There was a distant sound of men’s voices, but they weren’t coming closer, and Ethan was already pulling her up and leading her away by the arm, gently but firmly. She got a proper look at him. He was bleeding from the corner of his lip, but apart from that he looked okay, very much not shot, which was a relief. Questions butted their way to the tip of her tongue, but she padded quietly next to him.

Soon they came out of the wood and found themselves back on the path again, below them the monastery and above them, the route to the lighthouse. Ethan began to run, pulling Thea with him, until the path curved around along seal bay and they were hidden from the view of anyone looking up from the monastery.

Only then did he stop.

Thea’s lungs were about to explode. She was pretty certain she’d turned bright red in the face and she sank gratefully into the grass at the side of the path. She really should have worked harder in those cardio classes.

‘You okay?’ he asked, standing with his hands on his hips as he took deep breaths.

‘Fab,’ she wheezed. ‘What happened back there?’

The sky was now an inky wave of trouble about to crash onto them. The seagulls swooped and screamed, possibly telling each other to get in out of the coming snow, unlike those two stupid humans down there on the cliff. Ethan stretched out his shoulders, then touched at his lip, wincing slightly.

‘It was only Len who was armed, not the others.’ He showed her the gun, spinning the magazine and checking the bullets. It looked like a film prop to Thea. ‘But I think something’s happened at the Centre. The only reason I got away was because a message came through on their radio. I couldn’t hear it properly but it sounded like there’s been a fire, or something. They were being called back.’

‘A fire?’ Thea got to her knees, feeling the cold slush from the previous snowfall seep into the fleecy gym leggings she’d been issued earlier.

A fire at the Centre was unlikely but not impossible. Thea thought of Rosie first, the rise and fall of her breathing and the beeping machine marking out her life and, in doing so, she remembered Richard being held down, a syringe pushed into his arm. What had Rory told her? Don’t fuck about with REM sleep. The rage had come from Richard like heat. Like fire.

‘But we’ve only got a short space of time before they come back out to find us,’ Ethan said, interrupting her thoughts. He wiped at his lip again and grimaced. ‘If you still want to go to the lighthouse, we do it now.’

It was the tone and the way he handled the gun.

‘You were in the army, weren’t you?’