She tried to untangle the knots in her head. She could still see the broken domes of the Saviour on the Spilled Blood and the grown-up Ledjo reaching out to her when she closed her eyes. And she remembered the voices merging into two, then one, and the feeling of hands untying her and telling her everything was going to be alright. But could she be sure that had really happened?

Then she realised something more disturbing than everything she’d been through in the dark room. When she tried to picture the boat on the lake in her mind she couldn’t see it. It hadn’t changed, morphed into something new and unfamiliar. It wasn’t buried in the mess of memories and nightmares that had taken over her mind. It was just gone, as if it had been ripped out of her. She was missing something else too. Ledjo’s backpack.

Valera didn’t know if she was being watched somehow or if her captors were on the other side of the locked door, waiting for her to bang or wail or completely break down. She couldn’t cry even if she wanted to. She was too angry. She stood in the middle of the room, shaking with rage, until she couldn’t hold it in anymore and she let out a deep, guttural scream. The door didn’t open. No one came to silence her, or comfort her, or drag her back to the dark room.

Now sure she was alone, she went back to the door, But instead of twisting the knob again, she kicked it, slamming her heel into it again and again until the panel it was embedded in fractured and the whole mechanism clattered onto the floorboards.

The door swung open and Valera peered out into the short landing on the other side of it, still half-expecting some unseen guard to jump on her. She ignored the other doors and other rooms on the first floor and ran for the stairs that would lead her down to the ground floor and out onto the street. But they didn’t, because the bottom of the staircase was blocked by a huge slab of metal. It looked like a giant guillotine had sliced through the house, intended solely to block her way.

There was a door embedded in the thick metal, but no handle for Valera to turn or attack. She still kicked it, purely out of frustration, and heard a dull, deep echo on the other side.