“Benedict will go to prison for sure,” Abi says. “Maybe Vikram too. And the rest of us will be a cautionary tale of ethics gone wrong for every medical student for evermore.” Abi glances anxiously up the stairs like she’s afraid Benedict has come after her. “Benedict’s got too much at stake. As far as he’s concerned, there’s no point going back unless he’s sure we can remember what happened here.”

“But we can go back,” Chiu says. “I don’t want to remember this place. I just want to see my parents again.”

Farah reaches out and places a comforting hand on his shoulder.

“I’m sorry,” Abi says. “I know him and he won’t let you. Not yet.”

“Why not?”

“We think we can change the field protocol in the machine to preserve some of our memories. But there’s an element of trial and error and we only get one shot for each of us.”

“So he wants to keep us here and use us as guinea pigs?” Farah says.

Abi nods. “I’m afraid so.”

“He can’t stop me,” Chiu says firmly. “I’ll go. When he’s sleeping.”

“Benedict is the only one who knows enough about computers to get the system running,” she says. She sighs, her face softening for the first time. “He won’t let you near the machine until he has a new protocol to test – then there might be a chance.”

“But that might be too late,” I say.

“I’m sorry.” Abi turns to go. “Try to enjoy your shower.”

We rummage in the lost-property boxes, digging through years of forgotten towels, gym outfits and water bottles. In the ordinary world they probably stink, but here, it’s fine. Just a dry staleness no different to anything else and far better than our own blood- and mud-caked clothes. Farah finds a turquoise sports top and a pair of black leggings. They’re loose, but she uses the belt from her jeans to cinch them tight. I find jogging bottoms and a white T-shirt. Chiu hardly bothers looking. His face is dark and brooding, still reeling from Abi’s news. He sifts half-heartedly through one of the boxes, then gives up and disappears upstairs without even bothering to shower.

The water in the shower is so cold it feels like it’s burning my skin. I get the peculiar sense that it might be cold enough to propel me back to the ordinary world and I close my eyes and plunge my head into the water again and again. But it doesn’t work. When I open my eyes, the world is just as real and immovable as ever.

I’m towelling off my hair afterwards, still only half dressed, when the door opens a crack and Farah slips inside. The sports top she’s wearing is about three sizes too large for her, but it sets off small explosions in my brain when I see her. She walks purposefully across the changing room, reaches her arms around my neck without a word and kisses me. I stumble back, causing one of the locker doors to slam shut. She laughs, then kisses me again, and this time I kiss her back.

After a few moments she pulls away just a little, her face still very close to mine.

She says, “Hi.”

“Um … hi.”

She kisses me again, and I feel the weight of her pressing against me. There’s an urgency in the way she kisses me. Even when we stop, we stay like that, holding tightly on to each other, breathing each other’s fresh, soapy, shower gel smell. I never held anyone like this before, I never knew how it felt or what I was missing.

“Let’s get out of here,” she breathes. “Somewhere we can be alone.”

“We’re alone here?” I reply, hopefully.

“I mean … somewhere else.” She grins. “Let’s go to the Ritz!”

I stiffen. “We need to persuade Benedict to let you use the MRI and go home.”

She sighs and pushes away from me. The coolness of her absence makes me ache and I want to reach out to her again. But we can’t avoid this conversation.

“Talk about a mood killer,” she says.

“I’m serious,” I reply. “We don’t have time to wait around for him to come up with a new protocol. We need to make him understand.”

“Or…” Farah says, her eyes flashing. “We don’t. Let’s go to the Shard! Let’s go to the very top and give God the finger.”

“No.”

“I’m not going back to the ordinary world,” Farah says, darkly.

“You’re not serious—”

“I’m done with this bullshit. We got Chiu here, that’s what he wanted. This lot will look out for him, they might even get him home eventually. But I’m not waiting around here to die and I’m not going back so I can wait around to die either.”

“But we’re going on a date, remember? A real one. At the cinema. Or out for dinner.”

“Real?” Farah snorts. “Real for me is tests and scans and needles and operations. You wouldn’t care much for me in that state. Why don’t we just live while we can.”

“But we’re so close,” I say.

Farah shifts, takes another step back. I sense her closing off. This is how she survived, I think. This is how she got through all that crap. She looked like she was out there giving the teachers grief because she wanted to but she was hiding just as much as I was.

“With or without you, Kyle,” she says. “It’s your choice.”

“Farah, please,” I say, sickly. “I don’t want to lose you.”

She bites her lip. “You don’t get it, do you? You are going to lose me, Kyle. It’s inevitable.”

“What do you mean?” I say, my voice small, almost nothing. “It’s the good kind of cancer, remember? You’re going to be OK.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Farah says. “You heard Abi. Even if by some miracle I get better… I’m not going to remember you, am I? And you’re not going to remember me. Either way … if we go back, we lose each other. We lose all this.”

THIRTY-SEVEN

Either way, if we go back, we lose each other.

I must have known at some level; I just didn’t want to face it. We aren’t the first to be here and yet nobody in the ordinary world knows about this place. Even if some people make it back, the most that’s left are garbled memories, fragments, the unspoken fear that fuels our horror stories. I think about Father Michael’s pamphlets, the religious stories and all the ecstatic visionaries in history. Perhaps those people were here, perhaps their wild convictions, their rushing glimpses, are all that’s left of their memories of this place.

It’s not enough, I think. I’m not like Chiu. Everything Chiu loves and cares for is at home, he doesn’t need to remember this place. For me, it’s the opposite. Everything I care for is here. Farah, of course, but not just Farah. Also, those parts of myself I’ve found since I came here. If I forget everything I ever was, does that mean I’m still me?

Maybe Farah’s right: we should stay here.

But if we stay, she might die.

Marcus is working in the hallway when we get back: delicately resetting the charges that they used to stun us when we first arrived. He’s stacked their weapons neatly by the door to the sleep lab and now that I can look at them more closely, I see that they’ve been stolen from the stock cupboards of a nearby sports outlet. Hockey goalie equipment. Golf clubs. Something that looks a bit like a home-made mediaeval flail, crafted from the bar of a dumb-bell, a length of chain and a string of weights that have been padlocked together.

“You probably should know about our system,” Marcus says. “In case anything happens.”

We follow him back into the common room. Vikram and Benedict haven’t moved since we left. Benedict scrawls in his notebook, ignoring us entirely. Vikram looks up from his journal and watches with an air of faint amusement as Marcus talks us through the systems.