‘No, Thea – think! A few of the others I spoke to,’ he said, frowning, ‘they were all single, not much in the way of family – loner types …’

Thea was beginning to guess where this was going.

‘And, apart from you and your mother, no one at home waiting for them to call.’ He paused for emphasis. ‘No one to care what happens to them.’

Thea thought back to that first meeting with Delores in her office: ‘You are the one who is important. You are … different to the others.’ Delores had meant different as in white-crowned sparrow, but had she been different in another way too? Was she the only one out of those fifty clients who had someone waiting for their call? So why take the risk – unless the chance to trial out sleeplessness on her had been too hard to resist?

‘What should we do?’ Thea asked. ‘This fire back at the Centre, the one the guards at the monastery ran off to help with – they’ll sort it out soon enough and we’ll be next on their to-do list. Should we try to get off the island? Go back to the Centre?’

Thea’s tongue felt furry and coated with sugar. She couldn’t think of anything. No matter how many times she moved the pieces around, the game always ended with her and Ethan dead. Not dead – they can’t do that, one part of her brain murmured. The other part sniffed and rolled its eyes.

‘There must be working Wi-Fi at the Centre somewhere, probably in the Staff Bubble. We just need to sneak in and email that memory stick to someone, anyone. My mother, a newspaper … At least we’ll have tried to do something.’

‘Or we could just carry on sitting here, in the warm, eating custard and listening to the radio until they come for us.’ Ethan sounded serious. ‘We might not even have to wait; they could just programme me to kill you and then kill myself, any moment now. Problem solved.’

Thea got goosebumps on her arms. It was the tone in which he’d said it, so bleak, so emotionless.

‘You’re going to have to handcuff me tonight, you know.’ Ethan screwed up the empty biscuit packet and fixed her with a look.

‘I’m not sure I know you well enough for that just yet!’ Her joke was met with stoniness. She blushed.

That was when Moses started to wail.

Chapter 35

Thea hadn’t expected to see the sky. There it was though, peeping through a hole in the roof of Moses’s room. No wonder he had been wailing. Snow steadily drifted in, enough to have already covered his blankets, melting where it touched his skin, piling up in the furrows of the bed sheets. Luckily for him, the fallen bits of soggy wood, plaster and a few cracked tiles had missed the bed.