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need you to realign the stage for a
trip to AR-21.’ He hooked a thumb towards the far end of the cabin. ‘Cold-weather gear still in the same place?’
    Tony nodded, and Yuichi led me over to a door at the opposite end of the building. I glanced back at Tony, who muttered something under his breath to Nadia. It sounded like
Holy Mother of
God
.
    Behind the door was a walk-in cupboard, and I was handed a pair of heavy padded trousers, a hooded parka and thick gloves. Before long, suitably dressed for the Arctic temperatures, I was back
in the truck, watching as the building dwindled behind us in the gloom. Nadia had taken the wheel, carefully guiding the truck between two of the bollards.
    ‘Start talking,’ I said, feeling cold for reasons that had nothing to do with the ambient temperature. ‘How the hell did we get here, and what the hell is this place,
anyway?’
    ‘What do you know about parallel universes?’ asked Yuichi.
    I searched his face to see if he was joking, but he looked deadly serious. ‘Outside of a couple of science documentaries on the Discovery Channel, about as much as anyone else,’ I
replied. ‘Is that what you’re saying? We’re in a parallel universe?’
    ‘Look outside,’ he said, nodding out through the windscreen. ‘Does this look like any place you’ve ever been?’
    I stared at him beside me. ‘I don’t know,’ I replied, with only a slight tremble in my voice. ‘I think you’re asking me to believe a lot.’
    ‘I know we are,’ Yuichi agreed. ‘Which is why we came out here.’
    ‘We’re here,’ said Nadia, pulling over by the side of the road.
    I followed them back out of the truck, thinking again about the moon’s fracture and what it implied. Nadia left the engine running, and I guessed we weren’t going to be hanging
around for long. From what I could see, we were in the middle of nowhere. There was no sign of anything resembling civilization, bar the cracked and broken tarmac of the highway.
    A torch appeared in Yuichi’s hand, and he switched it on as he stepped towards a sign by the side of the road. He played the torch’s beam over the sign as the freezing wind bit at
the exposed skin of my face. It read: ‘ WELCOME TO THE WORLD-FAMOUS WINE-GROWING REGION OF NAPA VALLEY , CALIFORNIA ’.
    I stared at the sign, then up at the dark and lowering skies. Frozen devastation, in all directions.
    ‘In this particular alternate,’ said Nadia, ‘Yellowstone Park erupted, big time. Not everyone knows this, but beneath all those hot springs, geysers and attractive scenic
routes lies a lake of molten magma the size of Long Island. And the pressure’s been building and building down there for millions of years, just waiting for the right conditions to come
bursting out.’ She shook her head sadly. ‘From what Tony and other survivors tell us, they didn’t have much warning. There were a few more earthquakes than usual, as well as a
sudden, inexplicable outwards migration of wildlife trying to get as far away from the park as they could run, swim or crawl.’ She raised her hands. ‘Then,
boom
. Enough ash and
dirt got blown into the sky, in the space of a single day, to build a life-size replica of Mount Everest. It’ll be still more years before anyone sees the sun.’
    ‘And that all means that just about everything died,’ added Yuichi, switching the torch back off and stepping over. ‘Food cycle shattered, crops failing. Most species went
extinct and the forests died. That, along with a catastrophic crash in global temperatures, pretty much did for civilization here.’
    ‘How many survivors?’ I asked, even as part of my mind refused to accept the evidence of my own eyes. I pictured them making the sign up and planting it in some remote region, in
order to fool me into believing their ridiculous story. But to what possible end? And was such a notion really any less lunatic than what they were telling me?
    ‘After the plagues and the