Lyra was awake early.
Shed had a horrible dream: she had been given the vacuum flask shed seen her father, Lord Asriel, show to the Master and Scholars of Jordan College. When that had really happened, Lyra had been hiding in the wardrobe, and shed watched as Lord Asriel opehe flask to show the Scholars the severed head of Stanislaus Grumman, the lost explorer; but in her dream, Lyra had to open the flask herself, and she didnt want to. In fact, she was terrified. But she had to do it, whether she wao or not, and she felt her hands weakening with dread as she undipped the lid and heard the air rash into the frozen chamber. Then she lifted the lid away, nearly choking with fear but knowing she had to—she had to do it. And there was nothing ihe head had gohere was nothing to be afraid of.
But she awoke all the same, g and sweating, i little bedroom fag the harbor, with the moonlight streaming through the window, and lay in someone elses bed clutg someone elses pillow, with the ermine Pantalaimon nuzzling her and making soothing noises. Oh, she was shtened! And how odd it was, that in real life she had been eager to see the head of Stanislaus Grumman, and had begged Lord Asriel to open the flask again a her look, a in her dream she was so terrified.
When m came, she asked the alethiometer what the dream meant, but all it said was, It was a dream about a head.
She thought of waking the strange boy, but he was so deeply asleep that she decided not to.
Instead, she went down to the kit and tried to make ae, and twenty minutes later she sat down at a table on the pavement and ate the blaed, gritty thing with great pride while the sparrow Pantalaimon pecked at the bits of shell.
She heard a sound behind her, and there was Will, heavy-eyed with sleep.
"I make omelette," she said. "Ill make you some if you like."
He looked at her plate and said, "No, Ill have some cereal. Theres still some milk in the fridge thats all right. They t have been gone very long, the people who lived here."
She watched him shake flakes into a boour milk on them—something else shed never seen before.
He carried the bowl outside and said, "If you dont e from this world, wheres your world? How did you get here?"
"Over a bridge. My father made this bridge, and ... I followed him across. But hes gone somewhere else, I dont know where. I dont care. But while I was walking across there was so much fog, and I got lost, I think. I walked around in the fog for days just eating berries and stuff I found. Then one day the fog cleared, and on that cliff back there—"
She gestured behind her. Will looked along the shore, past the lighthouse, and saw the coast rising in a great series of cliffs that disappeared into the haze of the distance.
"And we saw the town here, and came down, but there was no one here. At least there were things to eat ao sleep in. We didnt know what to do ."
"You sure this isnt another part of your world?"
"Course. This ent my world, I know that for certain."
Will remembered his own absolute certainty, on seeing the patch of grass through the window in the air, that it wasnt in his world, and he nodded.
"So theres three worlds at least that are joined on," he said.
"Theres millions and millions," Lyra said. "This other daemon told me. He was a witchs daemon.
No one t how many worlds there are, all in the same space, but no one could get fro