I really am alone.

Just like he’d said, here she was, floating — or falling — through an ocean of featureless white. Like a nugget of breakfast cereal see-sawing down through an impossibly large bowl of milk.

Stay calm, Sal.

Swirling featureless white all around her. She held her hand up only a dozen inches away from her face and it was so faint, fogged by the mist. She waved it around and felt the air, as thick as liquid, resist her movements. She looked up, hoping to see the faint form of one of the others flailing above her, but she saw nothing but more white.

Maybe I AM all alone.

She wondered whether she was in her very own milk-coloured universe, or whether the others were out there somewhere. Perhaps nearby. Perhaps just beyond sight. She wondered if anyone ever got lost in here, never to emerge at the other end. Doomed to spend eternity swirling and flailing. You’d go insane, wouldn’t you? With nothing to see, hear, smell or feel, you’d go completely insane.

She decided it was probably best not to think about this kind of stuff. But then her mind had more unwelcome questions it wanted to ask.

What if that’s what the creepy-movey things are? Other travellers … maybe even other TimeRiders who’ve lost their way? Got stuck here for eternity?

She could all too easily conjure up the image of another girl just like her, lost for endless centuries in here: eyes fogged by madness, opaque like those of a boiled fish, and cackling like an old woman — a mind rubbed smooth of meaningful thought and left utterly, utterly insane.

This really isn’t helping, stupid. Think of something else.

She decided she’d rather she was on her own; catching a glimpse of something out there, faint and moving, was the last thing she needed to see right now, so she closed her eyes.

Almost as soon as she’d done that, she felt the ground suddenly return beneath her feet.