Suddenly her arms were around me, pulling my head down towards hers, her lips pushed against mine.

My nostrils filled with the scent of her; my senses were overwhelmed by the touch of her skin until I felt almost drunk on her. It had been so very, very long since I had held a woman in my arms, and I revelled in the smooth, soft sensuality of her body beneath the thin material of her shirt. I only gradually became aware that I was painfully erect.

Then, just as quickly, she was gone, running back into the night, vanished within seconds into the shadows of the nearby houses as she fled for the second time that day. I stared after her, speechless and bewildered and groggy and still full of the taste of her lips.

Some instinct made me turn to see Nadia standing on the steps behind me, with a look of terrible sadness on her face. I wondered how long she had been standing there, and how much she had seen.

‘I don’t understand what just happened,’ I said, waving my hand after Chloe. ‘Why did she—’

‘I’m sorry, Jerry,’ she said.

‘Sorry? What for?’ I demanded.

She opened her mouth, then seemed to change her mind about whatever she might have been about to say.

‘Just go home,’ she said instead, turning away.

‘Wait.’ I stepped closer. ‘Why did she—’

‘Go home,’ Nadia repeated, much more forcefully this time.

I watched Nadia disappear back inside the hotel, feeling nearly as distressed as I had the day I found myself being tracked through woods by a retrieval team intent on rescuing me – whether I liked it or not.

EIGHT

A week later, and not long before midnight, I reported to the base compound outside town, and the hangar housing the transfer stages.

I’d had little in the way of free time in the month following my release from quarantine. When I wasn’t undergoing weight-training and cardio in a gym, I was receiving constant check-ups and such a variety and quantity of shots that I eventually gave up asking what they were all for. One of my trainers, whose job was to teach me how to track both people and animals as well as evade them, claimed to be half-Navajo. I learned as best I could, and any remaining traces of fat in my body were soon replaced by lean, hard muscle.