Tim looked around for anything to end it quickly. But he found nothing. It was just the basement of a pub. Plastic menus and beer mats. Nothing for a quick departure. Upstairs, there were knives and things like that. But that would make a mess.

Tim sighed and then suddenly knew what they had to do. And he didn’t want to do it. Dear God, he didn’t want to do it. But they had to. He had to.

“You have to hold her limbs down,” Tim said.

Amber looked at him. “How is that going to...?” She trailed off and then it clicked in her head. “Oooh, what are you going to do with her? Are you going to smother her? Strangle her? Maybe you should just throw her in the fire, or...”

Tim couldn’t meet her eyes. “Just bloody do it, okay.”

Amber let go of Tim’s hand, and approached the woman. She was incredibly calm—maybe bringing her in had been a terrible idea. She was crazy—Edmund was right. But then, this whole situation was crazy. And it was going to get a lot worse before it got better.

Tim thought of the group. He pictured them in his mind. He had to do this for them. Or it was over. They’d never see one another again. All get shipped off to different pens, prodded and poked, and made to eat sludge, and told when to piss and shit. That wasn’t any destiny for any of them. And this insipid imbecile, this stupid bitch, had threatened to take that all away, because of her blundering incompetence. She deserved it.

Amber crouched down over the woman’s legs, even though they looked like they were never going to move again, and gripped her wrists. The woman made no sign of recognition of this. She was so far under she wouldn’t know what was happening.

Bitch.

He went to her, knelt down, one leg either side of her torso, his face looking down at her battered, broken one. This bitch, walking along some road in the dead of night, without any sign she was there. Just there to make them all suffer.

What a silly little bitch.

He reached out with his hands, and clutched her throat in his palms.

They were going to achieve so much before she came along. Now they had to fight to survive. Because of her.

An anger flared up inside him.

He pressed down. Hard. He felt the muscles in her throat, felt them tighten and then constrict. And he carried on. He watched her face and saw that her one visible eye was fluttering open. Good—he wanted her to feel it. He wanted her to know what it felt like, to have your life flash before your eyes.