“If you don’t mind.” He took her elbow, and this time she couldn’t dodge. His grip was firm but not painful. “This is the main reception room of your suite. You’ll note the windows don’t actually open, and they’re made of toughened glass for your safety. The bathroom is through that door, and the bedroom is over there.” He pointed. “If you want anything, lift the white courtesy phone. If you need a doctor, there is one on call. I suggest you take an hour to recover, then freshen up and get dressed. There will be an interview in due course.”

“What is this place? Who are you people?”

Finally Roland frowned at her. “You can stop pretending you don’t know,” he said. “You aren’t going to convince anyone.” Pausing in the doorway, he added, “The war’s over, you know. We won twenty years ago.” The door closed behind him with a solid-sounding click, and Miriam was unsurprised to discover that the door handle flopped limply in her hand when she tried it. She was locked in.

Miriam shuffled into the white-tiled bathroom, blinked in the lights, then sat down heavily on the toilet. “Holy shit,” she mumbled in disbelief. It was like an expensive hotel—a fiendishly expensive one, aimed at sheikhs and diplomats and billionaires. The floor was smooth, a very high grade of Italian marble if she was any judge of stonework. The sink was a molded slab of thick green glass and the taps glowed with a deep luster that went deeper than mere gilding could reach. The bath was a huge scalloped shell sunk into the floor, white and polished, with blue and green lights set into it amid the chromed water jets. An acre of fluffy white towels and a matching bathrobe awaited her, hanging above a basket of toiletries. She knew some of those brand names; she’d even tried their samplers when she was feeling extravagant. The shampoo alone was a hundred dollars a bottle.

This definitely isn’t anything to do with the government, she realized. I know people who’d pay good money to be locked up in here!

She sat down on the edge of the bathtub, slid into one of the seats around its rim, and spent a couple of minutes puzzling out the control panel. Eventually she managed to coax half a dozen jets of aerated water into life. This is a prison, she kept reminding herself. Roland’s words haunted her: ‘Different jurisdiction, you know.’ Where was she? They’d taken the locket. That implied that they knew about it—and about her. But there was absolutely no way to square this experience with what she’d seen in the forest: the pristine wilderness, the peasant village.