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He shrugged, a bit annoyed. ‘They’re just my scales. They’re not strange.’

He felt uncomfortable with her gaze on him. He slipped out of the embrace and retrieved a sheet from the room and wrapped it around them.

She fell asleep before he did.

Emile woke up feeling uncomfortable. His body was twisted up inside his creased uniform and he was busting for a pee. He felt the disorientation of waking in a strange place and didn’t notice at first that he was alone in the room. He didn’t want to wake Errol or Bernice next door so he decided to go out on to the balcony to relieve himself.

He stood for a full minute, staring at Scott and Tameka asleep in each other’s arms. Then he closed the shutter quietly and crept back to bed, where he lay awake until morning. The sun was already bright when he heard Scott and Tameka stir. Scott cried out, shouting words Emile still couldn’t make out. The young man seemed to be troubled by nightmares most nights. Then Emile heard Tameka’s voice soothing him.

He heard them move to open the shutters. Without knowing why, Emile turned over and pretended to be asleep. They opened the shutters and came in, flooding the room with light. He heard them whisper something to each other and then Tameka climbed into bed next to him and Scott left the room.

He lay silently next to her, his heart pounding in his head, his bladder aching painfully, and feeling lots of things he didn’t have names for.

CONVERSATIONS WITH THE ENEMY

They squeezed through the cracks in the side of the crystal structure and half slid, half stumbled down on to the rocky ground. Kitzinger’s eyes watered behind her goggles. She had lived the last year under artificial light and the few chinks of thin sunlight which leaked into the crystal structure. It was the first time she had seen the sun.

It was a huge pale-pink disc eating up the sky. Clouds of black dust covered its bloated surface. It was so large that she felt dizzy staring up at it; a childlike part of her feared that it might roll into the planet or swallow it whole.

It was a red giant, a dying sun. And as it died, the planet around her was also dying, the aged sun incapable of providing the planet with the heat it needed to thrive. The bloated sun was still capable of soaking the landscape in deep crimson light, making the glaciers appear as if they were frozen blood. The world was beautiful, but sinister – dangerous. It was like standing on the very edge of chaos.

She’d never seen anything so barren, so lifeless. The surface was a desert of ice and rocky stone. A blizzard of ice tore across the expanse, raking up stones and small rocks. The tiny hailstones rattled noisily against the glass of her goggles.

Aric hadn’t stopped to admire the scenery. He had blindly stumbled into the blizzard, shielding his masked face with his hands. Kitzinger set off after him, pushing hard against the wind which threatened to knock her off her feet. Even as she ran she knew it was hopeless. There wasn’t anywhere for them to ‘escape’ to. Just kilometres of scarlet tundra stretching out before them. Once their captors realized they were gone they would find them easily.

The thought made her shudder. Nikolas would kill them for sure. She felt a cold sweat prickle beneath her suit. Why hadn’t she just done what she was told? Been a good, obedient slave?

Swearing continually into her respirator, she forced her way through the icy wind after Aric.

The blizzards became heavier and she lost both Aric and her sense of direction. A rocky ridge appeared through the clouds of sharp ice, which tore at her body. She made her way towards it, clambering up its loose surface on her hands and knees, hoping to spy Aric from the top.

She couldn’t see him, just the harsh surface of the planet and the outline of the crystal structure from which she had fled. Despite having lived inside it for almost a year she had never seen it from the outside. From this distance it looked like a city of thin geometric towers. Each side of the long crystal