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room.
    It was strange, now, to see anything that wasn’t rendered by the striking, too-bright white fluorescent lights of the Compound.
    There was something almost natural about the torchlight.
    Mitts lifted himself a little up off his spring-loaded, camp-bed mattress.
    The springs creaked out beneath him.
    He could tell there was a person sitting there—slumped—resting upon his plastic container. He realised the plastic container had been moved away from its previous position just below the ventilation hatch.
    He wondered if anybody: his mother, his father, Heinmein might’ve taken a look inside.
    If they had then surely they would’ve discovered the screwdrivers there.
    Perhaps somebody had noticed the screwdrivers had gone missing from the maintenance cupboard. Even though Mitts had gone out of his way to snatch the screwdrivers from a little-used cupboard, he couldn’t help feeling that—somehow—fate might’ve conspired against him.
    Made it so he simply wouldn’t be allowed to get away with what it was he hoped to achieve.
    The figure slumped up in the corner. He held a book in his hand.
    The figure aimed a glance at him.
    Mitts finally recognised his father’s profile.
    How his father had his sleeves rolled up.
    His father, still in silhouette, folded the page of his book and laid it down carefully on top of the plastic container. Then he trod on over to Mitts.
    As he drew closer, as Mitts used the torchlight to read his father’s face, he saw his eyelids were drooping. Like his mother, his father had black bags beneath his eye sockets.
    Even how he had approached the bed, he could tell that his father’s energy was depleted, that his shoulders sagged, that his gait dragged.
    Mitts wondered if the Compound had sapped his father’s strength.
    As it had sapped his own.
    His father perched down lightly on the edge of the mattress.
    Mitts heard the springs within his camp bed slink back and forth.
    His father reached forward and laid his hand across Mitts’s forehead. “How’re you feeling?” he said.
    Mitts tried to swallow, but felt as if something blocked his throat.
    When he tried to cough it loose, he rendered himself unable to breathe.
    It was only with his father’s help that he was eventually able to sit upright in bed.
    Mitts looked to his father, feeling his eyes streaming with tears from the effort of trying to clear his throat. Mitts’s chest tickled and he could feel a tightening sensation over his veins. Although Mitts had never wanted to as a kid—back when he’d been carefree, and they’d lived at home—he now had a seemingly irrepressible desire to go run through a park somewhere.
    Just rush back and forth, grinning all over.
    Feeling the tickle of oxygen flowing into his lungs.
    Bringing him back to life.
    But that life was gone now.
    The Compound was all that remained.
    Just Mitts and his mother, and his father.
    Having got his coughing fit under some sort of control, and trying to ease his weary body, he looked to his father.
    His father attempted a smile, but it withered and died upon his lips.
    He looked away from Mitts, as if he couldn’t bear to look him in the eye.
    As if it was all it would take to set things right again, Mitts reached out and grasped hold of his father’s thigh. He gave it a squeeze. “I’m . . . I’m okay, Dad,” Mitts got out.
    But, the truth was, Mitts felt very far from ‘okay’.
    In fact, even right then, he could feel the swirling nausea returning to him.
    And there was nothing he could do.
    Except lie himself down.
    Stare up at the ceiling.
    And wish it away.
     
    * * *
     
    The next time Mitts woke, he realised that he’d been dreaming about those dark-purple hills.
    About the buffeting winds.
    And he had smelled that sulphuric odour, all around him.
    On his clothes.
    In his mouth.
    In his lungs .
    His mouth tasted of pill capsules: that plasticky, nothing taste.
    He could hear a light hum in his ears.
    When Mitts looked about himself,