Farah and Abi lower Vikram on to the bed, his hand still clamped to his neck and the woodlice forcing their way out where they can. He coughs, leans awkwardly to one side and spits three more woodlice and a millipede on to the ground in a pool of saliva. Ants explore the back of his hand.

I wish there were blood, I think. My god, I wish there were blood. But the blood, when people are dying, is short-lived and is quickly replaced by something else. Another rule, I note, with no sense of pleasure.

Benedict is at the console, typing rapidly.

“How does this gizmo work then?” Jonah says, stooping to peer into the mechanism.

“Thoughts are cytoelectrical impulses exchanged between neurons,” Benedict explains as he types. “But qualia, the self-narrative I, is a standing wave composed of these impulses that extends across the whole brain.”

Jonah flashes me a playful wink. He doesn’t care, I think. There’s a punchline coming, I can feel it. This is just the build-up.

Vikram convulses, coughing uncontrollably, gasping for breath.

“What’s taking so long?” Abi snaps at Benedict.

“Nearly there,” Benedict says. “I’m updating the field alignments.”

Abi looks confused. “Use the same ones as Devon.”

“We may as well try the new ones—” Benedict begins.

Abi exhales a disbelieving gust that’s half laugh. “He’s dying, Benedict! This isn’t the time to try out a new protocol.”

“It’s what he’d want me to do,” Benedict insists, still typing.

Vikram vomits a stream of yellowish fluid.

“Hold on, Vik,” Abi whispers, her voice cracking. “You’re OK, you’re going to be OK.”

“What’s this with the field alignments?” Jonah asks, coolly.

“We’re still working on the protocol required to preserve our memories,” Benedict answers, without looking up. “There’s no point in us coming here unless we can take news of our research back with us, is there?”

My breath catches. Benedict doesn’t know what he’s done. To Benedict this is science, self-evidently the right thing, but there’s a dangerous look in Jonah’s eyes.

“He’ll remember this place in the ordinary world, will he?” he says.

“We hope,” Benedict answers. “It would be a tremendous discovery.”

“We can help you too,” Abi says. “Get you back. I don’t know how long you’ve been here but it’s less time in the ordinary world. Do you have a family?”

“What makes you think I want to go back?” Jonah says.

He smiles at me, like we’re sharing a secret joke. I see the anticipation in his look. Oh, no, I think, no, no, no… It’s the way he looked at the man he murdered, the way he looked at me the first time we met. I feel like I’m in a nightmare, the kind where you want to scream but you can’t, where all you can do is watch the horror unfold in front of you.

“You want to come back and study this place, I suppose?” Jonah enquires.

“Of course.”

“So you can carve it up and buy it and sell it and own it, I suppose?”

Benedict looks up, confused. “I’m sorry?”

Jonah shakes his head slowly. “We can’t have that.”

He takes the gun calmly from Kevin’s outstretched hand and turns and fires into Vikram’s chest. Three thunderous, world-ending cracks.

CRACK! CRACK! CRACK!

Vikram’s body jerks with each impact and the woodlice and the ants and spiders become instantly more frantic and boil from the wounds as his body dissolves into them, becoming them. Abi staggers backwards, her hand to her mouth.

“NO!” Farah screams.

She runs at Jonah and he slaps her aside with the back of his hand, knocking her down. He takes aim at the machine now.

“This is my place, do you understand?” he shouts at nobody in particular. “I own this place. God has a plan for me, in this world. And nobody else gets to muscle in on it.”

He goes to pull the trigger.

Except he doesn’t make it, because my little fruit knife has found my hand and I’ve darted forward and plunged it into the small of his back. I pull it out and stab again. And again. And again. I imagine it slicing through kidney and spleen. There’s no resistance. Just the dry thud, thud, thud as my clenched fist hits his shirt.

THUD. THUD. THUD, THUD.

Jonah twists, turns away from me and then elbows me in the face. I feel my nose pop and two of my front teeth hit the back of my throat. It feels as if the world has fallen in on me. The ground clouts me from behind and suddenly Jonah is glaring wide-eyed at me and I know he’s going to kill me for sure this time.

“You ungrateful swine!” he howls, clutching his side and trying to peer around to see what the damage is. “Look what you’ve done.”

A sick, singing blackness rings in my head. In the ordinary world I’d have passed out by now, but there’s no passing out in this world.

“I’ll kill you,” Jonah slurs.

He starts towards me but his legs give way and suddenly he’s on the floor with me. He tries to stand, staring at me in genuine disbelief and confusion. He sees, in the same moment that I do, that the fingers on his hand and the fingers clawing their way out of the wound in his side have become tangled together. He tries to pull his hand away but the fingers stretch like hot toffee and more sprout from his hand and his side like they’re trying to hold on to each other.

He’s dying!

The realization hits me as it hits him. He twists again, scrabbling on the floor for his knife. Kevin steps past him now. He picks up the gun from the ground and he points it at me. I’m still gasping and choking on my own blood and a part of me is checking my hands and expecting to see insects or dust or more fingers.

A cold feeling swells inside me. I know now why I was so scared I couldn’t even walk down the same road this kid was living on. Because there’s something wrong with him, something missing. He’s empty inside and it goes down and down and down like a hole. And where other people have something, with him it’s nothing and all he wants is to kill and kill and kill. I feel it inside me. How long he’d been waiting in his bedroom before Jonah found him, waiting with his sniper rifle set up and ready for the next unfortunate to pass by.

Years. Decades.

He raises the gun and points it at my face.

In the same moment, Farah hits him, hard, in the shoulder with a fire extinguisher. It’s so heavy she can hardly lift it. The blow is only glancing, but it’s enough. He goes down and she drops the fire extinguisher and nearly takes me out in the process. She doesn’t pause. She hauls me to my feet.

“Come on!” she screams.

She doesn’t need to tell me twice. I scramble to my feet and we bolt through the door and down the corridor.