He was the worst.

The bolt was about twice as long as an index finger. It had gone in through his open mouth, aimed at an angle that took it through the roof of the mouth, into the brain cavity. It must have been going at quite a clip as half the length of the bolt had come out the back of his head before stopping in place. His eyes were still open, and it was like they were stuck rolling back into his sockets, as if he was trying to see the damage done by the bolt for himself.

I told myself that a shot like that, cutting through the precious structures of the brain – the delicate architecture of the temporal lobe, the hippocampus – couldn’t be anything but instantaneously fatal, slamming consciousness shut like a door after an angry visitor. There wasn’t any chance that he’d felt pain, was there?

But I couldn’t be sure.

The worst of it was the way Bosa had left the crossbow with him, like she didn’t even care to take the weapon with her. It was resting across Rackamore’s chest, his own fingers half-clutching at it. I imagined him fighting to keep the end of the weapon from being jammed into his mouth, but finally unable to resist.

‘You did what you could,’ I whispered, as if there were a chance of disturbing any of them.

I’d handled it well until then. I’d braced myself for the bodies, seen what she’d done to them, and studied it all with a sort of detachment, like they weren’t really there, or I was seeing them all behind glass, like wax dummies in a museum. Trying to persuade myself that they weren’t really bodies at all, or at least not the bodies of the same people I’d been talking to and laughing with not long ago.

But I couldn’t keep it up. It hit me in a wave, and I suppose all I’d ever been doing was putting off that moment. These bodies were the flesh and bones and meat of people who’d been speaking and breathing and moving around the last time I saw them, and they were people with names, and pasts; people I knew too much about; people who’d been kind and firm to me at times but mainly fair, and I knew I’d been halfway down the road to calling most of them friends, and the fact that they’d become these ruined, sightless things was too much.