‘I’m a physician. I treat all my patients alike.’ Dr Magelonne busied himself with snipping open the loose gauze dressings. ‘Whether I find them sympathetic or not is irrelevant.’

Khassian winced as the last of the dressings was eased away. He had been enduring this unpleasant process now every two hours. He had endured it only because the stark reality of his situation was that, if he wished to save his hands, there was no alternative.

‘Hm. This looks a little better than it did. A little cleaner.’

Khassian risked a glance, only to look away. The oozing mess of raw flesh and scar tissue in no way resembled anything that could be described as ‘better’ in his vocabulary.

‘Tell me, Doctor. What – what is the prognosis?’

‘When it comes to burns, I am not in the business of prognostication, Illustre. All I can offer you here is a programme of exercise for the joints and muscles if all has knitted back together satisfactorily. We provide the very best treatment here: hot mineral mud to ease muscles in spasm, exercise in and out of the warm spa waters. But I can in no way guarantee what the outcome may be.’

‘I see,’ Khassian said. In reality he did not see at all; his mind was a red, raging inferno. Somewhere beyond the terror of flames, he still screamed aloud, ‘My hands, my hands!’ as beams crashed down into the auditorium and clouds of smoke billowed up to choke him.

‘And now I would like to ask you a question.’

Khassian gazed at the strange, claw-like appendages attached to his wrists where his hands used to be, slender hands, musician’s hands, long-fingered and graceful…

‘A question?’ He tried to wrench his concentration back to their conversation.

‘Did you know someone has been asking for you?’ Dr Magelonne was washing his hands in a bowl, shaking the water off, meticulously drying each finger on a linen towel.

‘Asking… for me? What manner of someone?’

‘I’ll be frank with you, Illustre. I have my other patients’ wellbeing to consider as well as yours. If there is any likelihood of trouble –’

‘Trouble? I don’t quite follow…’

Dr Magelonne sat down in the button-backed chair at Khassian’s bedside. Yet he did not relax, his whole body seemed tense.

‘Look at it from my perspective, Illustre. Two fugitives arrive at my Sanatorium, on the run from a repressive regime in the country beyond our borders. They ask me to heal them, shelter them. Don’t you think they owe me some kind of explanation if my generosity is likely to endanger my other patients?’

Khassian sighed and lay back on the pillows.

‘Do you have papers, permissions, identification? How did you get past the border guards?’

‘No papers… there was no time, Doctor. If friends had not smuggled us out, we would now be imprisoned, maybe even dead.’