Thea had smiled. ‘The left one. It’s called the Client Bubble. The other one is the Staff Bubble where the staff live and there are labs and everything.’

‘So, you live in the left testicle. Just making that clear.’

‘Yes, thank you, Mother.’

She hadn’t been able to see it properly when she’d arrived last night, but now, in the daylight, she could fully take in its clean, sci-fi strangeness. If there were any ghost monks floating around the place, she wondered what they would have made of the Centre: crossed themselves and muttered about the devil?

Meditation ended the session. She took a breath in and then let it out …

One …

Two …

Three …

A warm, wrapped chocolate was pushed into her hand. Thea opened her eyes and found the frizzy-haired woman with pencils in her hair from earlier sitting next to her. The woman pressed a finger to her lips and smiled, then she glanced around at everyone else with their eyes closed and carefully reached into her shoe once more, bringing out more chocolate for herself.

The Centre frowned upon caffeine, refined sugar, processed foods and alcohol.

Foot chocolate was still chocolate. Thea ate it and smiled back.

It was the walls.

Perhaps it was their fever-sheen gleam, or the way they swallowed noise, but after only her first day, Thea felt that they just might swallow her up too. One second there she’d be in her beige clothes, the next she would wander too close to the equally beige walls and they would liquidly close over her and she would be like fruit sinking in cream, never to be seen again.

It was late afternoon and she had half an hour to shower after her gym session. The shower had taken her precisely five minutes and now the walls of her room pressed in on her. She had lived on her own for years and had never experienced a problem with walls before. She liked them. The walls of her house had kept the world out and given her a cocoon in which she’d tried to burrow deep and sleep. Walls were fine.

She wandered into a corridor, smiling politely at the people she passed. Maybe that was it. Maybe it wasn’t the walls. Maybe it was the people. In her sleep-deprived experience, people were exhausting, with their egos and subtexts and hints and emotions and needs. She’d always tried to limit people. And now, here she was – surrounded by them.

And the walls.

Her steps quickened.

She had to get out. There was a lighthouse to see, after all, and out in the fields with the empty sky around her, perhaps she would have a chance to think.