My blood turns to ice.

He’s always waiting in the shadows. I don’t turn to look at him. I keep my eyes on the lectern.

“Minnow,” I sigh. The hairs on my arms prickle to gooseflesh when I hear him walk closer. I can smell his soap – a leather-mint fragrance. He stops next to me, his arm touching mine – the heat from him seeping out towards me. From the edge of my vision I see him raise his face to the beamed ceiling. We stand in silence.

“This was the blanks. This was an act of evil.” I break the silence with the words I’ve been wanting to say since I walked in.

Minnow lets out a whisper of a laugh.

“At last, you admit they can do wrong.”

I don’t like his mockery. I hate that even now he is closed and stone-like. I want him to break.

“What will you do now that you can’t say your father’s name in this place?” I say, and I hear his sharp, indrawn breath. I should be afraid. I should be running. But I stay, and my heart does not race, and my breath does not grow heavy. “Not all those who are forgotten are guilty. I know you whisper your father’s name: Davey Minnow. I know he deserves to be in the book of the dead.” I toe a scrap of parchment that lies on the ground. “We’re not so different after all.”

We wait, standing side by side. I don’t know for how long, but I’m sure I hear birdsong.

“Will this just go on for ever?” I say, looking at where the book lies in burned tatters. “The blanks attack and we retaliate? Haven’t you grown tired of all this – the hatred and division and death? Will we repay death with more death or will we redeem it and bring people to life while we still can?” He is still. Jack Minnow is terribly, masterfully still. “There’s time, Jack. My dad would have wanted me to live and flourish. I don’t know what your dad wanted for you, but I’m sure it wasn’t this.”

“Compassion killed my father,” he says. “You can’t live long if you have a weak heart – one that is soft to everything.” He lets the pause spool out and when he speaks again his voice is soft. “I intend to live.”

We stay there, shoulder to shoulder until something behind us scuttles and we both turn, tensing. It’s a crow. Flustered and flapping, stuck in the building after finding its way in somehow. We gaze at it, watch it slam against windows. After a minute the bird moves, and, drawn by slow dawn light peeping through empty window frames, it gets lucky – a broken window: red, blue and green glass lost to the stones. The crow flits through it and, with a shriek, is free.

Minnow and I walk side by side through the doors. He turns left, I turn right, and the crow soars above us.