The girls had been brought here for a reason.

Carly just didn’t know what.

She closed her eyes.

She didn’t want to know.

Think.

Tap-tap-tap, said the tree.

Hurry-hurry-hurry.

Carly raced back to the door. Twisted the handle.

‘It’s still locked,’ Leah said.

‘I know that.’ What Carly didn’t know was what they – what she – was going to do. Panicked, she ran her fingers down the side of the door, feeling for the bump of the hinges. Could she unscrew them somehow and remove the door? There didn’t seem to be screws visible and Carly wondered if the door needed to be open in order to see them. She rattled the handle again.

Think.

Desperately, she scanned the room. The mattress took up much of the floor space. Broken glass littered the grubby grey floor; the fluorescent tubes had been wrenched from the ceiling and smashed. There was a heap of rubbish that looked like the bonfire her stepdad had mounded in the garden last year. Carly remembered the strike of the match, the flames that licked higher and higher until the guy the girls had made was alight. His legs, his torso. His face.

Was that what the men had planned for them?

She couldn’t breathe. The thought… The thought of being trapped in this room, toxic smoke filling the air, filling their lungs. The relentless heat.

They would burn.

Suffocate.

Die.

Carly stumbled over to the window as though smoke was already seeping into her lungs. She grasped hold of the metal bars, thankfully cool and not scorching hot. Lifted her feet from the ground.

Come on.

She wasn’t heavy enough to yank them from the window.

‘Girls. Come and help me.’

Leah slipped her arms around Carly’s waist, hanging from her like an infant monkey. Carly’s shoulder sockets screamed with pain, her clammy palms slipped, as the sisters tumbled onto the hard concrete ground, into a puddle of stagnant water that had pooled under the window. It stank.

‘I want to go home.’ Leah clung to Carly, the tips of her fingers digging into the already-bruised flesh of Carly’s arm.

‘We’re going to go home.’ Carly stood, and helped Leah up. Both of their skirts were sodden. ‘Why didn’t you help us, Marie?’

‘We can’t get out,’ Marie stated the simple truth.

Leah began to cry.

‘It’s okay, though.’ Marie stroked her twin’s hair, the way she had calmed Bruno the night fireworks lit up the sky behind their garden. ‘It’s a game. Isn’t it?’

Marie’s eyes met Carly’s and there was both question and fear in them.

‘Yes,’ said Carly eventually. Marie had the right idea. Leah was born only twelve minutes after Marie, but she’d always seemed much younger – the one they needed to protect with her endless worries. It was better to lie and calm her. ‘It’s a game.’

‘But I don’t want to play.’ Leah sobbed harder.

‘If we don’t all play, we can’t all stay together,’ Marie said.

‘What do you mean?’ Leah wiped her nose with the back of her hand.