It took us a while to unwind enough to talk again. We started on the lace cookies and oven-warm muffins. He told me about the village of Mölle, where he was born. He had often returned to it with his parents and his little sister, Karolina, before her death. They would spend their summers fishing and swimming. Generally being a family.

It wasn’t an image I recognised. It had been years since my father and I had done anything but eat dinner together, and even that formality had been limited to weekends once I had left home.

I hung on to Nick’s every word. When he talked about Karolina, his voice strained at the seams. I didn’t ask how she had died. I hadn’t earned that sort of trust from him.

‘Scion killed her,’ he said, of his own accord. As if he had seen the question on my face.

An old hatred combusted behind my ribs. It was a latent feeling, a beast I kept restrained most of the time, but it had rankled for a decade, eating at me from within – the knowledge of injustice.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘Was she voyant?’

‘Yes. But … her gift never really got a chance to develop.’

‘They killed my cousin, too. He wasn’t like us, as far as I remember, but he was hanged for treason.’

He lifted his gaze to mine. ‘I didn’t know.’

Even now, I found it hard to talk about Finn. My throat tightened.

‘If you went out into that street and asked every voyant you saw,’ Nick said, ‘I think most of them will have lost someone to Scion.’

We fell silent for a while. My tea was cold.

This was too raw a topic. Mentioning Finn led me to tell Nick more about my life in Ireland, where I had been raised by my grandparents before my father was enlisted by Scion’s medical division. I told him about how afraid I had been when we landed in England; how I had cried myself to sleep each night; how lonely I had felt. We had come from a war-torn country, straight into the country responsible for the violence.

Nick listened to everything, his expression grave. I felt as though I could talk to him for ever.

I told him about the first time I had given someone at school a nosebleed – without ever raising my hand. I was ten and had no idea I had caused it; I assumed it was coincidence that the girl who had been teasing me suddenly had blood running down to her chin. But as it began to happen more frequently, whenever I felt particularly trapped and powerless, I came to the realisation that I was the source.

‘Surely people were suspicious,’ Nick said, snapping a lace cookie.