the floor where a punch reaches my stomach, a balled fist sinking into my abdomen. I yell, curl up as a stab of heat shoots through my whole body and amidst it all the cell phone slips further down and all I can think about is not the pain that roars through me but the cell phone, Balthus, and whether Dr Andersson has seen it.
I have to do something quick. Taking in a fractured breath, I roll what I think is to the left then hit something. What? The wall? A crate? I go rigid, adrenaline mixing into a lethal cocktail inside me.
‘She has everything here—news articles, the lot.’
She’s talking somewhere on her cell again. My eyes blink at lightning rate as I listen out for a clue, for anything. Is Balthus listening, too?
‘There is CCTV all over the place,’ Dr Andersson continues.
‘You’ll have to destroy all evidence,’ the man replies, voice breaking up, ‘erase any trace of her presence. We are at the agreed rendezvous point. Surveillance is pulled back so no ops can be tracked. It’s down to you now.’
A rendezvous point—does that mean her team are near? I try to think it through, but my brain is so overloaded by the bag and the adrenaline that it is almost impossible to be coherent, and if I—
There is a crash. The breaking of items, the pulling of drawers, throwing of books to the tiles—she is tearing apart my villa. I try to think fast and what to do and then I remember: my notebook.
Some time passes. I try to count the seconds, track the minutes, but pain from the kicks comes in waves, swelling then rolling back. After a while, crashing over, I hear her stride into what I think again is the kitchen and I take my chance.
‘Balthus?’
A second, two then: ‘Oh, thank God. What’s happening?’
I tell him fast then blink, try to see.
‘Maria, have you slipped the ties from your wrists?’
‘What? No. I have tried but it is secured with some type of—’ A smash. I wait, swallow, ‘—with some type of hard plastic that I am unfamiliar with.’
‘Hang on. Can you feel it, the plastic?’
I touch the tether with my fingertips. ‘Yes. Why?’
‘How small are the groves on the tether?’
I feel. ‘One millimetre depth.’
‘I think I know which type it is. If it’s just one millimetre, sounds like it’s the new restraints we sometimes used at the prison.’
A flicker of hope begins to burn. ‘Do you know how I can untie it?’
‘Yes … I think so.’
There is another smash from the kitchen. ‘Then tell me. Fast.’
After three, perhaps four minutes, Dr Andersson returns. Her boots sound lighter now on the tiles as if she has changed shoes and when she walks, the drift of her perfume is softer, more weak. She marches up to me and halts. The bag, cemented still to my head, scratches at my face but I try hard to ignore it, bite my lip, keep my back steady and wait.
For a moment, there is no movement. She is crouching in front of me, I think—I can just make out the outline of her body in front of me. But more than that, more than simply her presence, is the heat of her, of another person that catches me off guard and, oddly, the thought strikes me that this, now, is the first time in six months that I have encountered, with such geographical closeness, another human being.
‘Right,’ she says finally, ‘let’s do this, shall we? The day is getting on and so is time.’
The bag is whipped from my head and my skin, slapped by sunlight, stings as, for the first time, my eyes blinking over and over, I get a complete look at Dr Andersson as she looms now in front of me. Her blonde hair is tied up into a ponytail that slides down her back and rests down her spine all the way to her hip bones. Her forehead is high and sharp and peppered with freckles, and on either side of her straight nose sit two rose crescents for cheeks, each propped up by defined, prominent bone structure. I choke, spitting out the fibres of fabric from my mouth and throat.
‘What do you want?’
She offers me a smile, the one I remember from Goldmouth, with white teeth and scarlet, plumped lips. ‘I want to do my job and get home. I understand you’re on the harsh end of this, I really do, but MI5 wants the Project to end, which means I have to deal with you, end you.’ She takes out a gun. ‘I’m really very sorry, Maria. I always rather liked you.’
And then, with one bullet, she shoots me in the leg.
Undisclosed confinement location—present day
‘Doc, are you sure there’s a needle? Can you see it?’
‘Yes. But the light is fading again.’
The blackness has reclaimed the air, but, now I know the needle is there, I will my arm to move as much as it can, wriggling my fingers in an attempt to feel the point of the metal inserted into my veins. At first, nothing shifts and I feel so thirsty, am so desperately weak and tired that my mind begins to think it has imagined the entire thing.
And then it moves, there, the needle, in the crease of my elbow. Just one pull at my skin and veins.
‘Can you see it now?’ Patricia says.
‘No. I can feel it.’
‘Doc, you know what this means, right?’
I go to speak the words they are drugging me again but instead clam up, an instinct to yell out, to cry as loud and deep as possible welling up inside of me. This was not supposed to happen again. No, no, no, no.
‘Doc, are you still there?’
‘I ran away from them,’ I say after a moment, catching my short, shallow breath. ‘I hid. The Project and MI5 thought I was dead after prison. I thought I had escaped it all.’
‘Oh, Doc. Doc, I’m so sorry.’
For a moment, in the blackness, it feels as if everything has stopped, as if, here, now, all I have is collapsing on me, folding inwards never to push out again. It feels hopeless. I sit there, silent, scared, until, on the murky moisture of the air there is a rush of something.
‘Doc? Doc, you’re groaning. What’s the matter?’
I squint as hard as I can, frantically forcing my eyes to see something, anything in the dank, suffocating space as to my direct side, the rush sounds again, distinct now, a click licking the air as what must be a liquid begins its gentle whoosh. It is only when I hear again that my groggy brain engages in the intricacies of the noises around me and I realise with a stabbing clarity what is actually happening and what it means to me—what it means to us both.
‘What
