Puzzled, I glanced at my skirt, my hands. I was dusty with travel, and my clothes were creased, but it was Mitch who appeared less than alive. I glanced at Gary, but he only said, “I’ve got cutters in the truck. Better than an adze for this door.” He turned back. I took his place by the wire.

“Mitch!” I said. “Mitchell, what’s happened? Why are you in there?”

“I wouldn’t stay when he said sit,” sighed Mitch. His sunken eyes were bright. “I never could, even if it’s for my own good. Our own good.”

Perhaps he had a fever. Or perhaps he had been sleeping—my mother was distant when she woke, as if still returning from far away.

I crouched down to Mitch’s level, holding the mesh. He touched my knuckles. His own were knobbled and dirty, his fingernails black. “We’ll get you out,” I said. Mitch pinched my fingers as if he was making sure they really were flesh and bone. “Gary will open this and I’ll take you home, Mitch— Ow!”

I wrenched my hand away and stumbled backwards. “You bit me!” His teeth had broken skin, and dark blood welled up, but for a moment shock warded off pain. An old emotion stirred: the urge to slap my brother across the ear.

“You can’t get me out,” said Mitch, dreamily, and added in a childish singsong, “We’ve been trying for years, yes we have, to get us out. Look.”

He shuffled around, letting the hessian fall. I forgot my own hurt. The back of his shirt was cut away. Dirty dressings, peeling from his pale skin, revealed long, red-edged seeping wounds. No wonder he wasn’t well.

Mitch shrugged the covering up again and turned, lifting his arms to show cuts at his wrist and underneath, from armpits to elbow. They were ragged, untended, but looked deliberate. I couldn’t imagine the purpose. Through all the scents of that room, I caught a putrid sweetness, somehow familiar.

“Nothing takes,” said Mitch, gently resigned. His face was sallow, and the thin skin of his eyelids hooded his gaze. It made him look like the languishing eagle. “All these birds. I liked catching them. They laugh at us, but then they die. They don’t help.”

“Don’t help what?”

“Old Dave says it will take this time, next time, it must. We have Dad’s papers. But it won’t, because it isn’t maths, it’s…” He frowned at the ceiling, head tilted to one side. “It’s law. She didn’t say we could stop being monsters, ever. But we’ll try; we’ve got help. I said you’d help us. That was my idea. Chris made me stop painting, but I was right, wasn’t I?”

I couldn’t answer. I’d grown so used to my mother’s relentless reasonableness.

His attention strayed. “So few feathers…”