I stagger towards the stairs and grip the banister, trying to differentiate between the shouts in my head and the ones that rise from the kitchen. Buffy comes bounding up the stairs, growling, fur sticking up, tail flicking in agitation, darting past me to the bedroom, disappearing beneath my bed. Adrenaline floods through me. Pins and needles stabbing up my spine. Fight and flight war in my synapses and my muscles cramp. It can only be the Affinity Project. Who else – what else – could produce multiple competing signals or any goddamn signals at all? This is it: my time is up. It’s over, over for me and Jamie, over for Aiden. They’ll take me in now, they’ll Harvest my secrets, go after my brother and kill him and that’s it. I have done nothing to save him.

“I’m telling you,” Miriam’s voice cuts in. “This is completely unnecessary!”

Two men, dressed in black, carrying what look like batons, enter the hall and stare up at me. I back against the wall as their signals pulse in waves and I shake my head, trying to clear it.

“I told you,” says the tall dark-skinned man, his large almond eyes fixed on me. “This is the Asset.”

“Relax.” Jamie strides in behind them. “She won’t fight, Benjamin. She knows what she is. She knows everything.”

“Stay out of it, Jamie.” He points his baton at Jamie’s chest. They are equally matched, size and proportion, squaring off in the narrow space. “This is not your business.”

“They always fight – or run,” the other man says, steel-blue eyes in a tanned face, stubble on a square jaw. He twists the baton in his hands, a band of orange lights up near the tip. “She won’t get far.”

“Don’t be an arse, Davis. Put that bloody thing away.” Jamie shoves past them and positions himself at the bottom of the stairs. “Benjamin, think, for God’s sake. I’m here, aren’t I? The Asset knows what I am, what her aunt is. The Affinity Project. Everything. This is not an Extraction Protocol, Ethan said so. Besides, she won’t run. She won’t fight. She’s expecting you.”

Benjamin’s face hardens. “I don’t understand.”

“What? You’re in breach, Gallagher?” Davis scowls and looks to Benjamin. “Nelson, this son of a bitch is in breach!”

“Mr Nelson, Mr Davis, stand down.” It’s another man’s voice, strident, accented. It comes from the kitchen. “I said, stand down. This is not an Extraction.”

German?

The back door opens and closes again, a woman murmurs and Miriam replies. Davis stares open-mouthed up the hall. Benjamin lowers his baton, his full lips tightly pursed, his eyes flicking from me to Jamie and back. “Don’t try to run.”

“I won’t.” My voice sounds steadier than I feel as I grip my towel against my body.

The third man steps into the hall and his eyes find me on the stairs, bringing him to an abrupt halt. His frowning intensity makes me more anxious than the two men with batons. While not outright hostile, his appraisal is searching and stern. He doesn’t speak at first, though his lips part. “Get dressed, Evangeline,” he finally says, clipped, cool. “We will wait for you in the kitchen.”

I nod, almost stumbling with a backwards step up the stairs before turning and hurrying to my room. In my panic I know one thing for certain: I can’t let them take me in. I have to run.

FLIGHT

I fight my legs through the holes of my jeans, a bra onto my damp body, a sweatshirt over my spinning head, my mind shrieks warnings and recriminations. You need supplies. You’re not ready. Where will you go? They’ll catch you and they’ll know you have something to hide. It’ll make everything worse. You should have done something for Aiden weeks ago. You’ve got no one to blame but yourself. You left it too late. You’re a coward. He’ll die because you’re a coward. You wanted Jamie’s kisses more than you wanted your brother to live. You’re disgusting. You knew this was coming. You knew and you did nothing.

I bruise my knuckles on the edge of the wardrobe door scrabbling for sneakers, landing with a thump on my backside as I fumble them onto my feet. I pray no one comes upstairs to check on the noise. The laces are a tangled spaghetti nightmare, my fingers slow and thick. Frenzied with adrenaline, I lock on one idea – cross the Border River and run. I definitely heard another woman’s voice in the kitchen; if she’s the Warden who came to the Gallaghers’ a couple of months ago, it’s my only hope of hiding my signal from her. There’s no way I can be sure what kind of sensitivity the others have – I’ll have to be quick, quiet, lucky.

Springing to my feet, I scan the room for anything I can take with me that might be valuable later. My parka hangs by the back door downstairs. Knives and guns sit locked in Miriam’s hidden training room. Even my phone lies useless on the kitchen counter. I shake my head and snatch my backpack from the bottom of the wardrobe, a numb-fingered rummage for my wallet, a small burst of relief when I find it. On tiptoes, to lessen the sound of urgency in my steps, I hurry to the dresser and jam clean underwear and clothes into the guts of my bag. I wrench the zip and sling it on my back.

Coming to the window, I cringe at the geriatric latch and swollen wooden frame that sticks fast in the damp. I anticipate the painful screech that will follow when I open it. So much for quiet. The garden spreads out three storeys below me thanks to the sloping yard and basement. I could break up the distance by landing on the back steps to the kitchen. Perhaps I could offer the shocked Affinity agents a friendly wave before bolting. They’ll hear the window and know instantly I’m trying to get away. Whatever happens, it will be a chase. My best bet is to clear the steps and land, a crunch of bones, in the yard and not look back.

With sick churning in my gut, I slip my fingers beneath the latch, count to three as a final stall, then haul upwards. The screech, the slam of the lower sash crashing into the frame above, a shower of paint chips. I clamber, leg, shoulder, head, leg. A shout echoes from the kitchen. I jump. A blast of freezing air. Hungry gravity. A stone-hard landing that rattles my teeth, my skull. Fire in my joints. I’m up and running. I hear the kitchen door slam open and a male voice booms, “Evangeline!”

The slippery mat of dead leaves makes it hard to gain good footing but the slope gives me momentum. Miriam’s leafy backyard blends with the fenceless wild. I skid my way into the Border River Reserve, swatting bracken and hurdling fallen branches, my pack slapping my back with each stride. Go, go, go! It’s a few hundred yards to the river, the icy breath of it chilling my lungs. The roar of fast water grows louder as I tear through the wood. Moss, mud and pungent rot, wet air, a heavy sky. Electrified by adrenaline, my senses adjust as I move faster and faster, reflexes, vision, judging distance, rapid-fire calculations for the placement of my feet, a jump, a duck, a lunge left, then right and on.

I sense them in the bandwidth, two then three. I picture the man with steel-blue eyes, the hostile twist of his mouth, the cool fierce gaze of the agent Jamie had called Benjamin and then the older guy with the accent whose look had withered me on the stairs. All of them powerfully built, experienced, trained, armed and coming for me. The sound of heavy footfalls grows behind me. My heart rides at the top of my throat. The ground slips steeply down towards gravelly banks. I know the terrain. I know this isn’t the narrowest part of the river. I’ve tried jumping it before and fallen short, dragged into the ferocious current and swept downstream. I break from the trees and to my left the blue-eyed agent bursts out onto the bank. I charge towards the river edge, visualising the leap skywards.

The clatter of boots.

“Wait!”

With a grunt, I vault upwards, higher and farther than any previous attempt, propelled by fear and my cartwheeling arms.