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again from tiny pieces of crisp lodged in her throat. She took the stairs slowly, one at a time, her heart skipping a beat every time the creaks got louder. An icy draught gusted downwards from the landing and around the staircase. The sound of flapping started again.
    â€˜Ma?’ Alice’s voice was almost a whisper. As she got to the top of the stairs, she could see that the door to the spare bedroom was open, swishing back and forwards. She took one step closer.
    The spare bedroom.
    Alice could feel her entire body begin to shake. All the hairs on her body were upright, alert, terrified. The door banged shut and then yanked itself open again in the wind. She didn’t care that her mother would shout at her for going in there.
    â€˜Ma?’ she croaked. ‘Did you come back for me?’
    Alice picked her fingers over the peeling wallpaper of the landing: horrible brown flock wallpaper. Her mother had said they could change it when they had some money. Her mother had said a lot of things. Alice swallowed deeply and stepped into the spare bedroom, steeling herself tall and strong for whatever was inside.
    The room was painted red, pristine and clean with a cream-coloured border three quarters of the way up the wall. There were fresh flowers, now dead, in a vase on the bedside table. Apart from the bed, the table was the only furniture in the room and on it stood two unopened bottles of vodka. A freezing draught of ice-cold wind blew in through a partially smashed window and rain had already begun to seep down the walls forming small pools on the floor at the bottom of the soaked curtains. There were pictures of naked women on the walls, twisting over motorbikes.
    The shock and disappointment was overwhelming. Alice took a deep intake of breath as a deft, quick movement caught her eye. Matching the border, the linen on the bed was cream and cool—except there was a deep crimson stain, bleeding out like a bruise with a dark grey creature moving at the centre of it. Alice exhaled and screamed all at once. The dove, partially decapitated, ruffled its wings when it saw Alice, and flapped its body back and forth on the bed.
    She took another step towards the bird, its black bead of an eye following her movement. It raised a wing and let it fall.
    â€˜I thought you were my mother,’ she said.
    A trail of blood dripped from the jagged hole in the window across the room and onto the bed where the bird shook the last coughs of life from its beak. Alice watched as it snapped its neck backwards and forwards until the jumpy twisting finally stopped and the only sound was that of the wind whistling past the serrated edges of the broken window pane and Alice’s own heart beating.
    â€˜I hate you!’ she screamed and ran from the room.

2
    The Academy
    C arter was the last to step out into the cool night air. He’d been stuck at the back, standing on the panel that housed the throbbing, driverless engine for the entire journey and it had made him feel sicker than ever. The noise humming through his feet and the constant chatter of the crowd he was packed in with grated through his skin and sank into his bones. When the vehicle stopped and everyone bled out into the night, Carter could taste his own relief. Those first few seconds of calm were delicious.
    As he stepped down onto the earth, the damp air soothed his skin and the smell of the moonlit night washed away some of thick, cloying smell of the other passengers. There wasn’t much at the stop; a small red-brick shelter with four backlit screens inside and, on the far edge where the dirt met the perimeter fence, a row of warning signs that rose like tombstones out of the dirt for as far as he could see. The signs were new.
    D anger Of Death
    Do Not Approach The Barricades
    A slow , thin mist floated over the hopscotch fence-work that loomed upwards like a range of glittering mountains, the mist shrouding the tops of the shredded metal. The