The shift between the worlds was always marked by a sudden shift in air pressure that made Imran Bell’s ears pop. Stepping back through the brass Courtesy Arch into the rear of his Ford Transit, the heavy smell of Yorkshire rain, wet asphalt, and lukewarm diesel exhaust replaced the lime-and-sulfur reek of Lathmere. Through the van’s rear windows, the brick chimneys and sodium streetlights of a heavy-duty trading estate near Leeds looked solid, dull, and profoundly ordinary.
Imran sat on an upturned plastic chemical crate. He took off his steel-toed boots to shake out a pinch of Lathmere river grit. His body felt heavy with body fatigue, his arms aching from the tension of guiding forty feet of living colonial tissue through an underground vault. But he closed his eyes to rub the bridge of his nose. Then, something never seen before occurred behind his eyelids. The dark space didn’t go blank. It resolved into a faint, glowing web of aimed vectors, pulsing with rhythmic amber lines.
He opened his eyes. The van floor was fully normal. He closed them again, focusing his attention on the damp brick wall of the warehouse ten feet away. In the darkness, he could see a tiny cluster of six glowing dots moving in an uneven spiral through the mortar cavity—a small colony of common woodlice navigating a damp seam behind the plasterboard. The senses lasted exactly six seconds, clear as a blueprint diagram, before fading like an afterimage into ordinary blackness.
