Sally walked along the muddy path towards Blackfryers Bridge, hitching her skirts back into place and biting chunks off the meat. It might have been from a pig, but she really didn’t know or care. It was mid-afternoon and the sun had finally succeeded in burning away the mist and taking the edge off the chill. She’d even managed to release the younger man from the burden of his wallet before saying goodbye to them both, so it had been a productive day so far.

Instead of taking the direct route, she turned left towards Angel Street, then ducked through a broken hole in the high, grand brick wall that marked the boundary of New Spring Gardens. They’d been fancy once, before she was born, or so her mum had told her, but those days were a long way back. There had been a settling in at the gardens, a lowering of sorts, which had been good news for Sally as it had brought with it new entrepreneurial options for an aspiring young lady such as herself. Where once there had been garden parties hosted for the Prince of Wales, now there were gatherings of an altogether more intimate sort. It was somewhat early for that, though, so there would still be families pushing prams and pretending that London was anything but a cesspit. Didn’t matter how rich you were, Sally always said, you still walked through the same shit in the street.

Walk far enough through the gardens and they’d emerge onto the banks of the Thames, that effluent-filled tide of sludge and filth that slithered its way through the city. Wasn’t a bad place to pick up some trinkets that’d sell at the market, mind, pilfering them from boats as they ferried those patrons too good to soil their boots on the roads. They could grow as many posh gardens as they wanted, but London would always win out in the end, turning everything to mud and filth, swallowing whatever people tried to build on it.

A couple with a picnic sat next to a bandstand were distracted by each other and Sally started calculating the risk of a minor acquisition. The gardens were designed very sympathetically for the petty thief, or the swift murderer, with tall hedges and winding mazes, row and row of ornate flowers and colonnades of trees. Disappearing was easy.

Before she had a chance to formulate a plan she heard a shout from behind and turned to see the young man from earlier, pointing, clearly enraged and striding toward her. Somehow he had followed her. Abandoning any plans for new endeavours, instead she darted towards the nearest secluded corner, where she could turn a corner and vanish into a different part of the gardens.

As she raced across the lawn, holding her skirts to avoid tripping and falling, the trees began to sway in the wind, which had moments before been only a light breeze. The picnicking couple leapt up in surprise as their lunch was blown across the green. Leaves began to whip from trees, despite it being late-spring. Sally squinted as a black dot appeared in the air, small at first but growing rapidly. She couldn’t tell if it was tiny and close or larger and far away, as it defied any kind of definition. Larger and larger it grew, roughly circular but in a warped and uneven way, like a bubble on oily water. It engulfed the bandstand, tearing away stone and brick and earth. Sally watched as the woman tried to first save her picnic blanket, then her partner as he was lifted from the ground and sucked towards the black shape.

Grit and dirt filling her eyes, Sally didn’t think to run. She was frozen to the spot by the impossibility of what was before her. Her pursuer was closer to the terrible thing and had fallen to the ground, where he was digging his nails into the soil to prevent himself from being dragged closer. She would have succumbed to the black void as well, if it had not abruptly slowed its growth, half-embedded in the soil, wide enough that she couldn’t see both ends through the trees. Much of New Spring Gardens was gone. A black, indescribable shape loomed over Lambeth marsh.

*

The energy burst was easy to spot for Just Enough. Even for an AI as experienced as they were, it was enough to give them pause. Only for a millisecond, of course. After sending out a burst transmission to the network, they then wasted no time in identifying a host in the vicinity of the anomalous reading. After the unnecessary but polite and customary handshake, Just Enough downloaded into it and found themselves standing on a bridge in London.

A quick location check confirmed that it was Blackfriars, on the Thames. They’d never been to London before, not directly, and had arrived just in time to witness all the glass from the west-facing side of one of the river-front skyscrapers torn from the building and sent down to the roads below. Just Enough checked that emergency services were already en route, which they were.

The most interesting sight was beyond the buildings, set back from the river somewhat in what was supposed to be a residential area. Instead, there were a gaping black shape, emerging from the ground, in a warped oval shape. Its edges fluctuated slightly, as if other forces were pressing at its circumference.

Just Enough had never seen anything like it, nor had any other AI or human in 2342. Comparing multiple datasets and hypotheses shared over the network, they reached a theory that it was most likely a wormhole of some sort. A tear in space-time. Given that it had emerged in the middle of an estate of London houses it seemed unlikely to have originated there, certainly not deliberately. They wondered whether it was a local portal, meaning to elsewhere in the universe, or a trans-dimensional portal, meaning to parallel universes. That would be interesting.

Crossing the bridge to the south, Just Enough moved in for a closer look. That was when they realised there was a second portal, further to the west towards Waterloo Bridge.

*

Staggering from the destruction of the east quarter of the university, a student touched a hand to her head and felt blood. She stared at the black nothingness that now sat in the ruins of Kaenamor’s laboratory, feeling its energy pulling at them even though the wind had at last subsided. There was another disturbance, perhaps half a mile away.

Sitting down on a pile of rubble, the student rubbed at her eyes, wondering how it could have happened. Shifting her gaze upward, she frowned at a once-familiar constellation. Adding to the strangeness of that evening, she was almost certain that two stars had entirely vanished from the night sky.

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