A face came into focus. Full lips, dark eyes. Someone was holding his hand. A head bent down towards him, dark-haired, silver earrings bobbing.

Zita.

His heart surged, and he sat upright, then instantly wished he hadn’t.

A pain, keen and fierce, pierced his arm. He looked down.

There, glinting on his wrist, was a silver bracelet, pinching into the flesh of his forearm.

He wept.

They were in a room furnished like Jack’s rooms. Only everything was oddly flat and dull. Above the fireplace was a painting of Mundham Farm, its colours muted and dark.

Kit was slumped into a corner, his arm draped over the stuffed crocodile, breathing softly. The silver-haired boy acknowledged Tom with a half-nod. ‘Master has us all.’

‘It’s taken more of a toll on Kit than on me.’ Zita brushed a frond of hair away from her eyes.

‘We’re in the glass box?’

Zita nodded.

‘His power is on us now. These bracelets …’

‘Can he see us?’ Through the glass he could see Jack’s rooms in the farmhouse. The chair in front of the desk where he usually sat was empty.

‘I’m not sure. It’s not as if, my darling, we can do anything.’

‘Is there a way out?’

Kit snorted. ‘You try.’

‘Oh, Tommy darling, who would have thought we would end up like this? Not even a gramophone to keep us cheerful.’ Tears trembled in her eyes, but she wiped them away. ‘Now then, that won’t do, will it? That’s not what Nanny used to say. Chin up, shoulders back. Go on, try the door.’

Zita helped Tom up, and he limped to the door, scratching at the bracelet all the while. It was unpleasant, like having a bite or a sting.

The door was wooden and on a latch. It opened easily.

But a force almost unbearably fierce pushed him backwards in to the room, and the door slammed shut of its own accord.

‘Windows?’

‘Look out.’

They were floating in a sea of mist. Below them he could see a wall reaching downwards, but not the ground. Above him there was also a flat expanse of what he assumed was stone.

‘Where are we?’

‘I don’t know … I have my suspicions. This is some place of Jack’s devising, or else it’s a different kind of realm altogether.’

Tom shrank back from the window and his reflection in it. He saw how haggard he looked in the cold light. Zita slunk to the wooden floorboards and sat next to Kit, stroking the boy’s hair gently. Tom patted his pockets.

But the wooden flute that Tanenwod had given him was gone. Jack must have taken it from him before shutting him up.

‘No hope.’

‘Come here, Tommy boy.’

They clung together, the boy born five hundred years ago, the girl from the 1920s, and the twenty-first-century boy; all of them with nothing left in the world.