‘I know what you’re thinking,’ said Delores. Thea doubted it: she didn’t even know what she was thinking. ‘You’d blow the whole thing apart … and blow me apart at the same time. Why send myself down with the ship? Like I said, I don’t care anymore. If my ship goes down – well – so will theirs. I’ll have the payoff and I’ll be able to afford a good lawyer and a bolt-hole until it all blows over. Aspire will take the brunt of it … After all, as they keep insisting, they own the tech. I’ll get Moses the care he needs. And, meanwhile … I’d have you.’

She tapped her fingernails on the desk.

‘Later, when the dust settles – there’s a lot we could do with you.’

The little white-crowned sparrow. Ranks of sleepless soldiers trooped across Thea’s mind in orderly lines, shiny-eyed and eternally awake.

‘So, let me sum up the choice. Get to play the heroine and bring down the company, or, well … the island is quite a dangerous place at the moment, no? Aspire plan to get rid of any evidence of what’s gone on here. Anything could happen to you, and I’d be quite helpless to prevent it. It would be … regrettable.’

Thea’s frog brain continued to writhe.

‘Oh, and you wouldn’t be able to wriggle out of the latter stage of our agreement either, in case that’s what you were thinking. Getting to work with you in a few years, that’s non-negotiable. Let me be clear as well, your mother will have to be muzzled. And there would be … consequences … for reneging on the deal.’

Every other scenario her brain had whirred through over the last few minutes all ended in the same way: her death. At least with this offer she got the real reason behind the tech out there for everyone to see, and she got herself a few years while Delores stayed low. Anything could happen in those years. But she would get off this island. Right at that moment, that was all she wanted.

‘Under normal circumstances, I would give you some time to mull it over. Unfortunately, these are not normal circumstances.’

Delores had her back to the office door.

So she didn’t see Moses slip in.

Chapter 45

Shuffle, shuffle.

Moses was a horrifying puppet come jerkily to life. With his bald head and the spidery writing all over it, the grids marking off his skull, his gaunt limbs and hook-nailed feet, he shuffled closer and closer. He was something from a nightmare, the kind of thing he might have wanted to fix in someone else, years ago, before he knotted up his own brain so tightly there was no way to pick it apart.

Shuffle, shuffle.

He looked at Thea and put a blood-stained finger to his lips.

Where had the blood come from?