“I used up every last bit of luck I had helping us all break free from Truman’s concentration camp. And after I escaped, in my desperation, I made the mistake of trying to drain the luck from an interdimensional traveller passing as human. It felt my touch immediately, and knew me for what I was. It . . . did something to me, and now my luck is always bad.” She smiled humourlessly. “After all these years of passing as a homeless person so I could get closer to my prey, now I’ve become what I pretended. Payback’s a bitch. What are you doing down here, Molly? I never wanted you to see me like this. What do you want from me?”

“I want to hire you as a tutor for the Drood family,” I said. “Teach them about the real world, and the things they don’t even know they don’t know. You’ll have to live at the Hall, and you’ll have to curb your . . . inclinations, but the pay will be more than good enough to buy you a whole new life once you leave us.”

“You see,” Molly said to Subway Sue, beaming widely. “Your luck has changed.”

“No,” said Subway Sue. She looked away from us and seemed to shrink in on herself. “Look at me. I’m no use to you like this.”

“Things will be better at the Hall,” I said. “We can fix you up, no matter what’s been done to you. We’ll make a new person out of you.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of,” said Subway Sue. “I’ve heard stories of what happens to people who get taken to the Drood family home.”

“Only some of them are true,” I said.

“Trust me,” said Molly. “I won’t let anything bad happen to you.”

“But what can I offer to the high and mighty Droods?” said Subway Sue. “What can I teach them that they don’t already know?”

“The strategies of survival,” I said. “How you survive, when you’ve lost everything you ever depended on.”

Subway Sue looked at me, and then at Molly. I did my best to smile reassuringly.

“Eddie’s running things at the Hall these days,” said Molly. “Things are different there now.”

“I need to open my family’s eyes to the kind of lives they don’t even know exist,” I said. “Come and be a tutor. Share your experience. Help shape how the Droods see the world.”

Subway Sue smiled briefly, but didn’t look convinced. “You and your family have been hunting me and my kind for centuries. Hunting us down like vermin, for the sin of being what we are. You have the blood of my family and my friends on your armoured hands, Drood. And you want me to work for you? I’m not that bad off.”