‘I made it work,’ Anderson snapped. ‘Your job now, if you want to stay on the right side of the fight, is to take the model that Dr Davis was using and make it work as well. I didn’t have time to complete it before this crisis erupted. Myrnin’s arrival pushed us into an accelerated timeline. I think we’ve gotten the situation contained, but if any communications made it back to Amelie, we may have a fight on our hands, and I need at least one more working device to be safe. So, you do that, and I’ll make sure your boyfriend and your other friends get out of this in one piece. Clear?’

‘Clear,’ Claire said. ‘Dr Davis’s gun didn’t work? That was a bluff?’

Dr Anderson shrugged. ‘I thought you’d recognise it, and it would slow you down so I could use the one that did.’

It was good strategy. Shane would have approved.

‘We’re ready here,’ said Dr Davis. His goons were strapping Myrnin into some kind of harness. Oliver had been taken out already, locked in a similar straitjacket. ‘Back to the farm?’

‘As quickly as possible,’ Dr Anderson said. ‘Nobody’s scheduled to come into this building until ten, but an early arrival could compromise everything. Let’s move out. We won’t be coming back here.’

The farm? Claire didn’t know if that was some kind of shorthand code, but it didn’t sound like the MIT lab, anyway. She went along with them quietly, and ended up sitting next to Myrnin. He was wrapped up like a mummy in the thick canvas jacket, and his head lolled forward so his dark hair cascaded down in waves to veil his face.

‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered to him. ‘I’m so sorry.’ She could feel the animal shuddering of his body, wave after wave of what was either pain, or terror, or both. ‘I never meant for this to happen, Myrnin, I swear. I just – I just didn’t see it.’

He turned his head toward her. She saw a red flash from his eyes from behind the curtain of his hair, and felt a brief pulse of something from him – hunger, anger, blind rage. Then he sighed, slipped to one side, and rested against the metal wall of the van. Chains clinked as he shifted. They hadn’t taken any chances, she saw; the chains were coated with silver, and so were the manacles around his wrists and ankles. It was burning him.

Oliver, across from her, was in a similar state, but he wasn’t trembling quite so badly. Maybe he’d just had more practice at handling fear and pain, or maybe he hadn’t gotten quite so bad a dose of VLAD’s medicine. But he didn’t look by any stretch good, either.

Last of all, they loaded Jesse.