But, even to her ears, her voice sounded drunken, and suddenly she smelled the patchouli joss-sticks her mother always had burning in her house. In fact, there was her mother, sitting on the end of Rosie’s bed, with her glasses perched on the edge of her nose reading a newspaper as a teapot poured tea all by itself—

‘Thea?’

She woke with a start, Rory’s hand on her shoulder.

‘Don’t let me do that again!’ She sprang up and paced to the cupboards, searching through an abandoned cosmetic bag left on the bedside table. ‘It’s been so long since I slept. But I can’t sleep – I might hallucinate!’

Unspoken between them was the thought, and after the hallucinating, what would happen to her next?

‘What will you do?’ Rosie asked, her eyes much bigger than her voice.

Thea smiled grimly as she picked up a pair of nail scissors. When she’d hugged Rosie, those knots deep within her had loosened, but now they tugged and tightened once more.

‘Stay awake,’ she said, testing the points against her palm, ready to stab the ends into herself the very next moment she felt herself drift.

That was when the first explosion came.

Chapter 54

Running, again.

Heart-thumping, throat-closing, hand-shaking – again, again, again.

To Thea it seemed she was always running in this nightmare place and never getting anywhere; even when she made it out as far as the lighthouse with Ethan she was flicked back to the Centre again: a counter in a hellish game of tiddlywinks.

There was a deep booming that reverberated in her chest, and the feeling of something pressing down on them, squeezing the floor and making it tremble.

‘What is that?’ Thea shouted to Rory.

Between them, they supported Rosie.

‘Clean-up’s started!’ he yelled back.

Scorched-earth policy had never been so true, Thea thought grimly as she tightened her grip across Rosie’s shoulders.

They hadn’t even had time to get boots. After the first explosion they had got Rosie out of bed and run from the room, heading back to the damaged cafeteria that Rory had led her through only about half an hour ago on the way to where he’d hidden Rosie.

It was the dark twin of the other sphere. The original fire had started somewhere near here and there were black smudges on the stainless steel and white walls. Surfaces had warped, and the sticky gloss that had so unnerved Thea was charred to an acrid toffee. However, now there was new damage from the recent explosions. The chairs and tables, which had been neatly arranged, were upended and had a fine layer of dirt on them, whilst the floor was littered with chunks of stone and a few bits of metal. Thea warily eyed the walkways above them.