The car thrummed along the road. She tried to work out where they were. There was only one road from the airport. She normally enjoyed it, straight and wide with blossoming shrubs on either side. For the tourists, of course, but that didn’t make it any less pretty. They turned, and then again, until she lost all sense of direction.

To calm herself, she thought about the things she would do when she got home. First, call her father, he would be expecting her. Unpack, put winter clothes into storage, sort through the mail that had arrived while she was away. But first, food. She’d slept through all the meal services on the plane and was now ravenous.

The journey seemed extraordinarily long, but then she had no sense of time any more. There was just the motion of the car, the loud breathing of the men beside her, and occasionally a garbled sound from the relay radio mounted on the dashboard. We could be underwater, she thought, we could be driving into the past. She was woozy from the long flight, and this seemed like a waking dream.

She’d dozed off when the car braked, and one of the men grabbed her elbow to get her out. She was walked across what felt like grass, and then—“Steps,” said the man in warning—into a building. This was ridiculous, she felt like ripping the opaque glasses off to see where she was going, but didn’t want to make them angry.

They brought her into a small room, and finally removed her blindfold. It was ping pong balls, she realised, cut in half and stuck over each lens. Her own glasses were still with them, so everything was blurry. As far as she could tell, this was a government building of some kind, the walls that institutional green you only see in schools and hospitals. A woman came in with some forms for her to fill in, but she couldn’t see to write, and had to dictate her answers. It was just things like her address, and which schools she’d attended, surely information they already had. She wondered where they’d taken her luggage.

A little later, they brought her to a dimmer room. There were some people standing about, she wasn’t sure how many. They seemed to have been waiting for her. Someone said her name again, with a harsh emphasis, and when she answered yes, the interrogation began.

•

Stella’s childhood was unexceptional. The journalists who tried to find some kind of flaw in her upbringing were disappointed—she was mixed-race, of course, but you weren’t allowed to point at that as a defect. Her mother’s early death was a point of interest, but as she was under a year old at the time, and her father remarried not long afterwards, it again seemed unlikely this was to blame.