Jax was exhausted. He needed sleep. But the temperature in his cell could not have been more than five degrees. Without bedding or a jumper, the back-and-forth calories that he was burning were the only thing protecting him from the cold.

Eventually he reasoned that while the cold would not kill him, a sleep-deprived misjudgement made in the morning might. So he swung himself onto the slim single cot, sat back against the wall, pulled his arms through his T-shirt sleeves and stretched the shirt over his tucked-up knees. A ball on his bed, he rocked as he hugged himself hard and tried to quieten his mind, despite knowing it was impossible. His mind always raced.

JAX woke up shivering. His teeth chattered and his body shook. He jumped from the bed and began running on the spot. He groaned and grunted while he pumped his arms and legs, a cloud of condensation forming with each breath.

His face, toes and fingers were numb and the air filling his lungs felt like liquid nitrogen; he hadn’t been this cold since an ambush in Afghanistan had forced him to spend two nights in a mountain cave. Swapping the on-the-spot running for star-jumps, Jax could feel himself starting to thaw as he bounced up and down. He stopped shivering midway through a set of sit-ups then, to his surprise, noticed he was sweating following a round of shadow boxing.

The threat of hypothermia had passed.

Jax stood still, and, although he knew his watch wasn’t there, he still looked down at his wrist expecting to find the time. He didn’t know how long he had been asleep. All he knew was that it had been a long night that he would like to forget, but wouldn’t. Couldn’t. The best he could do was watch it end.

He had to stand on the desk to see out the shoebox-sized slot in the wall, the standard government-regulated window found in each cell. Its hardened clear plastic was permanently foggy, and even though a toddler would struggle to squeeze through it, rusted vertical bars ensured it couldn’t be breached.

Jax craned his neck to glimpse the outside world. He could not see the moon, but he knew it was still there – somewhere in the sky, unseen, dancing in the dark. The absent moon made Jax think of his ten-hour blank: there but unseen. Dancing in the dark.

He stood and watched as the patch of sky changed, a deep purple first spilling into the black, followed by an overcrowded palette of colours: pink, red, orange and yellow. The sun finally revealed herself with a blazing burst of white that bled blue. Jax smiled as he felt its warmth radiate through the window.