“To London,” Chiu says. “University College London.”

“How are we supposed to do that? We’re passed out somewhere in the ordinary world. You’re in the hospital. I’m probably still on the street.”

“We go there in this world,” Chiu explains.

A weak, unconvincing laugh escapes my lips. Is it possible I saw this coming? The sense of dread that followed me back here, is this what it was about?

“We can’t go to London,” I say. “There’s no trains or buses, we don’t have a car.”

“We’ll walk.”

“You’re not serious,” I say. “You want to walk to London?”

“It’s not too far,” Chiu insists.

Panic flutters in my chest. He’s serious. I wish Farah would say something, tell him how ridiculous he’s being. I think about how awful it felt in the day room, the windows exposed to that unthinking sky, and try to imagine what it would be like to try to walk all the way to London.

“There’s something wrong with the outside, you know that,” I say. I gesture at the walls around us. “You’re sleeping in the only windowless room in the building and now you think we’re going to walk to London?”

Chiu stares defiantly at me. “We’ll be OK.”

“And what do you think you’re going to do when you get there? There’s no electricity in this world. You can’t use an MRI without electricity.”

A flicker of doubt crosses Chiu’s face. “I don’t know. We’ll figure it out.”

I shake my head. “It’s not happening, Chiu.” I don’t like being mean to him but I want to squash this idea before it goes too far.

I imagine Farah’s already had this argument with him but she wanted him to hear it from me. I watch Chiu’s face tighten with disappointment and I start to feel sorry for him. It’s easy to forget how young he is. He wraps it up in reading science journals and being ridiculously clever, but inside he’s just a scared little boy who misses his parents.

“You’re going to be OK,” I say, more softly. “We all are. The doctors are taking care of us. They said you’re going to recover, remember? You could wake up at any moment.”

Chiu is silent for a moment, then he says: “What if they’re wrong?”

FIFTEEN

I offer Chiu a game of chess to make up for being mean and afterwards we all play Uno, but none of us are in the mood. Talk of going outside has shaken me. I’ve become attached to our safe little hideaway in the library.

Stuck here just like I was stuck at home.

Later, Chiu announces that he’s going to the day room to look for more games. After he’s gone, I expect Farah to bawl me out for being so hard on him, but she says nothing. Instead, she carries on reading her book, which she found that morning in the tiny fiction section of the library. I lie on my mattress, staring at the ceiling, trying to remember what happened on the morning of my seizure. I picture our little house with the dining table in the kitchen. But there’s nothing to anchor the memory to that particular morning, all my mornings are alike and washing into each other.

“Listen … about Chiu’s idea—” Farah says.

I sit up on my elbow and turn to her. “I should have been gentler with him, I’m sorry.”

“I think we should go.”

I stare at her for a second. “You’re not serious.”

“I am.”

“How? It’s, like, a hundred miles to London.”

“Ninety-two,” Farah says, matter-of-factly. “Walking will take a week. Ten days tops. Chiu found a map in the patient library. I checked: we can follow the A5 all the way down and cross over the M25—”

“Wait, wait, stop.”

Suddenly I realize that I was wrong. It wasn’t that they’d been fighting. They’d been planning it without me, they just didn’t know how to tell me.

“Look, I know you don’t want to—” Farah starts.

“Want?” I say, incredulously. “This isn’t about want.” Anger whiplashes inside me, surprising me as much as it does Farah. “I never stayed at home because I wanted to.”

“OK, I know, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean…”

“There’s something outside, I can feel it,” I say, desperately. “I know you can too.”

“You made it right the way across town to get here, didn’t you? Nothing bad happened.”

“It was horrible,” I say. “And it was about half an hour. You want to go and spend a week out there.”

“It’ll be better this time. Together.”

I shake my head. “Whatever we feel out there doesn’t want us outside. I don’t think we should antagonize it.”

“Or maybe it makes us scared to keep us in one place.”

Keep moving.

“Don’t do that,” I say. “You’re twisting it.”

“I get it, OK,” Farah says. “You had plenty of good reasons to be scared of going outside in the ordinary world and in this world we all feel exactly the same way.”

“Then why are we even considering this?”

“Chiu didn’t get a chance to tell you the rest of his theory,” Farah says. “He’s been reading about neuroscience for a long time—”

“Of course he has,” I say, bitterly.

“He has a theory. He thinks our consciousness is like a guitar string, a vibration that finds different resonances. He thinks that being here might mean we’re locked in this brain state, this resonance. And that being here might stop us from being able to recover in the ordinary world.”

“You’re listening to a thirteen-year-old’s theories about neuroscience now?”

“He’s not a regular thirteen-year-old, you know that.”

“It doesn’t mean he knows more than the doctors.”