‘Look, is this Number Five?’ Ella interrupts, pointing at the first box of the bottom row. Standing on the top of a pine tree is a figure throwing something down at three Mogadorians on the ground.

‘This is incredible. Everything is here. It’s all laid out,’ Crayton says. ‘Someone foresaw it all!’

‘But who?’ I ask.

‘Oh, no,’ I hear Marina whisper. ‘Who’s that? Who else dies?’

I skim quickly over the next two panels, where we start to come together, to one that shows Marina and me standing next to a lake. And I see John running out of the mouth of a cave with another person. I don’t know who it is, maybe Sam. I can’t tell because the boy’s head is turned away. Then my eyes reach the panel Marina’s looking at. With his or her arms out, a Garde is standing with a sword plunged all the way through its body. It’s impossible to identify who it is because the face has been chipped away from the wall. Right below it, on the floor, are pieces of stone.

‘What the hell is going on here?’ I ask. ‘Why is only that face missing?’ Eight is silent, head down. ‘Did you do that?’

‘Nobody can dictate what’s going to happen,’ he says.

‘So you thought you’d just destroy it? To do what, exactly? Make it less true?’ Crayton asks.

‘I didn’t know what any of this was. I didn’t know any of you. I thought it was a story, at least until –’

‘Is it me?’ Marina interrupts. ‘Am I the one who dies?’

I have the same question. Am I the one with a sword through me? It’s a chilling thought.

‘We’re all going to die someday, Marina,’ Eight says in a strange voice.

Ella scoops up the pieces of rock and studies them, turning them over.

Crayton steps in front of Eight. ‘Just because you destroyed it doesn’t mean it’s not going to happen. Withholding the information from us does not make it more or less true or destined to happen. Are you going to tell us who it is?’

‘I didn’t bring you all the way in here to examine a chipped section of the wall,’ Eight says. ‘You guys need to keep going – look at the last two panels.’