She and her father ran toward the glass wall—her father carrying her raging brother beneath one arm—and then turned back when they saw what was happening outside. The courtyard had become a battle ground. Soldiers poured through the door from the control centre—some they recognised, a couple they did not—fanning out, firing, throwing grenades. Mister Wolf was probably with them, but Natasha could not see him. Out there too, Lane, Sophia and their children flashed across the courtyard, powering through bushes, over paved areas, blurring around bullets, ripping out throats and spewing blood, bouncing from walls, taking occasional hits only to rise again, stronger and more enraged than before. Natasha saw the smudges of terrified faces. A torso trailing guts splashed into the pond. The fountain turned red. A grenade exploded by the window and starred the glass, and her father grabbed her hand and pulled her away, back toward their rooms. "Mummy!" Natasha said, but she knew that her mummy was dead.

They hid in her room, lying down beside the bed. Her father had slammed the door again and again, smashed a hole in the wall and fused the security lock. It pushed four heavy bolts into the door from the wall, trapping them inside, making certain that they were set apart from Lane and Sophia and the escape these two had obviously planned. They would be trapped here now until the soldiers came to let them out. He cried and raged and swore as he never had before in front of his children. His tears were for his dead wife and his son and daughter, born innocent and yet guilty of so much at others' bidding. "Daddy, let's go and get them!" Peter gurgled, his face distorting and growing red from the change. But her father held him and kissed his forehead, shaking his head, saying, "It's not our fight," and more gunfire and explosions swallowed whatever else he said.

Lane smashed against the door, screeching, his nails tearing through masonry and snagging on the metal bolts, pulling and pushing and twisting, but even his berserker strength could not bend the thick steel. He screamed through the wall at them, nonsense in his words. "Natasha!" he said, and other things, and "Natasha!" again. "He wants me, Daddy?" Natasha said, and her father shook his head and closed his eyes in despair. The bashing and screaming continued until gunshots and explosions replaced them. There was more fighting and more death, and then it became quiet for some time, the only sounds the sobbing of her father and her little brother on the verge of rage. Natasha was petrified. But her fear and her father's despair kept her from the change.

Mister Wolf, face splashed with drying blood, pressed the pistol into the back of Natasha's father's head and pulled the trigger. Natasha squeezed her eyes shut, trying her best to un-see what she had seen, cast out the image of her father's face bulging out as the silver bullet melted his brain and poured its poison through his body, and even though her brother was screaming she could still hear Mister Wolf's voice, low and loaded, "I've been waiting to get rid of this scum for so long."

They were dragged through the courtyard by their legs, tied with steel-wired rope, and however much pleading or shouting Natasha and Peter did the soldiers would not let go. She could see why: the bodies of their fallen comrades littered the ground, bleeding and Tom and all of them dead. No Lane, no Sophia or their children, she thought, and the idea came for the first time that perhaps they had got away. Perhaps after all this there had been a chance after all. A chance that started in a syringe, something to calm the burn of silver and negate its poison. "Where are they?" she asked, and Mister Wolf turned to her—a little girl, that's all she was—and struck her across the face with his pistol. She cried because her daddy was not there to protect her, nor her mummy to calm the hurt. "Shut up, bitch," Mister Wolf said. They got away, she thought, and even though they had left her and her family to die, for a while she was glad.

The Plain, her brother's cold execution, the hole, the digging and burying, she remembered all of that, and Tom could barely comprehend the cruelty. In his sleep—where his dreams were Natasha's memories, steered and controlled and yet going only one way—he cried out, trying to shout at Cole for the terrible things he had done. "One more bullet!" he said, and it was Natasha's voice begging the soldier to kill her rather then bury her alive with her dead family. But Mister Wolf looked and saw only what he had been told to see: monsters. No little girl, no dead family, only monsters like these that had murdered his friends and comrades. And bury her he did.

You see? Natasha said. You see what they did to us, Daddy?

Tom came around quickly, rising out of the dream and back to desperate reality. Though the feeling of dread had gone—blossomed into the violence and terror of Porton Down—the dream had left him with a sense that all could never be right with the world again. He had seen terrible hidden things that he had never suspected existed. He was privy to awful secrets. And his wife …

Daddy, we have to go, Natasha said. She moved in his arms.

Tom gasped and tried to push her away, but the front seats prevented her from going any further. She moved on his lap, her limbs and body twisting slowly, as if performing an endless stretch. Her face had come away from his chest, her mouth bloody, dried lips pulled back from her teeth like those of a hissing dog.

"Are you coming back to life?" he said.

"I was never quite dead.

"What are you doing to me?"

Only good. Helping you.

"Helping me so that I can help you?"

Of course, she said, and her honesty made him hate himself. And helping you because you don't deserve what has happened. None of us do. We berserkers were wronged by Mister Wolf, and now he has done wrong to you as well.

"You want revenge?" Tom asked, thinking of Jo lying on the back seat of their ruined car … the image distant, like a faded black and white impression of crystal clear reality.

I want to be safe, she said. Tom tried not to look down at her face, but he could not help himself. He thought of the little girl she had been in the dream, confused and frightened and forced to watch her mother gunned down, her father and brother executed in front of her. He cried. They were dry tears, sobs heaving at his shoulders and reminding him of the pain lying dormant in his back, waiting to be reawakened. She was helping him. She was making him better. Whether by doing so she was making him into something else entirely, it would not do to consider right now.

"Let's go," he said. "In then out again. Food, drink, toilet, and then we'll go to meet them. Lane and Sophia. We'll go to them and they can take you home." And I'll find Steven, he thought, and will he look like those things that were chained up at Porton Down? Those people, living food, chained to the wall for the berserkers to have at whenever they felt hungry. "Will he?" Tom asked out loud, but Natasha did not answer.

He looked down at the girl in his arms—the corpse that had started to move—and opened the car door.