They pushed him inside the elevator and forced him to his knees, then hauled him back out, once they had arrived at the ground floor. Ty managed to find his feet, and was shoved towards a steel door at the far end of the corridor, a thin but freezing trickle of cold air seeping past its frame and carrying with it the scent of oiled metal and decay. One of the guards stepped forward and unlocked the door, revealing stacked pallets as it swung open.

Ty clenched his teeth at the blast of frozen air and tried to hunch up, his paper uniform providing him with so little protection that he might as well have been naked.

He realized he was weeping as they dragged and shoved him out into the courtyard. Everything seemed to get a little farther away, as if he were experiencing the world at one remove, reduced to being a passenger within his own skull.

They pulled him towards the wall at the rear of the courtyard. He was close enough now that he could make out the dark stains where the wall met the ground. For the first time, he saw a door set into the wall over to his right, where it had been hidden from his view in the cell by a pile of crates. It stood open, a military transport parked on the street outside. A guard stood by the door, his visor pushed up, arguing with two men who looked too healthy and well fed to come from Ascension.

One had a thick woollen hat pulled down over his stubbled skull, but Ty still saw the irregular grooves and bumps disfiguring his cranium, which marked him out as a machine-head. He was tall and gangly, with a worried expression, whereas his companion was small but wiry and muscular-looking. The second one’s gaze locked on to Ty the instant he came into view.

‘That’s him,’ Ty heard him say, over the unending hubbub of activity. The machine-head glanced first at his companion, then at Ty. Then they both pushed past the guard they’d been talking to and headed straight for him.

‘Hey!’ the guard shouted, dropping his rifle from his shoulder and following them. ‘You can’t—’

‘The fuck?’ said the machine-head’s companion, stopping for a moment to glare back at the guard. ‘What was it about our authorization you didn’t understand?’

Ty’s own guards had halted at the commotion, but then they seemed to come to some mutual, unspoken decision and resumed pushing him towards the wall.

‘Hey, stop right there!’ shouted the small, muscled man. ‘Don’t take another single fucking step. Do you understand?’

‘We have orders,’ one of Ty’s guards grated. ‘If you’ve got a problem with it, take it up with Director Kosac’