I cried out as I hit the floor. At the same instant, the walls of the chamber lit up and a transparent barrier hissed down like the blade of a well-oiled guillotine, sealing the doorway.

Adam was still outside, in the corridor. His hands were splayed against the clear material, trying to find a way to open it.

I struggled to my feet.

His fists battered soundlessly against the door, then stopped as he realised it was useless. Behind him, the soldiers raised their weapons. I called his name but he couldn’t hear me. For a frozen, helpless moment, all I could do was stare into his eyes.

He started to mouth the words, “I love you.” But the guns spat before he could finish. He slammed up against the see-through door, twitching and flailing like a man caught in the teeth of a lion. I saw his right shoulder explode and his arm come loose, the exposed bones appallingly white in the wan light from the walls, the blood sickeningly red. And still they fired. They riddled him until long after he was dead, until it was only the smack of the bullets that held him upright and pinned to the barrier between us. Only when there was almost nothing recognisable about him and no chance that even a flicker of life remained did the firing stop. He slid awkwardly to the floor, leaving a thick slaughterhouse smear on the impenetrable glass. I stared at the bloody clumps of hair, the unidentifiable pieces of gristle and sharp little chips of bone, and I screamed. But it wasn’t a scream of fear; it was a scream filled with grief, guilt and rage, and an almost uncontrollable urge to break through that door and rip the armoured soldiers apart with my clawed fingers, to tear off their helmets and gouge out their eyes, to throttle them, and crack their heads against the floor until there was nothing left. To obliterate them as thoroughly as they had obliterated Adam.

As they advanced towards me, I railed and swore and slapped the glass. I had been running for two days—I had been running for years—and now I had had enough. A line had been crossed. Something snapped inside, and I didn’t even care if they killed me too, as long as I got the chance to fight back, to punish the men that had murdered my friend, and kick against the pricks that had skewered my soul since the burning of Pelapatarn. If I had known how to open the barrier between us, I believe I would have charged them.

Instead, before they had covered half the distance to where I stood, the little room I was in began to move backwards. It pulled away from the corridor—and Adam’s shattered body—and gradually withdrew until all I could see of the corridor was a tiny oblong of light adrift in a vast and impenetrable darkness.