Poodle reached up slowly with her hand to touch the blade, to see if it was real. Her slender fingers brushed the razor tip of the steel.

It was real.

SCHWURP…

The blade disappeared, sucked back into her chest. Gone, as if by magic, as if it had never been there.

Poodle coughed.

Inside her throat there was a surge of hot iron-tang flavoured blood. She coughed and tried to swallow to force it back down but the eruption was too much.

Her punctured lungs spasmed and she coughed again and this time the blood escaped her mouth, spraying outwards in a fine mist, landing on the pale flesh of her face and on her hands.

She coughed again, blood now pouring uncontrollably from her mouth.

She took a step forward but found that her legs seemed to be only partially under her control. They felt as if they were made of lead.

She took another step, weaving uncertainly. Heading towards the door. Maybe she could get to the door, get out through the panel. If only she could get into the yard…

In her peripheral vision, she saw something moving in the shadows, past her towards the doorway, cutting off her route of escape. In the darkness, she glimpsed the flash of steel.

Poodle walked towards the door, the hardest walking she had ever done in her life, the hardest walking she would ever do in her life.

Almost at the door now. She just needed to get to the door.

But then a figure stepped forward, its upper half cloaked in shadow.

Poodle gasped and staggered back two steps. She opened her mouth to scream, but instead she gurgled and more blood came out of her mouth.

Out of the darkness, the glinting blade came around horizontally, clutched in a black leather-gloved hand, the razor edge turned towards her. She noted mathematically that the intersection point of its trajectory was precisely where her throat was.

And then the blade made contact, although it did not halt. Its arc continued and terminated, having travelled almost one hundred and eighty degrees from its starting point.

The figure stepped fully out of the shadows to reveal itself as a jet of hot arterial blood gushed up the side of Poodle’s face.

Chapter 19

They’d been locked down for over two hours now with no explanation as to the reason why. Bailey had been spending the time lying on her bunk plugged into her iPod, listening all the way through her entire collection of eighties power ballads. She’d come to the realisation that Whitesnake’s ‘Is This Love’ was actually a much better track than she’d given it credit for up until now, although it was still nowhere near as good as her all-time favourite, ‘Kayleigh’ by Marillion, which she could listen to endlessly on repeat.

She unplugged herself and stood up and stretched. She walked over to the small window of the cell and gazed out across the yard at the huge grey walls topped with multiple coils of razor wire, the tiny vicious blades sparkling orange in the light of the setting sun. Sharon lay on her bunk, engrossed in a women’s lifestyle magazine.