“You’re like me,” he says.

“Like you how?” Farah replies cautiously.

“You’re ghosts as well.”

EIGHT

I feel sick but when I look at Farah I see she’s grinning and shaking her head slowly. “I know you,” she says. “You’re Chiu Lin, from Year Eight.”

Chiu nods mutely.

“But … you’re not dead. You’re not even dying.”

Chiu blinks once or twice like he’s thinking this over. “What do you mean?”

“What’s the last thing you remember?” Farah says.

Chiu squirms like he’d rather not tell us but Farah frowns at him with such a teacherly intensity that he eventually relents.

“I accidentally kicked our football on to the sports hall roof,” he says. “And Alexi Koch dared me to go fetch it.”

Farah nods, like she knows this already. “Do you remember what happened after that?” she prompts.

“Not really…” Chiu gives us a baffled look. “Alexi was calling up to me and then a teacher came and I don’t remember anymore.”

“You fell off, dumbnut,” Farah says, her face splitting into a broad grin.

“What?” Chiu’s eyes grow wide.

“You tripped and practically nosedived off the roof. You’d be dead except there was a shed that broke your fall.”

“I sort of remember.” Chiu nods.

Of course. Even I know about Chiu Lin falling off the sports hall roof. It was after I left but a friend who’d stayed on to do his A-levels messaged me to let me know. There’s nothing a school likes more than a good catastrophe to gossip about.

“You’ve been in a coma for six months,” Farah says. “You have your own special section in the school newsletter. But you’re not dying. They reckon you’ll be fine.”

Farah and I glance at each other, a hopeful glimmer. If Chiu isn’t dying, maybe we’re not dying either?

Chiu looks impressed. “I’m in the newsletter?”

Farah rolls her eyes. “They talk about it every assembly. It’s quite boring actually.”

We exchange stories as we follow Chiu along a corridor and into the next wing.

“I woke up here,” he says. “In the hospital. But alone and everything silent. I lay in bed for a while – I thought the zombie apocalypse had come.” I nod and Farah flashes me a withering look. “Then I thought I must be a ghost so I got up and started exploring. Then I found the library … so I moved.”

He swings open the doors to reveal the medical library. It’s not big: an L-shaped room with no windows, half a dozen low stacks, some desks, a counter and bookshelves lining the walls. Chiu has made a kind of sleeping area in the corner of the L. He’s dragged in a mattress from one of the wards and torn pages out of medical textbooks and blue-tacked them up like posters. More books are stacked untidily around the mattress, some piles kicked over and scattered on the floor among food wrappers and half-eaten chocolate bars. There’s something unbearably sad about the whole scene. I imagine him here alone, convinced that he’s a ghost, quietly setting up for the world’s loneliest sleepover.

“How long have you been like this?” I ask.

Chiu doesn’t answer right away. “A long time. I don’t know. Months?” He kneels down and sifts through his piles of books. After a moment he pulls one out and hands it to me. “Here. I tried to keep track, but…”

He trails off. The book is an exercise book with finely squared paper, the sort of thing a librarian would use for keeping track of their to-do list. I open it and find a tally that fills the page, four vertical lines and a fifth line through each one. I catch a worried look from Farah. I can see right away there’s a lot more than six months’ worth of days here. Six bundles of five per row. That’s thirty days a row: roughly a month. Twenty or thirty lines on the page filling a whole page and half of the next one. That’s … three years?

But it wasn’t possible. Chiu only fell off the roof six months ago.

“You haven’t been in a coma for that long,” Farah says.

I look at the pile of food wrappers and wonder how many times he tried to eat even though he wasn’t hungry; how many times he sat, disappointed, with the tasteless chocolate in his mouth.

“I think time is different here,” Chiu says. “I read something, look—” He gets up again, becoming animated, and sifts through more of his books and torn-out pages. He pulls out something that looks like a magazine but it’s thicker and it has a serious, academic look to it. The cover says: JAMA Journal of Neurology. “This is a study that a team in London published recently,” he says. “Here.”

We study the page together.

In a small study of six coma patients, Brownstein’s team found that the brains of two burst to life on a regular cadence that resembled an accelerated sleep-waking cycle. These patients displayed a surge in the specific type of brain waves that indicate conscious thought. Production of those brain waves – gamma waves – spiked up to three hundred times, reaching levels higher than those found in normal conscious brains.

“You see?” Chiu says.

“Not really,” Farah answers.

“They recorded gamma waves which means the patient was awake. But not in the ordinary world. So … maybe they were here?”

“So we might not be dying, just in a coma?” I say.

“Not even that,” Chiu replies. “You said I’ve been in a coma for six months but I’ve counted nearly three years. You’ve only been here a few days so this might be a heartbeat in the ordinary world. You might still be having a seizure, Kyle. Farah might have passed out or be fitting or anaesthetized. Just unconscious in some way.”

Farah shakes her head disbelievingly. “What are you? Some kind of child genius?”

“I like to read,” Chiu says, looking bashful. “I always did. And there’s not much else to do here.”

“What do you think?” I say to Farah.

“It’s possible,” she says.

“Why is it only us here?” I say. “It’s a hospital, there’s got to be a bunch of people in comas or under anaesthesia.”

“Maybe it only happens occasionally. A chance thing.”

“Lucky us,” I say.

Farah stands and strolls thoughtfully along the stacks of books, allowing her fingers to trail across them. I watch her and wonder what’s going on inside her head. I should be celebrating, overcome with relief – not dead, not dying, just unconscious – but a part of me is anxious. The tight, safe little world we’ve been enjoying feels uncertain again. I liked it better when it was just the two of us, when we felt that we might die at any moment and so nothing mattered.

“Anyway, there’s a more pressing question,” Chiu continues.

“Shoot,” Farah says, vaguely.