happen. You’ll be on the outside again. You’ll see us walking past you, pushing through the barriers, taking control of your crime scenes and stripping them of whatever we want, and you won’t be part of it any more. Can you stand that? Having taken that peek over the garden wall into the wilderness, can you really pretend that it doesn’t exist and that the garden – the nicely ordered garden – is all there is?’

‘Go to hell,’ she said bleakly. ‘You know I can’t.’

‘Go to your restaurant. Make small talk with your friends. Fashion, politics, house prices, sport… It really doesn’t mean anything. Not when it’s compared with the stuff that’s drifting in through the Rift. This is real life. Down there – it’s just fantasy.’

She turned away and pushed open the door that led down through the interior of the building. Twenty minutes to get to the restaurant, and she still had to get back to the Hub and retrieve her handbag and her high heels. Just for once, couldn’t they each get the chance to take one thing from the shelves and the storerooms in the Hub – one thing that would make their lives easier? A teleporter. That was all she wanted. Something to get her from A to B without having to go to all the tedious trouble of crossing the intervening ground.

The wind suddenly gusted around her, pushing her roughly against the doorframe. She thought she heard a flutter behind her, like cloth being blown away. She turned back, but the sky was completely black now, and if Jack was there then she couldn’t see him.

Owen was daydreaming, sitting at his bench in the darkened underground space of the Hub and letting his mind drift away into the higher levels of the empty atrium, up where the brickwork wasn’t quite so damp and the blanked-off ends of Victorian sewer pipes projected from the wall.

Sometimes, in the quieter moments – the moments between frantic chases around Cardiff in search of some piece of alien technology and long periods spent at his bench or in his lab dissecting out the form and function of the biological things they found – Owen daydreamed about writing up some of his stranger investigations in a magazine of some sort. The magazine didn’t exist, of course. There was no Journal of Comparative Alien Anatomy, nor even an Extra-Terrestrial Biology Quarterly. There was no convention he could go to where he could present his results. There was nowhere for him to get any recognition for the things he had discovered. Or even to record them for posterity before he started forgetting, went mad, or died, unremarked.

It made him feel angry and frustrated, sometimes, the amount of stuff that he knew but could never tell anyone. And who else was there to tell? Torchwood Cardiff: five people, rushing around trying to solve all the problems they could, with barely enough time left over to get on with their own personal lives, let alone sit down over a cup of coffee and chat about chlorine-based enzyme chemistry and anomalies in osmotic transfer rates.

And only one of them had any medical training.

It was a waste. A real waste. Owen had discovered so much during his time working in the Hub. Things nobody else on Earth knew. The bizarre secrets of Weevil sex, for instance, which had almost made him throw up the first time he learned about them but went a long way towards explaining the expressions on the faces of the creatures. The various senses that creatures could have in place of sight and hearing, including things like biological radar that Owen would have thought impossible unless he’d actually experienced them. The way that vast diaphanous creatures could slip through rock with the same ease that whales slipped through water. The existence of single beings that took the form of flocks of bird-like creatures, with each little part being an irreplaceable part of the whole.

There were times he felt he knew so much about alien biology that he would burst, and yet he was just scratching the surface.

And that was just with the equipment he had: cutting edge, of course, but cutting edge for Earth. There were alien things on the shelf in Torchwood that would allow him to watch biochemical reactions on the cellular level like he was watching a movie, or to guide minute robotic scalpels along arteries by the power of thought alone. And they would stay on the shelves.