Keeping her foot between the doors to keep them open, she cast her gaze around for something to jam the lift. Of course, there would be stairs and Kyle would use them but that would take longer. She needed that time.

There was an upturned cafeteria chair within reach, one of many strewn about messily. Perhaps the staff fleeing the island had pushed them over in their haste to get out.

Moses was nearby, though she didn’t look in that direction.

She couldn’t think about that.

Blessing the days recently spent in yoga, Thea stretched flat out on the floor, her arm out while still keeping the lift door jammed with her foot. Her shoulder didn’t throb quite so much now, but it wasn’t up to helping out in any way. High on the walkway above her, she saw a bleached-blond-framed face bob into view. Kyle was trying to work out what she was doing. She didn’t want him heading for the stairs yet. Maybe he thought she’d become prostrate with grief or shock. Or she’d fainted. Or started hallucinating again. She stretched some more. It felt like she might tear a muscle somewhere any second, but she managed to claw her fingers around the chair and shove it into the lift entrance.

The doors banged open and shut on it uselessly, a giant mouth masticating a piece of gristle.

Then she ran.

The glass doors were there. They were so close she could see the smudges on them, handprints of people either gone from the island, or dead. She didn’t look back because there was nothing to look back for; she needed no final picture of the hell this place had become.

She skidded to a halt.

Nothing to look back for.

Thea was close enough to touch the glass.

She was wrong. She’d forgotten.

Rosie.

How could she have forgotten Rosie? She was still in the building, if Rory had been telling the truth. Hidden somewhere and unconscious, making it too difficult for Thea to move on her own. She couldn’t drag her through the corridors, down to the beach and into a boat all by herself with Kyle chasing her.

Wouldn’t it be more sensible to escape and then send back help, especially as Kyle was, at this moment, leaping down the stairs towards her?

She should leave – Rosie was probably dead.

She couldn’t leave – Rosie might be alive.

She had to go back for her.

She had to because … well, it was her fault she was lying in that hospital bed, wasn’t it? Rosie had followed her and her pointless little quest to find a face in the monastery window. If she hadn’t, she might still have been happily sticking pencils in her hair and flirting with Ethan, not lying motionless in a hospital bed.