It is clear that today I will have to visit the prison.

Guards let us in through heavy, locked doors, and with each new corridor, the sense that we are walking further away from light and hope increases. Finally, we reach the cells. They are cave-like and dark – there is no privacy, just a gloomy space cut off by bars. Some cells have two or three people sharing them. No one makes eye contact with us as we pass.

This place exudes absolute loss of hope – all these lives, all this potential, has been locked away and left to decay. At the end of the passage there are more doors – through to private rooms, perhaps interrogation cells. The final open-fronted cell we come to is darker than the rest. This is the corner of hell, where no light or colour can exist.

Jack Minnow stops and peers into the cell.

“Not hiding, I hope, inker?” he taunts. “Come forward and be seen.” A scuffling and a groan and the shadow of movement. Obel. He comes crawling, with his eyes screwed up against the pitiful light.

Obel is like an angel whose feathers have been plucked. His hair is longer, brown and straggly. He stinks, and his lips are dry and cracked. The arms that once flexed with power when holding the machine are gaunt and grey. Everything is grey.

Every bright and beautiful colour, every word, every shape and image has faded like a flower that was picked and allowed to slowly die. All his marks are wearing away, the blank spaces spreading like a forest fire.

And when I look closer at the hand that used to create worlds – the one that was crushed by Minnow’s rage – I see the fingers that have not been set, the bruising which has become a permanent swelling and the scar that is red and blue as though showing the rage that broke it. There are new marks too – not ink, but a catalogue of bruising in all its miserable shades. Obel, my Obel, is broken. And his skin tells it all.

Down on my knees, I reach out my hands to him through the bars and he lets me hold him.

“You were meant to run.” There is a scratch to his voice – thirst or the result of screams, I don’t know. He sounds bewildered, confused and small. It feels as though something within him has been replaced by a child whose soul doesn’t fit right inside his skin.

“I’m safe.” I whisper into his ear – not knowing whether it’s true or not, but he needs some hope. “And I’m going to help you.” Another promise I have no means of keeping. But I can’t tell him the truth; that I am as helpless as he is.

Obel tries to stand, hauling himself up. He is weak. I force myself to look at him again, to take in the full horror of how changed he is, how beaten down. Dread shivers through me – I can’t let this happen to Gull. I look around, as though I will find an escape route or a way forward, but of course, all I see are bars and locked doors.