‘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.’

The scarlet feathers drift over my goose-bumped arms like light-falling snow. I close my eyes and hear the camera beep and click.

But too soon the shivering, the leaf-fluttering shakes return. I shake from head to toe, I couldn’t stop it if I tried, I’m a girl possessed.

Maybe this was what happened to Yin, or is still happening now: the cold, the bare skin, the helplessness. When we were little girls we would go everywhere holding hands, take baths together, sleep in the same bed. How could she be going through this alone? How did we end up so far apart?

‘Only a few more,’ Chloe murmurs.