She loved food. He liked that.

A lot of people loved to eat, loved taste, loved indulgence, but not many could be said to love food itself. He would catch her looking hungrily at cookbooks in shop windows as they passed. Hungry for the lovingly prepared presentations on their glossy covers, and the ideas contained within.

She loved it best when someone suggested cardamom ice-cream, or roast pork with peach gravy, or roulade of beef with whipped potato and radish cream, and she got to taste, in her mind, something she had never thought of before. Could tell how it fit together, or laugh at the absurdity. He loved that laugh.

In 2046, mankind struck out into space. It was not the thrill of adventure that drove them, nor the quest for new horizons. It was fear. Satellites and space stations were rafted together to form the foundations of Orbit 1 and first governments, then the rich, then anyone there was room for boarded shuttles and moved off the surface. The surface was no longer safe.

Something had been disturbed. Something which had lain aslumber for countless aeons, dreaming in the deep. People began to go missing at first, and then it was towns – gaping holes rent in the earth where once had been streets and buildings. It was clear, before long, that this was no natural phenomena. Things were burrowing, beneath the soil, tearing through rock like water. They could not be tracked, and so could not be fought. More towns disappeared, then cities. Mankind turned, in terror, and fled.

Clara picked up the bottle and two empty glasses from the dresser and followed the man out the door. She leaned against the railing of the balcony as she watched him make his way down the stairs and across the saloon, stepping over drunks and around fights, until he was out the door and into the dusk. He didn’t look back.

She had stopped asking why it was that the man paid for a service he didn’t use. Stopped seeing it as a rebuke, and started appreciating the hours, once every few months, away from the pawing hands of those brutes below.
“Clara!”
Dale had seen her standing idle, and she fully expected to be punished for it. At least he didn’t take it in trade.
“You’ve got a customer!” he called, a leering grin splitting his face as he gestured at a sweating hulk of a man sitting across the bar from him. “Marcus sent him to you ‘specially.”
She shuddered inwardly. The man did not look kind. But, if Marcus had sent him, there was little she could do, so she composed herself and started down the stairs.

“I think when it comes to it nobody really believes the human race deserves to be saved because we’re particularly deserving. Some people might think we deserve it because we’re particularly clever, but cleverness is the kind of thing that you only recognise or care about through cleverness. The universe doesn’t care about cleverness. The universe probably doesn’t even know about cleverness.

If we deserve to be saved at all, it’s because of days like that. Perfect days.

The gulf between people is so wide, it cannot be crossed. But it can be bridged. If we can connect with each other, in such a perfect day, maybe we can connect to the universe. Maybe we can prove that we were here. Maybe that’s enough.

All I know is, if there is a judgement, if my soul must be put on trial when all of this is through, I will hold that day out as evidence, and I will not say a word.”

The sun was setting far out on the horizon, sinking into dust. The pumpjacks were cast into stark silhouette, silent and still, like a herd of mechanical behemoth wild horses frozen in their gallop out across the frontier.
It was fitting, thought Clara. “The horses that carried us stopped, so we climbed down to rest.”
“Never got back on,” came the voice from behind her. He didn’t need to ask what she meant. “Maybe never will.”

“Your hour’s up,” she said, turning from the window and back to the room. Her client lay on the bed, just like the others, but the only thing he had taken off was his boots. He sat up, swinging his legs off the edge of the bed and set about relacing those boots now. “Sorry. I don’t mean to be rude, but Dale would kill me if I gave you a second more’n you paid.”
“Dale doesn’t own you,” he frowned, fishing a few notes, more than he owed, from his pocket and handing them to her.
She laughed. “Marcus owns Dale, and Marcus might as well own me, so it amounts to the same thing.”
He crossed to the door, stopping with his hand on the knob to look back over his shoulder. “Marcus owns the water and the power,” he said, “so he might as well own us all.”

They ran from Vile Lane to the East Arm. A small slice of city steeped in their sweat and blood. It had been a childhood game at first, but what started as play turned to pride, then to war. The Briar Patch Boys ran these streets now. They were these streets.

To the South was Bulger territory. The border was marked on no maps, but both sides knew it to a stone. The unspoken agreement was a civil one: the Bulgers did not want the empty warehouses and winding alleyways of businesses and families on the poverty line; the Briars did not want a massacre. The civility, however, would only last so long as there were no incursions over that unseen border — not on gang business, not in gang colours. It had never been tested, but both sides knew it and both sides respected it.

Eamonn the Three stood at the top of Vile Lane. His toe traced a familiar cobblestone through his worn boots. He was lost in thought and did not notice the children behind him, each of whom he knew by name, stop in their play. His right hand, usually gloved, hung bare at his side: two fingers and a thumb twisting slowly as though reading the gusty wind, two stumps causing a stir of whispered conversation from the children. Most of them saw him every day, but few had seen that hand ungloved. It was the stuff of rumour and legend. Few of the children agreed on how it had happened, but most assumed it was the reason for his name. It made sense, after all; everyone knew someone who knew someone who confirmed that Alysson the Three’s left hand was the same. They were wrong about the name. The name had come before. That was important; especially today.

He clenched his hand into a three-fingered fist, and began to walk.

In practice, nothing will ever work one hundred percent of the time. Apart from some crazy idealists (who posit that since theory and practice are never the same and since in theory nothing ever works perfectly in practice, in practice it is possible to make something that works perfectly, and who almost never go on second dates) this has been widely recognised amongst scientists and inventors for a long time. It is only recently, however, that it has been purposely exploited.

There will always be circumstances, the logic goes, in which a particular device will not work. These circumstances can obviously be changed through careful engineering: that is why there are scuba watches and hiking watches and watches with little things that go bing. What if, the logic continues after a stiff drink, we engineer those circumstances away into increasingly unlikely areas? Don’t make a watch that keeps perfect time unless you get it wet, make a watch that keeps perfect time unless it is worn by Henry VIII. Don’t make a camera that takes brilliant pictures in daylight, but rather murky grainy ones at night, make a camera that takes brilliant pictures unless you happen to be taking a picture of a wooly mammoth. Not only that, but it may be possible to engineer fantastically unlikely devices that only work in an incredibly unlikely but easily reproducible set of circumstances, such as the user hopping on one leg whilst humming Flight of the Bumblebees. By this time the logic is sprawled under the table and the bouncer is rolling up his sleeves.

Henry flicked through the pictures on his camera, each one a blurry blob and each one blurrier and blobbier than the last. It was no good. He swore under his breath. The light was all wrong now, anyway. He looked at the digital watch on his wrist; it read ’18:32:07′, and below that the date ’07/14/98′. The seconds ticked over, at a rate of about one per second if the watch was anything to go by. It wasn’t, so he pulled a second watch from his pocket. This one was a pocket-watch, as one might have guessed, and had been passed down to him by his father, Harry, and before that his grandfather, Hank. He thumbed the catch and flicked it open. Six thirty-three. He was mildly surprised. Not that the digital watch was keeping correct time, for although he had set it again this very morning it was now out by exactly three weeks, but that any of its digits even vaguely resembled something accurate.

His last girlfriend had expressed a frustration that he wouldn’t just stop wearing the thing. He himself had expressed a concern that his fellows would not take him seriously without a digital watch (after all, the reverse was true). At this point, she had expressed a desire to date other people. Well, and good riddance anyway. His friends had always been surprised he was dating her in the first place. (This was not strictly true. Indeed, in some ways, it was strictly untrue. What his friends were surprised at was that she was dating him.) He swore once more for good measure, tossed the camera onto the passenger seat, and pulled out onto Ocean Avenue.

“My mother was a rockstar. None of that commercial bullshit they have these days, either. Honest-to-goodness, fuck-the-man punk rock. Chances are you’ve heard her play. Maybe the more vinylly-obsessive of you would even recognise the name. But I’m not going to tell you her name. I only mention her by way of showing that I had an education.”

“My father is an engineer. I don’t know what he does to put food on the table – I don’t have ‘clearance’ for that – but while he’s at home he tinkers. And you can bet I got an education there, too.”

“At a certain age it becomes cool to not like what your parents like, but mine weren’t just passionate, they were obsessive, and that kind of thing rubs off. Besides, rebelling against punk rock is just stupid.”

“Mom left eight years ago, leaving Dad with a 10-year-old girl to raise and a bemused expression on his face. It’s not like she was a bad mother. She was a great mother. I guess the sacred institution of marriage just doesn’t gel with punk sensibilities. And it’s not like she would have just never called again, only her plane went down on the way back from some ‘Free Tibet’ gig, and the afterlife doesn’t have visitation. So that leaves me and Dad. Dad and I. He’s a bit of a flake, and hardly the best-equipped single parent of a teenage daughter, but Mom’s punk streak saw me through the worst of the horror that is highschool. Maybe you’d say it was Mom’s cynicism. Fuck you. Besides, my Dad is my Dad, and that’s always been enough for me.”

As he walked down the street, houses loomed out of the gloaming on either side. They were now indistinct, now perfectly clear but somehow wrong, now indistinct again and passed away behind him. His footsteps took him faster than they should have and soon, without noticing, he was on another street; one that was not his own. Looking behind he could not see where he had come from. Looking ahead a cathedral, tall gothic edifice, loomed menacing under the glow once more blooming in the sky. High above, a large circular stained glass window. The picture was unclear from this angle, but light flickered from behind it that was not the light in the sky.

The main portal was barred, but those to the sides were not. Inside, hundreds of candles lined walls and floor. They flickered as one as he swung the door closed with a dull boom. He craned his neck upwards, but still could not make out the stained glass. Lowering his gaze as he moved into the cathedral proper, he gasped for the first time. The nave extended ahead of him some fifty feet, lined by candles and pews, then ended abruptly, giving way to only void. As he moved forwards the glow bloomed again, its source visible to him now as a distant pillar of flame that rose and fell from somewhere far in the distance. It cast into stark relief the torn edge of the cathedral: walls and roof and floor jagged as if some giant hand had torn the rear of the building off in a fierce rage. He came to the edge, and could see arrayed far beneath him what he could only assume was a junkyard. Towering piles of jagged shapes, their size impossible to judge but clearly vast, were all that could be seen from here to the horizon where the pillar of flame flared once more. Directly below, the ground was lost in darkness.
“Impressive, isn’t it?”

He jumped, thankful that he had not been leaning outwards at the time, and turned to the left to see a girl sitting with her legs dangling over the edge. She had been hidden from sight behind the pews as he had entered.
“I come here sometimes to look at it. I don’t know what it means, but I think it’s impressive,” she looked up at him with a strange expression on her face. “You’re the first other person I’ve met here, though.”
“Have we met before?” he asked. “You seem familiar.”
She laughed. “Even in a dream that’s a lame pick-up line.”
“I wasn’t…” he started.
“We haven’t met,” she interrupted, standing and extending her hand. “I’m Alice.”
“Peter.”
They shook hands, then turned back to regard the junkyard. Peter was about to open his mouth again when the pillar of flame flared once more – violently this time, twisting and leaping upwards with a low roar that seemed to grow as it echoed. Alice grabbed his hand. She turned to face him but the ground lurched and anything she said was lost as the roar turned deafening.

The ground bucked and shifted and Peter tightened his grip on Alice’s hand, beginning to back away from the edge. It was too late. A horrible lurch and he was on his stomach and she was over the edge. Their grip still held, and Peter scrabbled to maintain purchase, but he could no longer see her – no longer see the hand that held her. The roar began to subside and he strained to pull her upwards. His hand came into view, then hers, then the ground gave one last heave and suddenly he was holding air. He hurled himself to the edge, drew breath to shout, then woke in a cold sweat to his own bedroom.

The room was so dark that at first he wasn’t sure his eyes were open. He wandered down the hall and into the living room. The clock on the DVD player flashed a sickly green “88:88” mournfully, clearly as lost as he was. The front door was not locked. Outside the grass felt strange under his bare feet. Indistinct. It was green, too; green, where it should have been grey. Everything else was grey in this murky light. Gloaming. That’s what they called it.

There was something off about the street. It looked precisely as he would describe his street in this light, this gloaming. That was the problem. It was as if it was a set built by someone who had heard that description, but had not thought to fill in the details. Broad brushstrokes, like a child’s painting of brick, mortar, asphalt, grass and azaleas. Away to the left, away from the cul-de-sac, the sky bloomed yellow and orange over the distant, indistinct grey blobs in the middle distance. It was not dawn; more like an explosion he could not see or hear lighting the low-hanging clouds from below.

His mind clicked into place, finally fully awake. He had had this dream before.