This place smelt. This whole world smelt. They’d taken her away in a vehicle, when she’d been injured, and they’d tried to make her lie down and put a mask over her face. She’d tried to tell them that she just needed to go and heal herself, but they didn’t listen, they just said stupid things to her.

The gas hadn’t knocked her out, and when they noticed that, they’d taken off the mask and started talking excitedly to each other. They wheeled her into this place on a trolley.

So she’d opened the pouch in her wrist, and pulled out the bulb, and then they’d started to scream.

Through the haze of her vision, the little girl saw that, ahead of her, a nurse had fallen, pulling over a trolley of instruments as she did. The body lay across the junction of two corridors and was still fairly intact. Aphasia redoubled her efforts to walk and stumbled to her knees beside the body.

The wrist pouch wouldn’t close. She’d die if she didn’t do something soon and that’d let down all her fathers and her dear son, Hoff.

She reached for the nurse’s decaying face, and started to feed.

‘Sir!’

Smith, despite his intentions, was deep in Mansfield Park when he heard the shout.

He waved a hand distractedly⁠ —

⁠— and found a cricket ball in it.

The schoolboys applauded and whistled. Smith tossed the ball back to the bowler and bowed exaggeratedly.

‘That could have taken your head off, sir!’ said Phipps, awed.

‘Oh, probably not. Still, someone must be looking after me…’ Smith would have turned his attention back to his book, but the boys became agitated again, a great whispering and the occasional whistle disturbing those sitting beside him.

He looked up to see his niece, dressed in very tight trousers, running frantically across the ground towards him. The batsmen paused as she ran between the wickets, their gaze following her, awestruck.

As soon as Bernice reached the little rise where Smith was sitting, she was offered a flurry of jackets and pullovers to cover herself with, as well as a panama hat from the laconic Alton. She waved them all aside, grabbed Smith’s hand and hauled him to his feet.

‘Come on,’ she said. ‘I’ve got something to show you.’ The boys coughed and muttered things, and a few grins sprang up.

‘I haven’t time…’ Smith looked around in confusion. ‘This is Bernice, my niece. Bernice, these are my boys.’

‘There’s no time for that. You must come with me, it’s a matter of life and death.’

‘It is?’ Smith squared his jaw. ‘Very well. Lead on.’ He pointed stoically and marched off, then glanced back. ‘Shall I bring some of the boys?’

‘No,’ Benny told him. ‘Just bring yourself.’