At dinner, the four successful recruits had sat together at the end of one long table. Max and Ash sat opposite each other, slightly apart from them. They weren’t completely ignored. Sami kept trying to catch Max’s eye. Abby made a pretence of not wanting her stew and offered it to Max. He declined. She wasn’t fooling anyone.

He was still limping slightly as he left the dining room. ‘You want me to strap that up?’ Martha said, without much feeling, when she saw him.

‘It’s fine,’ Max told her. She shrugged and walked away.

Back in the hut, Lukas refused, at first, to catch his eye. But that was impossible to maintain for long. Eventually, he surprised Max by offering his hand. ‘No hard feelings, bro,’ he muttered. Max looked at his hand but couldn’t bring himself to shake it. Lukas shrugged and removed a piece of gum from his mouth. He wrapped it up and threw it on the floor. Then he went back to being his surly, uncommunicative self. Sami, who had been watching, looked like he wanted to intervene but thought better of it.

In the end, they all went to bed early. Max couldn’t sleep. He was sure the same was true for the others, though nobody spoke. He simply lay there, staring into the darkness. His ankle throbbed, but that wasn’t what kept him awake. He couldn’t believe that he’d been given a chance to break out of his humdrum life and he’d messed it up. The three days of selection had been so busy that he hadn’t realised how much he wanted this. Only now that it had been taken away was it clear to him what he had lost.

He’d lost everything.

He wanted to jump out of bed, storm across to the house and find Hector. Tell him about the paracord. Tell him that he’d been set up to fail. But he knew it would do no good. Hector had been against him since the beginning. He wasn’t going to change his mind now. This was the result the grizzled Watcher had wanted all along. Max’s failure was his success.

What would Max do now? That was the question that he kept coming back to. Sit it out at school until he could apply to join the army? Would they have him? he wondered. Would his failure here keep him out of the military for ever? He didn’t know.