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and gasped within the men’s grip, the air stung at her bare legs like tiny frosted pinpricks. If the two men flanking her were bothered by the dramatic drop in temperature, they certainly didn’t show it. There was ice on the tarmac, small piles of snow in the places where bitumen met grass and the sky was a steely expanse of grey cloud.
    Distracted by the cold, Kirra barely realised she was being carried towards the looming mouth of an aircraft hangar. The two men forced her through a side doorway into an extended concrete corridor, and marched her along it for some time before pausing at an open door.
    Inside the room, a woman sat on a couch, talking happily with someone out of Kirra’s view. The woman wore jeans, a dark crimson jacket and gloves, and had long dark hair draped over her shoulders. She looked up at Kirra and the two men, her expression curious.
    One of Kirra’s brutish escorts spoke in a language Kirra couldn’t identify, and was answered in the same language by the other person in the room, a man Kirra couldn’t see. Obviously the men had been given instructions of some kind, because they led her off in the opposite direction with a distinct sense of purpose, heading down another corridor before stopping at a wide metal door, once painted a silvery grey and now peeling and rusty.
    One of the men punched a security code into the keypad on the wall and lifted the bolt, and Kirra found herself face to face with a concrete room full of nothing. She was pushed over the threshold, stumbled, and spun around just in time to watch them slam the door and hear them bolt it from the outside.
    She sucked in a breath and tried to wrench the door open, not entirely sure why she was bothering. Whirling around, she noted a metal tap and basin and a frosted steel toilet in the corner behind the door. The water in the toilet was almost frozen over. She flushed it once and watched the liquid seep away and then reappear. Several flushes proved successful in thawing most of the ice.
    Opposite the toilet and basin was a tiny window, high up in the wall: metal bars crisscrossed over a broken pane of glass. She tensed when an icy breeze whistled into the cell.
    After concluding that escape was impossible via the little window, Kirra did a few quick laps of the cell. In four steps she could walk from one side to the other.
    She was trembling with cold. She slipped her hands up into the sleeves of her jumper, crouched in the corner facing the door and wrapped her arms around herself.Her breath curled away from her mouth in steamy spirals, and each inhalation felt like someone had her chest in a vice and was winding it tighter every few seconds. She glanced at her wrist, but remembered that back home in Freemont she’d stupidly forgotten to put on her little watch with its cobalt coloured wristband.
    As night fell, Kirra started to panic in earnest when she thought she saw several dainty snowflakes float in through the window. The room grew colder and colder by the moment and the air pressed in on her. It felt like being shut up inside a freezer. She wondered for a frightening moment if she’d survive the temperature of the night. She wasn’t positive she would and so she told herself that a rescue team had to be on its way. Any time now, they’d come for her. They’d wrap her up and give her a warm drink and take her back to Freemont. There was no need to panic about the cold. None at all. They were coming.
    Â 
    Kirra woke to the sound of voices. They sounded far off and for some reason Kirra processed their words at a much slower rate than she normally would have.
    â€˜You have made an unacceptable error,’ a man was saying threateningly. It sounded like Latham.
    â€˜Me?’ The second voice sounded ashamed. Kirra didn’t recognise this man.
    â€˜Yes! You! I gave you a simple task: to keep her alive. Not challenging, is it?’
    â€˜No, but —’
    â€˜Not hard