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stop.’
    ‘No, you won’t die.’ But some will , he thought. He knew who they were, their faces and their names. They came in his visions, such strong, rich visions. He wasn’t going to tell the boy this, though. ‘You’re right to do what you’re doing, Matthew, so maybe you’ll succeed where I didn’t. But there are risks: this is life and death stuff.’
    ‘He didn’t kill you,’ observed Matthew.
    ‘He can’t kill me, remember? And I can’t kill him.’ Sam’s smile was more like a grimace. ‘That’s our gift, our sentence – that and the future.’ Sam laid a hand on the boulder he had been chained to for so long. The path upwards waited again and, at the top of the path, food and water. ‘Besides, in case you hadn’t noticed, he gets much more of a kick out of torturing me than killing me.’
    Kim
    It was Fitz again. Fitz, with the bright red shock of hair that seemed to defy gravity in the way it floated in jagged wisps around his head. An emergency light flickered just behind him, and in the intermittent glow it provided, she could only briefly see his features outlined from second to second.
    Fitz was saying something. ‘We have to get out of here. Come on—’ And then he said a name, and it was someone else’s name, not hers. ‘We have to get out of here now,’ he repeated, and she could hear despair in his voice.
    ‘No, wait,’ said a voice sounding suspiciously, unpleasantly like her own. She struggled away from that voice, from the name Fitz had mentioned. Someone else.
    ‘Fitz, fetch Odell and the others. We can still get this stuff out.’ Great stone slabs surrounded her, their rough surfaces carved with arcane symbols and alien scripts that her practised eye recognized as Middle Period Shipbuilder. She was stepping into a corridor that curved abruptly just ahead. A faint trickle of memory came into her mind about what lay beyond, and then she realized . . .
    She was dreaming, and she knew her worst nightmare lay around that curve. The worst thing she could possibly imagine, ever, lay a few feet away, in a building abandoned by the race who had constructed it untold millennia before.
    She was dreaming, and with an awful certainty she knew Fitz was dead. She discovered then that no matter how much she wanted to, she could not cry, could not shed tears, because this, after all, was a dream.
    Somewhere, on the periphery of her awareness, something significant was happening. She knew it was imperative that she now wake up.
    Must wake up.
    And suddenly she was back in the Goblin – shockingly so. Oh dear God , she thought, that was bad . She’d actually forgotten just how bad it could be. She had to find Bill, and fast.
    The Goblin was her ship; after the botched expedition to the Citadel, she’d acquired it after finding herself still in the Kasper system with enough money left to purchase a long-range, deep-system hauler and a retrieval contract to go with it. That had been over two years ago, and since then Kim had developed into a rock hermit. Every now and then she’d bring the Goblin back into the Kaspian system’s Angel Station, way far out where the Kaspian sun was just one particularly bright pinprick of stellar light in the deep black of night.
    Now she was coming back in after a particularly fruitless haul and knew they’d be reviewing her contract. That knowledge just made her usual state of mind all the worse.
    When she’d seen the inside of a Goblin for the first time, she’d thought she could maybe make sufficient cash by going out in it for a few days at a time, as the idea of living in it for weeks or months seemed hardly appealing. But she knew people did so – had been doing so, one way or another, for decades. Yet, after the first month or so on her own, travelling through the Kaspian system as captain and sole passenger on board her refitted Goblin, she had discovered the will to keep living.
    To some degree, she had Bill to thank. In a sense, Bill had