A thousand miles away in a desert with no name, Matt Callaghan watched his friends being slaughtered and watched half a million people die. He stood stock still against the workbench, his face frozen in horror, unable to watch but unable to turn away from the grainy images streaming through on the tiny, fuzzy screen – the live footage, birds-eye-view, as the Earth opened up and swallowed the city of Detroit. The buildings buckled, the skyscrapers fell, sinking, melting, into the gaping, molten maw. Fires burning, smoke belching, steel and ash and death – hell on Earth, brought up to mankind. Mankind who stumbled. Mankind who screamed. Mankind, who the cameras could only watch helplessly as they tried to run, tried to escape as their city sank into a pit of searing, bubbling stone. The watching world saw everything – saw parents running with children, friends trying to fly away with friends. Strangers, trying to save strangers.

And in the centre of it, the black figure of Klaus Heydrich, raised aloft upon a pillar of earth, smiling as the city around him died. Untouchable and alone. Slowly, his boots lifted from the ground and he floated gently into the air, a lone shard of black against a boiling sea of red, indifferent to the hissing, the smoke, the screaming beneath him.

His work was done. As every nation on Earth watched on in horror, Klaus Heydrich drew in close to the camera, his face momentarily obscuring the devastation behind him.

“Fifteen minutes,” he reiterated plainly, “Then Chicago.”

His pale smile widened. And, black coat whipping, he flew away.

Matt’s hands clutched the bench.

“God.”

It wasn’t an exclamation, but a prayer. Matt had never prayed before in his life. He’d never believed in the divine. But right now he had nothing else. No plan, no power, no hope. His friends were dead, his world falling apart, and all he could do was beg.

“God,” he whispered. His face scrunched up, tears leaking from his eyes. “Please. I don’t know if you’re listening but please. Please.”

He looked up at the sky, pleading.

“Help.”

*****

Heat.

Heat and dust, everywhere, rolling over. Distant rumbling in her ears. The taste of blood in her mouth.

Jane tried to breathe. To suck in air where he’d struck her, through the pain in her chest, her sunken guts and lungs. Everything was blurry. Smoke crinkling down her crushed throat, dark blotches flittering at the edge of her vision. She tried to stand but couldn’t. Tried to move her arms, her legs, anything. But everything just lay there. Everything hurt. She closed her eyes.

“You need to wake up.”

A voice. Not the Black Death. Soft and young. Oddly calm.

Her eyes flicked open.

There, in front of her, stood a boy.

Pale and small with a quiet, round face and hair a colour between white and gold. He stood there as still and silent as a statue, watching her, unblinking, unmoving, as dust and darkness whorled around them. Pure, plain and untarnished, while she lay bruised and broken, covered in dirt and ash and blood. It was like something out of a dream. Jane forced herself to blink. But the boy didn’t disappear.

And then, as her eyes refocused, she saw what was behind him.

“No,” she whispered. Detroit. The entire city, sunk into the Earth – the tops of its tallest buildings, still sinking slowly down into the red, violent glow. Curtains of ash, pillars of toxic smoke, raining down, rising up from within its cavernous depths, blotting out the sun. She pushed unsteadily to her feet, taking a step forward, two, the pain forgotten – before sinking back down, her knees stinging in the dirt. Homes. Schools. The Legion. All gone, all extinguished – swallowed by the tides of fire. Turned to nothing in the dark.

“I can’t…” she choked, “I don’t…”

But there were no words to say. She put her head in her hands, unable to bear – unable to watch any more.

Then the child behind her spoke.

“He’ll destroy everything. Everyone. The entire world.”

Jane opened her eyes a fraction. She looked up, through her fingers, her chest heaving, half coughing from the smoke. What was… there was something about his voice. The way he spoke. He couldn’t have been more than ten, maybe eleven, but he wasn’t scared like a child that age should be with the devastation swirling around them. He was quiet, almost serene – and when he spoke, it was without urgency, without inflection. Out of place. Like he was.

Slowly she lowered her hands and stared back at him as he stood there, gazing into the sinking storm – the choking clouds, the crater of melting earth. His face blank, his small mouth set, his eyes distant.

His eyes. The deepest, sapphire blue.

“Who are you?” she whispered. Was she dreaming? She’d been concussed, hit in the head a lot. Was this even real? “Where… where are your parents?”

The pale child looked at her, his blue eyes steady and piercing. Eyes that didn’t blink or waver. Eyes that seemed to know her.

“I am watcher and wanderer,” he said softly, and it was as though his voice echoed through a veil. “Eternity and instant. I am no one and everywhere. I tug at the life-threads.”

“I don’t understand,” whispered Jane. She was unconscious. This was a dream. The child turned back to the fallen city.

“I led you here,” was his only answer, “To this point.” He looked back at her, his young, smooth face – but the words he spoke were not a child’s words. “To stop this. But the time for discretion has passed. I have stacked the deck. But I cannot stop him. Only Dawn can.”

His words rang in Jane’s ears, his voice a half-forgotten memory. But the truth stuck in her throat.

“Dawn is dead,” she whispered, despaired.

But the child shook his frail head. “No,” he murmured, voice echoing in the wind, “Not always.”

He turned to her and held out his tiny hand. “Take my power,” he asked her. There was no fear in his voice. Jane stared at him, unmoving – her knees still grazed in the dirt, her armour cracked, hair run through with ash and temple slicked with gore. The battered empath, beaten and bloodied, kneeling face to face with the small white child. For a moment, they just sat there, the girl staring, the boy’s thin arm outstretched – dust and smoke billowing, the world brown and ochre grey, swirling in spirals around them.

And slowly, as if a dream, Jane reached up and took his hand.

Instantly, she felt it. Under his skin, echoing – a gaping, cavernous feeling, stars studded through the singing abyss. A heart beating backwards; a sense of falling, up into the sky. The warm, frozen infinite. Words and sounds and colour, humming through him, like nothing she’d experienced, nothing she could comprehend. She reeled, not knowing or understanding, for the first time truly afraid, wanting to let go, wanting to run away – but when she looked up she found herself looking face to face with the boy. Jane froze, terrified, seeing only his eyes – the swirling sapphire galaxies, opening up into eternity, deep enough to lose yourself in, to swim forever through.

But then her gaze widened, and she saw the greater truth. The boy’s eyes were of his powers – alien, unfathomable – but what was in them was not. In his eyes, across his face, in his small, sad smile, there was only compassion. Only tenderness. And in an instant, she knew somehow that he was only there to help her. That he wasn’t going to hurt her, now or ever. That all he wanted was to be kind.

Somehow, he reminded her of Matt.

“Don’t be afraid,” he murmured gently. Young and hopeful. Old and knowing.

She closed her eyes, closed her fingers gently around the child’s soft, warm palm, and felt the power underneath it flow into her.

“Concentrate,” the child whispered, “Remember this place, this moment. The sound, the smell, how the Earth felt beneath you. Remember, so that you may return. Then listen. And think.”

“The numbers sixteen, three, five and seventy. A square opening into a circle.” Jane felt it moving within her, the new coin between her fingers, rolling into place. Eyes still closed, listening, breathing, following the boy’s words. “The smell of leather and sawdust. Warm rain in your hair, the sound of starlight, soft wool beneath your skin. Focus on them, all of them, compressed, a single point. Hold it in your mind and walk through it-” he told her, and Jane felt the wind around her churn, the sounds and smells swirling out and away into a warm, singing, shining blue darkness – felt her body falling forward until there was nothing around her but a wrapping, threading tunnel and an echo, the boy’s voice whispering in her ear-

“-and bring back the Dawn.”