‘We tried to show her,’ Ellis sighed. ‘We really did.’

Olivia pushed up off her chair and in a single jolt was up and rushing towards Petra; she smacked into her, or should have smacked into her, but it felt more like a sting of scouring sand on a windswept beach, millions of tiny, sharp particles on her skin, into her skin, through her – and then stopping, the particles falling through her body, into Petra’s feet and through her soles into the floor. Petra felt grazed and infected in every cell, every corpuscle and nerve ending itching microscopically, and then Olivia was standing inside her, her body pressed weightlessly into her own, an electric buzz sizzling between them. From inside her skull, Olivia put her lips an atom away from her ear where her cold ghost breath rotted.

‘Petra,’ she whispered directly into her brain stem. ‘You are talking to the dead.’

Olivia stepped away, pulling the sharp particular charge with her out of Petra’s body and off her skin, like a shear of dry wax from every follicle, and then she was disconnected.

Petra ran, propelled by an explosive aversion in every cell of her body. She’d sprinted out of the room and down the main stairwell before she even realised she was in control of her movements. It was only when she pushed through the main doors of the dining room that the nausea hit, along with a sweat-dousing feverish chill. Propping herself against the tiled wall, she recognised the glass panes and steel vats of the brew room that doubled as a kitchen. She was approaching the room from the far side, and ahead of her would be the main lobby and the way to the staff changing rooms and her clothes, the keys to Suki’s car. Hearing a scuffle ahead, seeing a familiar shape, Petra hurried across the echoing space.

‘Vincent?’

Was that music up ahead? The sound of a harp?

She followed a short passage towards a brightly lit archway; beyond, she was relieved to recognise the narrow, utilitarian passage where she’d looked in on Vincent and Beccie. A little way beyond, the bronze-lit cave was still shining through the window, and when Petra approached, she saw Vincent standing where he’d last been when Beccie had deserted him.

She rushed into the room, shoving the door through the sand caked on the floor, and then remembered with a twinge in her elbow what had happened the last time she’d reached for him. Was this the original cavern or the one that had been projected to her up in the Club Room? Gingerly she felt the air in front as she slowly approached.

‘Let’s go home,’ she said, testing for a reaction.