‘Nah, it’s better than good, you look great. I’m nearly done.’

Chloe seems different here, out of school. More grown up, more herself. She finishes taping the cords down and checks all the connections.

One corner of the room has been turned into a set. There are two of those umbrella flash things, a crumpled sheet on the ground, fairy lights taped up, battery packs and cords hidden away to the side. The lights bring out the mottled patterns and stains on the concrete. I can see the ideas from her folio coming together.

‘How do you know so much about this?’

‘I don’t really. I read a lot of Wikihows.’ Her long black hair hangs over her shoulder as she checks the spidery tripod and camera for stability. ‘All of this belongs to school. If we break anything, we’re screwed.’

She straightens. ‘Right. Can you lie here? I put a little cross on the spot, see that masking tape?’

I lie down slowly, arranging my nightie around me. The cold of the concrete floor shocks my skin.

You wanted dark, Natalia, I tell myself, you wanted real, so lie down already.

Chloe takes some test pics, murmuring to herself. She rearranges my feet and arms and holds a little white-balance meter near my face.

‘I have no idea if I’m doing this right,’ she says.

With my eyes closed, the clicking of the SLR sounds like insects chirping.

‘I don’t know what the hell you’ve got on your head,’ says Click-Click-Chloe, ‘but it works.’

Damp seeps into my muscles and joints and I let it. I wanted everyone to stop lying to themselves and each other and look at what’s really happening, to all of us.

I’m dead, I tell myself. My heart has stopped, my blood is sludge, the electricity in my brain is gone.

When you’re dead everything stops, the activity in your cells creaks to a halt. Your brain powers down, the sparks that leap from neuron to neuron cease, all your thoughts and memories and what you think of as your personality is gone because your brain machine has stopped. You don’t have a soul, because what you thought of as your soul was just electricity in your brain. You only exist while the machine thinks you do.

Afterwards, where do you go? What happens to all these thoughts?

I start to shiver, the smallest possible tremors all over.

‘Are you cold? Can you handle a few more minutes?’

Chloe speaks to me from a thousand kilometres away. I manage to lift my head.

‘How does it look?’ My mouth barely moves.

‘It’s hard to tell on the display, it’s so small. I want to try one more thing, if you can hack it?’

She leans over me and shakes a ziplock bag full of feathers. ‘It needs more colour. I’m trying to do this black, white and red thing.’