Faik closed his eyes again. Perhaps he could wish it away.

“Get back from the door,” one of the guards ordered.

The metal scraped against the stone as the door was pushed back. The prisoners pressed themselves away from it and from the guards who now stepped inside.

“Three of you today,” one of them said. It was Donkey. He paused and turned to exchange a sneering grin with one of his colleagues.

He was carrying a cattle prod. He stabbed out with it three times.

“You, you and you.”

Faik was the third.

He struggled to his haunches and then tried to back away.

But there was nowhere to go.

His knees started to shake uncontrollably.

The guards rushed into the small cell. They took the first man by the arms and hauled him outside. The man was cuffed and shackled. He was too stunned to struggle.

The second man, an oil worker who had been arrested at the same time as Faik, was ready for them. He swung a punch at the first man, the blow sinking into the man’s gut, and then he threw himself at the other two. There was a crackle of electricity as the cattle prod was rammed into his chest. The voltage dropped him to the floor of the cell just as quickly as if he had been drilled in the head. He was still twitching as the guards pulled him outside and cuffed him.

They came back for Faik. He tried to resist, but he was smaller than they were, and he hadn’t slept or eaten properly for days. He was as weak as a kitten. They tugged him outside and cuffed him. A sack was pulled over his head, and he was manhandled down the corridor. They turned once, twice, and then a door was opened, and fresh morning air kissed his sweating skin.

“Please,” he said. “Please, don’t. I have a sister. Our parents are dead. She needs me.”

“You should have thought of that,” Donkey hissed into his ear.

The arms on either side of him were withdrawn, and unsupported, he fell to his knees.

The sack was removed.

He was in the main yard, the walls topped with coiled razor wire a short distance away from him. There was a crowd of people inside the yard. Several hundred. Prisoners, roused from their sleep to partake in a chastening spectacle. Guards, too. Some of them had cameras. The atmosphere was a strange mixture of the festive and the frightened. The prisoners knew that the condemned men could just as easily be them. The guards knew that, too. It was a chance to bolster their position. They would use the morning’s display to reinforce their authority.

Fear made men docile.