In spite of my protests, Mum allows Verity’s father, Simon, to come with us back to house. I lie on my bed while he cleans and stitches the slice across my torso. He’s a skin specialist and tells me the cut’s not deep. His words are meant to comfort, but I can still feel Longsight’s touch on me. While Simon works he describes his shock – he had no idea what the mayor had planned, he says. But he flushes with shame when I ask him about the mayor’s miraculous new ink. Is there anyone who wasn’t caught up in this?

When Simon is gone I put on all the clothes I can find. I can’t stop shivering and I cannot bear to have my skin on show. I feel dirty: from the prison, from the smoke smell in my hair, from the sweat and the blood and the hands – all the hands on me without permission – and finally, I sleep.

Whatever hope I had that the people would rise up and claim their own right to rule is quashed by morning. Mum wakes me with tea and the news that Jack Minnow has issued a statement. Those who heard his announcement at the town square first thing this morning were given letters – printed copies of his words to pass on to their neighbours. Mum lets me read.

My fellow citizens,

I have written these words a hundred times in my mind and it is something of a relief to finally be able to put my thoughts on paper. The last months have been the hardest and most upsetting in our history.

Since I was a young man I have followed and supported Dan Longsight. I looked up to him, and the day I was made his advisor was the proudest of my life. Not only was he, in my mind, a wonderful and inspiring leader, he was a man I considered a friend – even a brother.

The pain you feel today is an echo of the heartbreak I have experienced, having to witness the downfall of the man I most admired and, hardest of all, having to keep the truth from you, my own community.

Looking back, perhaps I should have seen it sooner, but what I now know to have been delusions of grandeur, I believed was simply the confidence of a great man. He would tell me he believed himself to be immortal and I believed in his purity of heart as surely as I saw the ink on his skin.