Carrie Anne. “Your department. Shaun’s on top of it as much as anyone is.”

Lizzie saw that Shaun, in uniform but as always looking slightly out of his depth, was laying out cones across the road. Up ahead, in front of the line he’d already put down, a small car was steaming in the middle of the tarmac. It seemed to have been cut in two just back from its bonnet. The front half, which lay several feet down the road, seemed to have a small electrical fire going on. But what immediately stood out was the person inside. Half of him was lying forward against the steering wheel in the front half of the car, a mass of blood. She could see through the back window of the rear half that the rest of the man was slumped back against his seat. There was just enough of a human shape left to ascertain that he’d been cut in half along with his vehicle.

Lizzie crossed herself and muttered a prayer for the man and for all their protection. The crowd shouldn’t be seeing this. But maybe it was what they needed. “What did this?” she asked.

“No idea,” said Shaun, coming over. “But whatever it is, it’s still there. Look.” He picked up a branch from the road and threw it. It cracked backward toward him when it hit a point near the bisection of the car and driver. It landed back at his feet, smashed into pieces.

The crowd cried out. The noise children make when they’re suddenly, genuinely scared. Behind that sound, immediately drowning it out, there were angry shouts too. A lack of understanding from the out of towners. Someone had started to sob.

“Looks deliberate,” said Matty from the yard, who was sitting on the front bumper of his concrete mixer lorry. There was a distant, empty look on his face. “I mean, I were right behind him. I saw something I couldn’t really see but that I could, you know, feel, come down from above him, straight through. Like an axe coming down. I slammed on the brakes, or I’d have been right into it. Fuck of a coincidence—sorry, Vicar—if he’d just happened to be there when it zapped down, like. For it to start up or appear or whatever just as he went through. When he were just on that line.” He shook his head. “This one behind me nearly ran into me.”

“But I didn’t,” said a lorry driver with a Dutch accent. “What is this? Why the vicar?” Lizzie pushed back the silly annoyance she always felt about people apologising for swearing when she was around. And she mustn’t be all high and mighty about these people being forced to deal with what they’d refused to acknowledge before. They were going to need to pull together, and quickly.

“What can you see here?” she pointed to the road and listened as the Dutch driver described the scene pretty much as they could see it. Except what he’d seen of the accident itself had made him think a tree had fallen. He was, however, puzzled about where that tree was now. He couldn’t feel anything in the air in front of him, like Lizzie could now that she’d been told something was there, but yes, he had seen the branch fly backward and smash. He now thought this was probably some sort of secret weapon test. He had many ideas about how this connected to various conspiracy theories he’d heard about.

Lizzie recognised a non-rained-on mind struggling to deal with the realities of life in Lychford. That was to be expected. At least he and the others like him weren’t likely to try to walk through this invisible wall. She looked back to the crowd. “Did anyone know the victim?”

“It’s Lacey Beresford’s lad,” said Paul, quietly. “He’d have been off to work at Mott’s farm.”

There was a general murmur of grief. Lizzie had to put that aside for the moment. “We should see how far this wall goes,” she said.

Several of them went with her, and several more headed off the other pavement, so they went up into the woods on both sides. The locals were talking and talking, still trying to deflect the reality of this, some of them even starting to agree with that truck driver, despite what they knew, despite what they could feel. Lizzie discovered that this cutting line was marked in the woods by sliced rows of trees, some of them bisected, each half of them having fallen in a different direction. At least it was pretty easy to see where the wall was. “Just as well,” said Shaun when she shared that thought aloud, “I don’t have enough cones.”

They kept walking, a hundred metres or so. The wall continued all the way along. The smell of cut timber was everywhere on the wind. A text from Carrie Anne in the other party confirmed that it kept going in the other direction too. Lizzie brought up Google Maps to check her suspicions. Only the saved version was available, nothing from the server outside the town, but it was enough to confirm that the wall was an arc, part of a circle.

She and those with her jogged back to the crowd at the traffic jam. The locals and outsiders were arguing now, fear turning into anger. She shouted for them to listen. They all turned to look at her, the locals telling those from outside to shut up. “This is enemy action,” she said. “This is what we’ve been telling you about. They’ve locked us in.”

* * *

It had taken an hour and three cups of tea, and Autumn had purposefully ignored all the urgent noises coming from her phone while the conversation was going on, but at the end of it, Sunil seemed to understand what she was trying to tell him. He let out a long breath. “This explains a lot,” he said. “This is definitely what my staff now believe every word of. I suppose I believe it too. What choice do I have? It’s everything Judith always talked about, all of which I assumed was metaphor, or old age. I just wish . . .” He put a hand to his brow and took a moment to control himself. “I wish I had been here for her funeral. I wish I could have said goodbye.”

Autumn took his hand. “She was brilliant at the end. She never stopped being amazing.”

“I had . . . backed off a little. Let her be. The number of times I saw her and she clearly didn’t know who I was. It’s like I lost the woman I . . . I was friends with, I suppose. It never came to more than that. I lost her months ago. And yet I just don’t know, I feel a gap. I want a conversation I will never now be able to have.”

“Yeah.”

They were both silent together for a while. When he spoke again, it was with fear in his voice. “These terrible things, they defy rationality. They seem outside of science.”

“They’re not. I won’t let myself think they are.”

“I knew Judith worked for you, so I suppose I suspected, this shop being what it is, that you’d know . . . anyway, that’s why I decided we should have this conversation, and why I should bring this to you.” He reached into the bag he’d brought with him and pulled out a round shape, about the size of a cricket ball, wrapped in newspaper and string. Autumn’s extra senses felt something uneasy about the bundle, something negative, but it was such a small feeling. It was like something was waiting to be hatched, like inside the bundle was some sort of . . . egg? “It seems while I was away this arrived by post at the restaurant. I opened it up, but . . . well, I don’t know what this is.”

Autumn still felt profoundly odd making a magical sign of protection openly in front of someone. Sunil just raised an eyebrow at it, interested. She went and got some of the holy water Lizzie had given her a supply of, and her own protective unguent (mostly Aldi “light in colour” olive oil) and drew a circle on the table around the package. Then she untied the package and opened it up. It was highly unlikely Judith would have sent something dangerous to someone she cared about, but as Sunil had said, toward the end she’d done some very random shit.

On the paper lay something that should have been in a butcher’s shop. Or no . . . more like an archaeological dig. It was an organ of some kind, though none that Autumn recognised. It was brown and ancient, parched of the liquids that had stained it. But it wasn’t mummified or preserved. It had that egg sensation about it, that here was something that still contained potential.

“Is it a heart?” asked Sunil.

“Romantic gesture,” said Autumn, and immediately regretted it.

But Sunil smiled sadly. “There was no note. Perhaps this is something sent from her dementia, something taken from an animal. A sacrifice? Something to protect me? Or perhaps there’s no meaning to it.”

Autumn told him she’d look into it. Sunil seemed satisfied, took her hand again, looked awkward, again with that feeling of incompletion, of not knowing. Finally, he headed out. Autumn stretched, sighed, picked up her phone and glanced at it. And let out a scream.

* * *

Ten minutes later, Lizzie looked around to see Autumn skidding to a halt. “We’re going to need you to start answering your phone,” she said, and immediately regretted it.

“It was something important. What, did you think I was with Luke?”

Lizzie was incredibly aware that they had an audience. “Tabling that,” she said. “And sorry. This is the problem we’re facing.”

Thankfully, Autumn nodded and listened. “Why were you able to text me?” was the first thing she asked.

“Sorry?” said Lizzie.

“Radio stations aren’t getting in, and neither is the radio for the phones. It’s not as if we’ve got a mobile phone tower nearby, and even if we did, it would need to communicate with other towers. So that’s got to be deliberate. Whatever this is is letting us talk to each other, but not to the world.”

Together with a number of, now highly engaged, locals, they headed to check out the rest of what seemed to be a circular wall. They first went to the Folly, the pub at the end of the road going out of town to the north. This was the route that went over the bridge on the river that had given the town its name. Developing as a market town dependent on the wool trade, roads roughly at the compass points had evolved to bring sheep flocks in from outlying farms, and that was the way it had stayed. Now each one of the roads, according to reports, were bisected by the invisible wall. In this particular case it was marked by a line of stones that Erica, the landlady of the Folly, had placed there. She and her family had heard about what was going on from a sobbing friend on the eastern side of town and had rushed out into the road to halt approaching vehicles. Luckily, this road was the one with the least traffic. So this was the only access point where the arrival of the wall hadn’t resulted in damage either to people or vehicles. Jake Beresford had so far been the only fatality. On the other side of the invisible wall here at the bridge there was already a queue of vehicles, with people at the back continually coming forward and having to test the wall for themselves, despite being yelled at by Erica’s two burly sons.

“Maybe I should have put the cones here,” said Shaun.

“I think that’s right about them killing someone deliberately,” said Autumn. “Them being whichever power set this up. They had to throw this whole wall . . . I guess it goes all the way up?”

“It seems to,” said Lizzie. “One of the senior school kids sent up a drone and it exploded.”

“They had to put it all up at once, so they targeted one person, waited until he was in the way and left what happened on the other roads to chance. Maybe Jake was a sacrifice to help power this thing.”

“The outside world,” said Lizzie, “will now be aware of what’s going on. And they will be very puzzled.”

“So the enemy really don’t care if they’re seen doing this. It’s all out in the open now. An attack on the whole of reality. Like Maitland Picton’s mission was meant to be.”

“Which helps us not at all. Even if the army shows up. We can’t even get a message out. Not until they’re within shouting distance, anyway. Because at least sound is getting through.”

“Judith left something that might be useful. But she didn’t leave it with us.”

Lizzie was surprised to hear about Judith’s strange parcel. “It can’t be relevant. If Judith had been aware this was going to happen she’d have said something.”

“True. But we were all aware of the general fairy-political situation, her included. She’d have assumed we were going to be dealing with the rebel fairies at some point. I just don’t know why she would have kept the heart or whatever it is from us. I already tried it on the pieces of Finn, by the way, I took just a moment to do that before I came over—” Her tone had already become defensive.

“Right. I’d have done that too.”

“—and like you, I assumed that somehow Judith knew the future. But rubbing it on the pieces, squeezing it over them. . . . No. I do not think she divined that Finn was going to explode and might need healing.”

Shaun came back over. “I’m going to get anyone stuck on this side to leave their vehicles and head back into town. I’ve sent a couple of the burlier lads to head out to the other compass point roads and do the same. I think the best thing I can do is keep checking up on those compass points. Okay with you two?”

Lizzie looked to Autumn, saw her nod absently, still annoyed. Those new to Lychford would find a welcome in the town’s three cash-strapped coffee houses. For those businesses there was definitely a silver lining. “Yes,” she said.

“You two are going to sort this out, aren’t you?” said Shaun. “Quickly? Because—”

“Thank you, Shaun,” said Lizzie, actually finding it in herself to dismiss a police officer.

Shaun paused for a moment, then decided to let himself be dismissed. But the look on his face said his urgent question wasn’t going to go away.

“So,” said Autumn, “no pressure.”

* * *

Zoya was having a perplexing morning working in the shop, listening while trying not to to the increasingly bizarre and scared stories the locals were telling each other. It seemed that nobody had left for work this morning, that they all thought there was some sort of wall stopping them from getting out of Lychford. Was there not a podcast documentary series to be made about this? The town that lost its marbles. “Logan,” she said to the boy who was on the tills with her, “why do people here believe all this mime artiste bullshit?”

He stared at her. “Oh my God. Weren’t you here when it rained? My nan wasn’t here, either, but when she came back there was still a bit of the water around and she must have inhaled it or whatever and now she can feel it, too, just like the rest of us can.”

Zoya made a heroic effort and contained her exasperation. “This feeling . . . is it like perhaps someone nice is looking down on the town from the north and he wants everything to be well and there’s maybe another bit of you, a good bit, that needs to learn, out there somewhere? I feel that, a little, sometimes. This is me being charitable. This is a slight poetic moment. This is the closest I can get to why everyone here is now bugfuck crazy in the head.”

Logan stared at her. “No, it’s not like that at all.”

“Ah well. I thought it was worth a try.”

Logan’s phone buzzed and he pulled it out to look at it. He became immediately agitated. “The boss says if we think there’s any danger, we should pull down the shutters and close up. Are you feeling any danger?”

“No.”

“I am a bit. Maybe not enough? A bit, though.”

Zoya felt that perhaps engagement would stop him from jittering back and forth between the tills. “Tell me more about this feeling of yours. How everyone feels.”

* * *

Autumn and Lizzie had headed back to Autumn’s shop, aware of townsfolk heading home all around them. “So what’s the enemy’s next move?” Autumn asked, unlocking the door of her business. God, they’d been used to the town not knowing or caring about what they did. She’d been used to the pressure of saving the universe, but everyone down the pub knowing about it? That made everything gibberingly more enormous. And Lizzie continuing to be off with her was exactly what she didn’t need right now.

“Finn said they were ‘coming,’ so, having cut us off, that may be the next thing. We should put everyone on alert.” As they went inside, Lizzie showed Autumn a list of local resources on her phone, from the care workers at the retirement home to the library staff.

“I don’t know how much help local anything is going to be,” said Autumn. “They’re already starting to panic.”

“But we have to warn people what to expect.”

“Yes. Of course. I’m just saying—”

“Finn thought you could do something about whatever this is. Those were his last words, that I should go and get you.”

“Thanks for that.” Autumn headed in the direction of the kettle. She’d decided the only way to tackle Lizzie about something that was getting to her was, as always, head on. “Okay, there’s time for this now. We need to be on the same page. What’s getting to you? Is it something about Luke?” She looked over her shoulder to see that Lizzie had immediately folded her arms. Which was a sure sign something was about to blow. “We shouldn’t have shagged, is that it?”

The expression on Lizzie’s face did not become in any way more peaceful.

* * *

Logan had been describing his personal odyssey with his new senses, at some length. Which seemed at least to be calming him down. A little. “It isn’t what you said about someone nice looking down on us. It’s about terrible things lurking around everywhere. And the boss says now they’ve walled us all in. With them inside, too, probably. Lurking.”

“I think your version is what isn’t true. This is fertiliser-based weirdness everyone is deluded from.”

“Deluded? You’re the one who’s weird.”

“Why do you say this?”

“Because ours is all of us, and yours is just you.”

“Ah. Now that’s more what I’m used to.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Zoya was grateful at that moment for the bell signifying the arrival of a customer. It was an old lady, who immediately started yelling at them. “We’ve been told to go to our homes! By the police! It’s happening!” And then she ran out again.

Logan, galvanised, went to the door, fumbled with the latches, seemed to realise he was too panicked to handle anything so fiddly, and with a little cry, fled off through the shop, presumably aiming for the back door. Which made no sense. Because that old lady had been fine.

Zoya wouldn’t have said she was calm, exactly, in the face of all this, but she wasn’t terrified either. She had, in her life, seen some stuff. “Decadent,” she muttered to herself. She would lock up and take what she was now pretty sure was an official day off with pay, the first task of which would be to head over to the school to make sure Jas wasn’t in the way of any of this insanity.

She went to the door. She realised that the marketplace outside was weirdly silent. She opened the door and looked out. Yup. Deserted. Everyone was taking this order pretty damn seriously. But then, that one police officer who was sometimes in the town was as cuckoo as all the rest. She closed the door again, drew the bolts, and found the latches for the shutters that had so defeated Logan.

* * *

Lizzie was about to let out all her tension by finally bellowing . . . she didn’t know what she was going to bellow but her cheeks were flushed and she was certainly deeply upset about something and here it was, the big something she’d say that would let the row start to happen and then maybe she’d find out why—

But then something shot past her cheek and was suddenly in the wall beside Autumn.

“Get down!” Autumn shouted, throwing herself to the floor.

Lizzie tried to do the same. But as she did so, there was a sudden, impossible pain in her shoulder and the impact of it spun her around. She fell, tripping over her feet. As she hit the ground the pain in her shoulder exploded.

It was more pain than she had ever felt before. She had a moment to realise that.

And then she was lost.