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Harry waited another few minutes, sniffing back the tears that he didn’t realise he’d been crying, and then rose from the bed, turned out the light and set off down the corridor. A fire had been ignited inside him – a fire that needed feeding.

Mrs Wesley stood in front of the bathroom mirror and tried to pinpoint the exact moment that the world had jumped back into focus. It was as though she’d spent her whole life looking out through dirty windows, not realising that they were dirty because they were all she’d known. And now someone had finally given the glass a good clean. Suddenly, everything seemed sharper, more in focus: she could remember names, places; she could remember what she’d had for tea the previous day; and she could remember why she was here – she was here to be cured.

And – unless all this was another cruel part of her illness –

the treatment seemed to be working. She remembered her knitting and shook her head, half in amusement, half in horror at how she must have looked to others – knitting and re-knitting the same square of green wool, day in, day out. But that was all over. She stared at the woman in the mirror, realising with a growing smile how attractive she actually was. She tugged a few errant strands of brown hair into place and collected her accoutrements together.

Moments later, she closed the bathroom door behind her, toilet bag clutched in her arm – and jumped as she felt a hand on her shoulder.

‘Oh Harry!’ she exclaimed, her laughter defusing the hysteria that she felt bubble up inside her. ‘Don’t do that!’

Harry smiled – but not the cheery, cheeky smile that Mrs Wesley was familiar with. This was more of a sneer, cold and calculating. Mrs Wesley wasn’t sure she liked it very much. In the past couple of days, there were quite a lot of things that she was realising she didn’t like about this place. Maybe they’d been there all along and she just hadn’t seen them.

She looked at Harry, feeling suddenly very vulnerable. His hand stayed on her shoulder.

‘What’s wrong?’ she asked..

‘Everything’s fine,’ he replied in a soft voice. ‘I just thought I’d offer you an escort to your room, Doris.’

She pulled her head back a little and raised an eyebrow: she wasn’t keen on being addressed in so familiar a way, especially by someone she hardly knew. ‘You seem different, Harry – are you alright?’

‘Oh yes, Doris – I’m more than alright.’ His eyes gleamed.

He smiled devilishly and tapped the side of his head. ‘It’s all coming back to me. All of it.’

‘That’s wonderful, Harry,’ she beamed, relaxing a little. ‘I must admit, I’m feeling a lot better myself.’ She took a closer look at this new, invigorated Harry.

As if he’d read her mind, he smiled. ‘I feel like a new man,’

he said, and slipped his arm into hers.

The numbers streamed past her like bubbles rising from the depths, splitting, multiplying as they fled upwards into the night.

Part of her felt detached enough to observe the clear, mathematical beauty around her, to even make sense of some tiny, tiny part of it all. The rest of her was fenced off from her perceptions as if someone had neatly bisected her brain, leaving half of it to be integrated into whatever vast matrix spread around her, half of it to observe, neutrally, uninvolved.

She felt an itch, deep inside her head, but she had no body with which to scratch it.

She watched the numbers coalesce and crystallize around her, fading out of the velvet darkness, rainbowing through colours she never knew existed. The symmetries were beautiful, breathtaking. But just as she began to understand a fraction of what they were all about, her attention would be caught by something else, like a butterfly in a poppy field, unable to settle.

But it didn’t matter. Wherever she turned, there was some new puzzle, some fresh algorithm being enacted around her. And attention, she knew, wasn’t required. Her presence – her conscious awareness – was almost a side-effect, an observer powerless to interfere in the abstract machineries that wheeled