He tried to get a sense of where he was, without looking up. The poor condition of the road surface, the echoing, the gloom of an occluded sky: he could only be in Paradise.

They’d been waiting for him, for both him and Madeleine, which was odd considering she’d changed their route on an ad-hoc basis. He was certain he wasn’t carrying a tracker, and no one would have dared get close enough to Madeleine to tag her. Neither had they been followed; she wouldn’t have allowed it.

His attackers pulled him up a ramp and into a building. He could see a bare concrete floor, stained and damp, and could feel a ceiling over him. Natural light seeped in behind, and he was facing a wall.

They dropped him without warning, and his face closed with the floor at alarming speed. He managed to turn his head in time not to break his nose, instead choosing to stun himself into insensibility again.

He lay there, quiet and still, and wondered what they were all waiting for.

He could hear a rhythmic grinding noise that grew louder. It stopped and, after a few moments, there was the unmistakable rattle of lift doors opening.

Two of the men reached down to pick Petrovitch up again, and he decided that he’d be damned if they were going to put him inside that metal cube. If he blinked, he could see the pile of bodies and the wash of blood.

“Stop,” he said, and they were so surprised that he was conscious and talking that they dropped him again. He managed to get his hands under him to partially break his fall.

The lift door started to close again, and one of the men stuck his boot in the way. The motors wheezed pathetically as they strained against the obstruction.

“I don’t want to go in the lift.”

“I don’t see how you’ve got any say in where you go or how you go,” said the man at the lift.

“I can walk,” said Petrovitch.

Someone laughed.

“I don’t think so,” said the man. “You barely look alive.”

Petrovitch looked up. The man’s face was a blur; he could just make out a shaved scalp and a black beard. That, or his head was on upside down. “Perhaps you shouldn’t have hit me so hard.”

“Like it matters.” He relented, and nodded to the men standing behind Petrovitch. “Get him to his feet. Let’s see him stand.”

Petrovitch was hauled upright, then steadied as he wavered. He lacked the visual cues that told him where vertical was. Something else was wrong, too. He put his hand to the side of his head to find his skin wet and sticky.

He stared at his palm, and scratched a pattern in the half-dried blood with his fingers.