‘If you spend several days in the Outer City walls, it will be obvious something happened to you here. If your friends think you’re dead and you later turn up alive, it’ll be suspicious. Your escape to the countryside will be a nice, peaceful way of keeping your friends’ anxiety at bay without affecting our deal. Now, off you pop.’

Alex had given her a dirty look, and recognised his own powerlessness. There would be a chance to win, but it would not be then. Not that day.

He had stepped into the cloning pod, and the door had sealed shut behind him.

*

He had been held against his will in the bungalow for two days. Although most of the time, he had not been aware of being imprisoned.

In his regular state, the one in which he knew nothing about his capture, he had refused to leave the bungalow. He had believed himself to be acting on his own free will, staying in place like the loyal teammate he was, until the teenagers found their chance to escape.

Each time he entered his fully aware state, he realised it was Crossland’s doing. Conditional thought, she had called it. Every thought that passed his mind about leaving the bungalow had been met with an instruction that had been planted there: ‘I will stay here until the teenagers need me.’

The teenagers must have been dead, of course, but Crossland’s work would force him to stay put. It had been torture without a torture chamber. A prison where the prisoner believed he was choosing to stay.

Forty-eight hours after his imprisonment, ‘Smoke on the Water’ sounded yet again.

It had been speakers fixed to the top of the approaching vehicle, as normal. The memories had come flooding back to Alex: the memories of what he was really doing at the bungalow.

Crossland had strolled through the front door as if she lived there, flanked by two clones on each side, and greeted Alex like a rebellious teenage son.

‘I have a treat for you today,’ she had said, producing a twelve-inch laptop from a pink and purple pouch.

‘A video of my clone children growing up?’

‘No,’ she had answered, ‘you are the child in this scenario. When was the last time you spoke to your father?’

His birthday. Six months before Takeover Day .

‘The population of New Brighton has been declining for a while,’ Crossland had said, ‘some kind of disease did most of the work. Among the survivors, your father was easy to find.’

‘…You’re using my dad as leverage against me.’