“Whatever he’s doing. Beating you. Biting. Hanging you from a rafter. Cutting you. You see that scar Selan has? He came to talk to us about what he called a telephone cut – how a cut from ear to mouth that goes right through your cheek takes a long time to heal. How food and water leaks from it. How easily it gets infected. Then he said one of us would get a telephone cut before the week was out. Selan was the one he chose and everything he said about it was true. She almost died.

“And he rapes us, of course. They all do. For the others, it’s quick. With the Colonel, the more you scream, the more he likes it. He finds out what you hate most and that’s what he’ll do to you, over and over and over. Afterwards, he’ll ask – do you love me? He’ll rest your head on his shoulder and stroke your hair, and he’ll read to you about atrocities in history in a loving voice.” Petal shuddered.

“That’s what’s happening to my mother now?”

“Some version of it. I’m sorry. She’ll survive, though. It’s not her first time. All of us have been through it. We try to stop him taking the youngest girls, but we haven’t had a really young girl up here in a long time. Luckily, most of us aren’t fertile. Do you want me to go on?”

“No. How many of them are there now?”

“Toplanders? Forty or so. We never see them all at the same time, but that’s what we think. A handful are old, I mean, really old. In their sixties. Another twenty are middle aged. They need young males for the walls, and they’ve lost two in the last month. We used to get many people fleeing Bana, but that’s rare now. They need new recruits.”

Sorrel glanced around the barracks, counting twenty beds. “And how many of you?”

“In this barracks? Eight, counting your mother. But there’s another barracks with closer to twenty. They keep us apart as much as they can.”

“What else can you tell me?”

Petal shrugged. “Colonel Drax has a younger brother, Ganan. Drax blinded him with a torch. Made us all watch. Did it himself. Ganan hates him. Some of the younger Toplanders think Ganan should be colonel.”

“A blind man?”

“They want the family to stay in control.”

“Why hasn’t someone killed this Drax?

“You’d be surprised how well terror works to keep people from fighting back.”

“What kind of weapons do they have?”