Chiu fishes in his back pocket and pulls out the folded sheets of paper he tore from his journal before we left. He hands them to Benedict. The others cluster around him to read. I watch their eyes scanning the words. Then the woman takes a step back, her hand rising to her mouth, her eyes wide with shock.

“Devon made it?” she murmurs, a weak, hopeful smile flickering on her face. “He made it!”

“We shouldn’t jump to conclusions, Abi,” Benedict warns.

“But it has to be him, right?” Marcus says. “ ‘The team successfully manipulated the cytoelectric activity of a coma patient … restoring them to wakefulness.’ That’s him. Devon. Abi’s right.”

“What do you think, Vikram?” the woman named Abi says.

The man named Vikram shrugs, his eyes still scanning the pages. “It’s possible…”

“It has to be him,” Abi insists. “It worked.”

A tense silence. They fall back to reading, muttering, pointing out passages to each other. Chiu was right, I think. Something important is happening here and these people are a part of it.

“Where did you get this?” Vikram says at last, looking up at Chiu.

“We were in a hospital when we first arrived,” Chiu says. “I found it in the library.”

“What does it mean?” Abi asks.

“It means they went ahead and published without us,” Vikram says bitterly.

“Why would they do that?”

“Look at the date,” Marcus says. “And they’ve used our names. We’re all co-authors.”

“Oh, the damn fools,” Benedict says. “They’re trying to keep up the cover story.”

“Oh god—” Abi sits heavily, her face pale.

“Excuse me?” Chiu says, interjecting. “Who’s Devon?”

The others look at us like they’d forgotten we were there. Abi offers us a weak smile. “Devon Wang is one of our colleagues,” she says.

“Don’t tell them too much,” Vikram interrupts her. “It could be a set-up.”

Abi gives an exasperated sigh. “They’re kids, Vik.”

“Kids who happen to have found and correctly interpreted an academic paper?”

“Chiu isn’t like most kids,” Farah says firmly.

“Suspicious,” Vikram says.

“For god’s sake. What do you want to do?” Abi says. “Turf them on to the street?”

“We can’t risk that,” Vikram responds. “They’d go back to whoever sent them.”

Abi turns to the older man. “Benedict, please, talk some sense into him.”

“Of course,” the older man – Benedict – says. “I apologize for the … poor start. This world has more than its fair share of trouble. Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Professor Benedict Brownstein, I run this lab and allegedly I wrote this paper, which was an impressive trick seeing as I was unconscious at the time. These are my colleagues: Dr Abigail Peradams, Dr Vikram Shah and Dr Marcus Lancaster. We are – er, were – part of a study to explore disconnected consciousness.” He gives us an awkward little half bow and then looks around, brightening. “Marcus, maybe this would be a good time to put on a nice pot of tea, don’t you think?”

THIRTY-FIVE

They show us through to another room behind the main lab. It looks like some kind of common room, cluttered to the point of being filthy: pizza boxes, takeout containers, half-eaten sandwiches; electronic circuits, soldering irons, dismantled equipment. It’s hard to tell how much exists in this world and how much has leaked across, forgotten in the common room of the ordinary world. In the spaces between the equipment, there are piles of loose papers: ring binders and notebooks, all filled, as far as I can see, with densely packed writing and intricate diagrams. The windows, I notice, have been covered with cardboard and masking tape.

We sit on three long, low, moth-eaten sofas, arranged in a U-shape around a coffee table strewn with yet more scientific journals and notebooks. Marcus bustles over to a small kitchenette and flicks on a kettle.

“You have electricity?” Farah gasps.

Marcus grins like a schoolboy. He gestures to the far corner where a large section of the room has been given over to a stack of car batteries, all wired together with high-voltage cable. “Just a hand-crank generator, I’m afraid. I wish I could get the LiPos working but lead acid is about my limit.”

“How?” Chiu says.

“We’re scientists,” Benedict replies, looking affronted. “Neuroscientists, to be fair, but between us we have enough working knowledge to get a few things running.”

Marcus fusses over mugs and tea bags and starts pouring tea. “Milk?” he asks. “I’m sorry it’s only long-life. The fresh stuff never makes it through before it’s gone off.”

I grin at the absurdity of our sudden change in circumstances, as Marcus slops milk into each of our cups.

Something catches Chiu’s eye and he lets out a yelp of delight, leaping up and rushing over to the large flat-screen monitor on the workbench next to the kitchenette. “You’ve got a television?” He examines the flat-screen, which is showing a grainy image I can’t quite make out. “Can you get TV? Movies?”

“DVDs are a bit outside my field of expertise,” Benedict admits. “We have a hard wire to the CCTV camera in the airlock, that’s all.”

I recognize the scene on the monitor now. Not the broken filmic images we saw in the service station, but the white and cream walls of the hallway where they ambushed us. That’s how they did it, I think. This screen, an arrangement of magnetic locks on the doors and some kind of … explosive?

We make ourselves comfortable on the mismatched sofas while Marcus offers around a plate of biscuits.

“Ah! Tea and stale biscuits,” Vikram remarks caustically. “No one eats here, no matter how many times we’ve tried, but Marcus keeps at it. He thinks it’s good for morale. Typical upper-class Englishman.”

Marcus scoffs, haughtily. “You went to a better school than I did, Vik. And if I described you as a typical Indian, it wouldn’t be acceptable, now, would it?”

Vikram waves him away.

“It makes the place more homely,” Marcus insists.

Benedict sits next to Farah and gestures towards her bandaged hand. “May I?”

Farah casts me an anxious look but allows Benedict to take her hand and gently unwrap the bandage. “Hyperdactyly?” he says. “But … what happened to the extra fingers?”

“We cut them off,” I say.

Benedict glances at the others. “You cut them off? Why?”

“We were told that you could treat the symptoms. Slow it down.”