They quickly checked the windows didn’t open, piled anything heavy in front of the door and then they pressed themselves against the walls on either side of a window, Rosie slumped under the sill.

Drones. To Thea, drones were wobbly, whirring things that children flew in the park, an upgrade on the old toy helicopter. Or they would one day deliver parcels, though no one was very clear when that day would come. The ones she’d read about and seen, they would not help blow up a building; they would not hunt and track and use horrible little sensors on their horrible whirring bodies to hunt down three people who only wanted to get off an island.

Thea was breathing too hard.

She tried to think of something else. And there she was. Back on the green but it was daylight, a bright winter day with just enough sun to keep the chill at bay if you wrapped up warm. There was the smell of the grass and Rosie’s chatter, and they had their lunch spread out before them, sorted into piles of “healthy”, “too healthy” and “too healthy to actually eat”. Then there was Rory with his chocolate, his stolen contraband, and in that freeze-frame of sun and with the sugary sweetness starting to melt on her tongue, in that moment, though she hadn’t realized it at the time, she’d been happy. She’d fit in.

‘We’re going to die, aren’t we?’ Rosie’s face was pale and big-eyed, her swelling and bruising still vivid blues and greens, the dingy bandage hiding the worst of it.

Thea couldn’t get her mouth to open to offer any comforting words; the signal between it and her brain had fritzed.

‘I saw a programme about field mice during a harvest,’ Rosie continued, dreamily. ‘The harvester comes, churning up all the wheat, cutting it down, rolling over it and the field mice they run, and they run but they can only get so far. In the end they have nowhere left to run. The harvester gets them. Chopped-up little field mice.’

Rosie’s voice took on a faraway quality, as if she wasn’t really talking to anyone, only herself. When she’d been little, Thea had read a book about a field mouse family who had escaped the spinning blades of the harvester, despite one of the little baby mice being ill and unable to move. She couldn’t remember now how they’d done it. But she wanted to tell Rosie about it, about how the mice could escape, after all.

‘That’s us, isn’t it?’ Rosie continued. ‘We’re chopped-up little field mice. We just haven’t quite got to the end of the field.’

She rested her head against the wall and closed her eyes.

‘Rosie, keep your eyes open,’ Rory whispered, bending to nudge her shoulder.

‘Why? I’m tired.’