Chapter 1: Sarah
Sarah woke to white light.
For a few seconds, that was all there was. Light. Hard, white, artificial light pressing through her eyelids and turning the inside of her skull red. She blinked against it, once, twice, her lashes dragging as if she had been sleeping too deeply or for too long.
The ceiling above her was not a ceiling she knew. It was metal. Smooth, grey, faintly reflective, broken only by a long strip of fluorescent light that hummed overhead. The sound was thin and constant, almost insect-like in the quiet.
Sarah tried to lift a hand to shield her eyes. Her wrist did not move. For one foolish second, she thought her sleeve had caught on something.
Then she pulled again.
Something tightened around her wrist. She looked down.
Straps.
Her mind went empty.
Not calm.
Not blank.
Empty in the way a room goes silent when a glass smashes.
She was lying flat on a metal table. Her arms were fixed at her sides, wrists bound by dark restraints. Her ankles were strapped down too. She jerked one foot, then the other, and the restraints bit immediately into her skin.
“No,” she whispered.
The word was tiny in the room.
She pulled harder. Her body reacted before her mind could catch up. Shoulders twisting, spine arching, fingers clawing at the empty air. The table beneath her was narrow and cold. Her skin stuck slightly to it where the hospital gown had ridden up around her thighs.
Hospital gown.
Her sweatshirt was gone. So were her leggings. Her trainers. Her socks. Her underwear.
Someone had changed her.
The panic rose so fast she could not breathe around it. Someone had taken her clothes off. Someone had touched her while she was unconscious. Someone had put her here, strapped her here, left her here under this terrible white light.
“No. No, no, no.”
She tried to sit up and could not. Tried to turn onto her side and could not. Tried to tear one arm free and only made the restraint cut deeper into the soft inside of her wrist.
The room came to her in pieces. Metal walls. Steel floor. Crates stacked against one side. Other tables arranged in a line around her.
Surgical tables.
A new horror opened inside her.
She had been walking. That was the last thing she remembered. She had put Isobel down just after seven, kissed the warm curve of her cheek, smoothed the dark little wisp of hair from her forehead. Isobel had been born with so much hair. Everyone commented on it in those first few weeks. But now there was only little whisps left. Sarah hated it and loved it.
Lewis had been in the kitchen loading the dishwasher badly, because he always loaded it badly, and Sarah had laughed and told him she was taking Twiglet out before it got properly dark.
A normal evening.
A stupid, precious, ordinary evening.
The path had been dry beneath her trainers. Gravel and stone crunching underfoot. Fields on either side, wheat whispering in the summer air. Twiglet had trotted a little way ahead on the extendable lead, ears bouncing, nose down, small wire-haired body full of importance. Sarah had held her water bottle in one hand and the lead in the other.
Then nothing.
No sound.
No flash.
No pain.
Just nothing.
And now this.
She began to fight properly then. Not carefully. Not sensibly. She thrashed against the restraints until the table shuddered beneath her.
A sound broke out of her, half grunt, half sob. Tears gathered but did not fall. The panic was too physical for tears yet. It lived in her ribs, her throat, her wrists, the frantic animal need to get up, get out, get away.
“Help!” she screamed.
The sound ripped at her throat.
No answer.
“Someone help me!”
Nothing.
The room swallowed her voice. The light above her flickered. Sarah froze. For a moment there was only the electric hum and her own breathing, ragged and ugly in the sealed room. No windows. No clock. No voices. No clue where she was.
The air smelled of metal and antiseptic and something dry and filtered, as if it had been cooled and cleaned too many times. Tiny specks of dust hung motionless in the fluorescent light above her. Nothing stirred them except her breath.
She swallowed. Her throat hurt.
She was thirsty.
Not a little thirsty.
Not the kind of thirst that came after a summer walk.
Her tongue felt thick. Her lips felt dry. The realisation moved slowly through her, colder than the table beneath her. She must have been here for hours.
Then another sensation pushed through the panic. An ache. Deep, hot, insistent. Sarah went still. For a moment she could not place it. There was too much fear, too much cold, too much wrongness. Then the ache sharpened across her chest, heavy and swollen and horribly familiar.
Her breasts.
She looked down as far as the restraints allowed. The front of the hospital gown was damp. For one confused second, she did not understand. Then she did.
Milk.
The sound that came out of her was worse than a sob. Her breasts were full. Painfully full. The skin felt tight and tender beneath the thin gown, her body strained past comfort, past routine, demanding relief. A slow, warm leak had spread into the fabric.
“No,” she whispered.
Isobel.
The thought did not arrive gently. It tore through her.
Isobel had missed a feed.
Maybe more than one.
Sarah had fed her before putting her down, but not enough to last all night. Not yet. Isobel was still too small, still waking hungry, still rooting blindly against Sarah’s chest with those tiny furious sounds that broke Sarah’s heart even when she was exhausted. If Sarah was this full, then Isobel would have woken. She would have cried. Lewis would have tried to settle her. He would have tried a bottle, if there was any expressed milk left, if he could find it, if Isobel would even take it from him while frightened and hungry and wanting her mother.
Sarah’s breath hitched.
She needed to feed her.
The thought was panicked and absolute. She needed to sit up. She needed to go home. She needed Isobel’s warm weight against her, the soft pull of her mouth, the little hand that always pressed against Sarah’s skin as if holding her there.
Instead she was strapped to a metal table, leaking through a hospital gown while strangers had done God knew what to her body.
“Please,” she pleaded, though there was no one there to listen.
“Please, I need to go home.”
Her voice broke on the last word. She forced herself to breathe.
In.
Out.
Too fast, still, but there.
In.
Out.
She had to think. She had to know what had been done to her.
Pain.
She tried to refocus herself.
Am I in pain?
The question steadied her because it was practical. It gave her something to do besides scream.
Sarah shut her eyes for one second and worked her way through her own body.
Toes.
She wiggled them.
Still there.
Feet. Ankles. Calves.
She tensed, released, tensed again.
No sharp pain.
Thighs. Hips. Her stomach clenched.
No pain there either.
No obvious injury.
No tearing.
No burning.
Nothing her panicked body could identify, unless shock was hiding it from her.
She kept going. Hands. Fingers. Arms.
Still there. Still hers.
She opened her eyes again and looked down as best she could. The gown was white except for the damp spread across her chest.
No blood.
Okay, that's good.
Her bare shins looked ordinary beneath the fluorescent light. Pale skin. A few old bruises she recognised from real life. A faint line of stubble along her shins.
My legs need shaving.
The thought was so absurd, so viciously normal, that for half a second she almost laughed.
Then she began to cry.
Not loudly at first. Just a hot spill at the corners of her eyes, sliding into her hairline because she could not lift a hand to wipe them away. She stared down at herself, forcing her gaze over every visible inch.
Feet. Fine.
Legs. A bit fuzzy, but fine.
Hands. Fine.
Arms— She stopped.
There was a mark in the crook of her left elbow. Small. Red. Precise. A faint bruise had begun to form around it. Sarah stared at it.
An injection site.
The small amount of control she had clawed together broke apart.
Someone had put something into her. Or taken something out. Drugged her. Sedated her. Drawn blood. She did not know. She had no way of knowing.
She looked wildly to either side, expecting a drip, a monitor, wires attached to her chest, anything that might explain what had been done.
Nothing.
No machines. No bags of fluid. No electrodes. No heart monitor beeping steadily beside her. She was simply strapped down in a windowless metal room.
Alone.
The door opened.
Sarah went still so fast it hurt.
It was set into the wall to her right, so smooth she had not even noticed the seam. It slid open with a high, pressurised hiss that made every muscle in her body tighten.
Two figures entered.
At first, her mind refused them.
It did not try to name them. It did not try to understand. It simply stopped, as if whatever part of her knew how to recognise the world had come up against something it could not process.
They were not human.
Sarah stared.
They were roughly human-sized, no taller than an average man, the same height as Lewis, perhaps, but broader through the body. Dense. Sturdy. Their clothing — if it was clothing — was fitted close to them, grey and black and faintly shiny, like rubber or wet stone.
But it was their faces that trapped the scream inside her. Four eyes. Black, glossy, arranged in pairs across the upper face. No whites. No pupils she could see. Just blackness reflecting the fluorescent lights. Where a nose should have been, there were two narrow slits set high and flat. Their mouths were too wide.
That was the detail that made her stomach turn.
Too wide, too long, stretching across the lower face in a line that might have been expressionless or might have been smiling. She could not tell.
Their skin was grey-brown and patchy, thick in some places, folded in others, leathery like an old turtle’s neck.
Aliens.
The word came whole and ridiculous.
No.
No, that was insane.
There were no aliens. There couldn’t be. Humanity had barely gone farther than the moon. If aliens existed, if contact had happened, it would be on every screen, every phone, every news channel in the world.
Masks, then.
Prosthetics.
Some elaborate suit.
Some sick experiment or joke.
Then one of them spoke.
The sound was low enough to vibrate somewhere beneath her ribs. Long, drawn-out tones, not like words so much as pressure given shape. The other answered in the same language.
Sarah could not scream. She could not beg. For several seconds, she could only stare at them while her body lay rigid on the table, every part of her waiting to be hurt.
The one nearest the door looked at her. All four eyes fixed on her face. Then it moved closer.
That broke her paralysis.
“No,” she gasped. “No, please. Please don’t. Please.”
It did not react.
She twisted violently against the restraints, but there was nowhere to go. The creature stood beside the table and reached for the hem of her gown. Sarah shook her head.
“No. Don’t. Don’t touch me. Please don’t touch me.”
It lifted the gown.
Cold air moved over her thighs, her hips, her stomach.
The fabric slid up and bunched beneath her ribs. She tried to clamp her knees together, but the restraints held her legs apart just enough that she could not protect herself, could not curl inward, could not make herself small.
A sound came out of her then. Thin. Broken. Not quite a scream.
The creature did not touch her at first. Somehow that made it worse. It only looked. At her legs. Her stomach. Between her legs. Her breasts.
The inspection was slow and methodical and empty of anything Sarah understood.
Not shame.
Not cruelty.
Not curiosity in any human sense.
Not kindness.
Nothing she could appeal to. She was not a woman to them.
She was not Sarah.
Not Lewis’s wife.
Not Isobel’s mother.
Not a person who had been walking her dog through a field at dusk.
She was a body on a table.
Then the creature paused. All four of its eyes fixed on her chest. Sarah followed its gaze and understood, with a sickening rush of humiliation and fear, what it had seen.
The milk had soaked through the gown. Another bead had gathered where the fabric had shifted, warm and exposed beneath the cold light.
“No,” she whispered.
It reached out.
The touch was brief.
One long finger pressed against the leaking bead at her nipple. Sarah made a broken sound and tried to wrench herself away, but the straps held her down. Pain flashed through both wrists.
The creature did not seem to notice. It drew its hand back and held it up, studying the thin white sheen on its fingertip. Then it rubbed the liquid slowly between two fingers. Sarah stared in horror.
Milk.
Her milk.
Isobel’s milk.
The creature tapped its fingers together once. Twice. Testing the texture, perhaps. Measuring it. She had no idea. Then it made one of those low, drawn-out sounds to the other creature. The second stepped closer and looked too.
“No,” Sarah pleaded, the word useless in her mouth. “Please. I have a baby. I need to feed my baby.”
Neither of them reacted. The first creature spoke again, still rubbing its fingers together. The other answered. Their voices moved back and forth over her exposed body, over the damp gown, over the thing her body had made because Isobel needed her.
They were discussing her. Or the milk. Or whatever they thought she was.
Not Sarah.
Not mother.
Specimen.
The word came to her with such cold clarity that she almost stopped breathing.
“No,” she pleaded again. “Please. She needs me. My baby needs me.”
They did not look at her face.
After a while, they seemed to reach some kind of agreement.
The first creature released the gown. Not down. Just released it. The fabric remained rucked around her ribs, leaving her exposed beneath the light. Then they turned and left. The door hissed shut behind them.
For several seconds Sarah could not move at all.
Then she started shaking so hard the table vibrated beneath her.
She worked her fingers desperately, catching at the edge of the gown where it had bunched near her side.
It took three attempts before she managed to pinch the fabric between two fingers and drag it down an inch.
Then another.
Not enough.
Not nearly enough. But enough to cover part of herself. Enough to feel fractionally less exposed.
She lay there sobbing.
Lewis would be looking for her. Isobel would be crying. Twiglet might be dead somewhere in a field.
The thought came so suddenly that she made a sound like she had been struck.
No.
No, Twiglet had to be alive.
He had to have run home. Someone had to have found him. Lewis would know something was wrong. He would have called the police. He would have called her mum. His mum. Everyone.
But what could any of them do?
Where was she?
Where had they taken her?
The ache in her breasts pulsed again, hot and insistent beneath the damp gown.
Her body did not understand terror. It did not understand impossible rooms or black-eyed creatures or metal tables. It only knew that too much time had passed and her baby needed feeding.
Sarah cried harder.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered, though she did not know whether she was speaking to Isobel or Lewis or herself.
“I’m so sorry. Please help me. Please someone help me.”
Before she could unravel completely, the door opened again. The same two figures entered. This time, one of them carried a needle.
Sarah’s body began fighting before her mind formed the thought. She pulled so hard at the restraints that pain flashed through both wrists.
“No,” she cried. “No, please. Please, no.”
They came closer.
“No. No, I have a baby. You saw — you saw, I have a baby. I need to feed her. Please.”
The one with the needle took her arm. Its grip was firm and impersonal. Gloved, maybe, or perhaps that was its skin. She could not tell.
It turned her elbow outward with practised ease.
“No, please. Please. She needs me. I have to go home.”
The needle touched her skin.
Sarah screamed.
It went in.
For one second, there was pain, sharp and cold.
Then the white light above her stretched.
The room fell away.
And blackness took her whole.
When Sarah woke again, she remembered before she understood.
Her eyes flew open.
White light. Metal ceiling. Cold air.
She came up with a gasp, one hand already clawing at her chest, the other grabbing at the hem of the hospital gown. For one wild second she expected the straps to bite into her wrists again, expected her arms to jerk uselessly against the table.
But her hands moved.
She froze.
Then she touched everything.
Her arms. Her wrists. Her face. Her ears. Her throat. Her stomach. Her legs.
She ran her hands over herself with frantic, shaking urgency, checking for pain, blood, missing pieces, anything that might tell her what had been done while she was gone.
Still alive.
Still whole.
Not safe. Not untouched. But whole.
Only then did she realise she was no longer strapped down.
Sarah looked at her wrists.
The restraints were gone, but the marks remained. Deep red bands circled both wrists, raw and angry where she had fought against them. Her ankles were the same. Bruised. Tender. Proof that the first room had been real.
The table was gone.
No.
Not gone.
She was somewhere else.
Sarah scrambled backward until her spine hit a wall. The shock of cold metal through the thin gown made her gasp. She looked around, breathing too quickly.
The room was still metal. Still silver-grey and hard-edged, still lit by that same merciless white light. Crates were stacked against one side in uneven towers. The floor beneath her was smooth steel, cold enough to ache through her bare feet.
But there were no surgical tables.
No seats.
No restraints.
No door she could see.
Just the room.
The crates.
Her.
And a window.
Sarah stared at it.
For a moment, she did not move. A window meant outside. A window meant direction, place, something beyond the sealed metal and humming lights.
Then she ran to it.
Her bare feet slapped against the floor. She reached the glass — if it was glass — and pressed both hands to it.
Outside was black.
Not the black of a dark field. Not the black of a room with the lights switched off. A deeper black. A vast, depthless black filled with points of light so sharp they looked almost artificial. Silver, blue-white, faint red, some steady, some flickering.
For one stupid, hopeful second, she thought: night sky.
Then she understood what was wrong.
There was no horizon.
No trees.
No ground.
No clouds passing over the stars.
No orange smear of a town in the distance. No farmhouse light. No road. No moonlit field. Nothing that belonged to Earth as she knew it.
Just blackness and stars, spread out in every direction she could see.
Sarah backed away from the window.
“No,” she whispered.
The word fogged the surface in front of her.
She leaned in again, because there had to be an explanation. There had to be.
Perhaps it was a screen. Some kind of projection. A trick. A plane at night. A military aircraft. Something high enough that the ground had disappeared beneath cloud.
She turned her head, trying to see along the side of whatever she was inside.
No wing.
No engine.
No blinking aircraft light.
The side of the vessel — vessel, the word came before she could stop it — seemed flat and dark, vanishing beyond the edge of the window.
Sarah looked down.
There was no ground.
Only more black.
The dread moved slowly this time. Not a strike of panic, not the bright animal terror of waking strapped down, but something colder. It seeped into her bones, into the hollow places behind her ribs, into the pit of her stomach.
Space.
No.
Impossible.
Space.
The thought had nowhere to go. It kept returning, blunt and absurd and monstrous.
She had always loved space.
That was the cruelty of it.
She and Lewis had watched documentary after documentary on the sofa. And then in bed when they got a tax rebate and treated themselves to a bedroom TV.
It had been their happy place.
More so after Isobel was born. 4am, Twiglet snoring, the volume low while the baby fed until she fell asleep against Sarah’s chest. Sarah would pause every ten minutes to tell him something she had just remembered, or something the narrator had skipped over, or some fact about quasars or neutron stars or black holes that Lewis pretended to understand because he tolerated it, and secretly liked watching her get excited.
A couple of birthdays ago, he had bought her a telescope. Not top of the range, but expensive enough that she had squealed when she opened it.
He had set it up wrong, and the automatic tracking never quite worked, so she had to sit in the garden with the little remote nudging it every few minutes.
She had not cared.
One freezing night in January she had found Saturn.
Actual Saturn.
Small and pale and miraculous through the lens, its rings tilted like something too delicate to be real. She had run upstairs and dragged Lewis out of bed in his dressing gown, Sarah laughing while he complained about the cold, then stood beside him grinning as he bent to look.
Back then, space had been wonder.
Distance.
Beauty.
Something safely unreachable.
Now it was outside the window.
Now it was not wonder at all.
It was absence.
It was silence.
It was the knowledge that beyond this thin barrier there was nowhere to run, nowhere to breathe, nowhere to stand. No road leading home. No police searching the fields. No neighbour seeing her through a lit window and calling for help.
She might as well have been millions of miles away.
She might as well have been dead.
Isobel.
The name opened something in her.
Her baby girl.
Sarah pressed both hands over her mouth, but the sound came anyway.
It tore out of her, raw and low and nothing like ordinary crying. It was a wail. An animal sound. The kind of sound she would have been embarrassed to make if any part of her were still capable of embarrassment.
Isobel would wake and cry for her.
Isobel would root against Lewis’s shoulder, furious and hungry and confused, searching for a body that was not there.
Sarah bent forward, arms wrapped around herself.
“No,” she whispered into her hands. “No, no, no.”
The pain of it made her sick.
She barely made it to the corner.
She dropped beside one of the crates and vomited onto the metal floor.
There was almost nothing in her stomach.
Bile burned her throat.
Her body retched anyway, again and again, trying to empty itself of a terror that had nowhere to go.
When it was over, she stayed on her hands and knees, spitting, shaking, eyes streaming.
The room hummed around her.
She wiped her mouth on the back of her arm and sat back against the wall.
That was when she remembered her breasts.
The ache was gone.
Sarah went still.
Slowly, she looked down.
The gown was still damp at the chest, but the terrible pressure had eased. Her breasts no longer felt stretched and hot and painfully full. They felt soft. Tender. Drained.
For half a second, some exhausted part of her almost recognised relief.
Then horror followed.
Drained.
She had been unconscious.
She had not fed Isobel. She had not pumped. She had not done anything.
Someone else had.
Or something else.
Sarah’s stomach turned again, though there was nothing left to bring up. She clutched the gown closed over her chest, fingers digging into the thin fabric.
The memory returned with cruel clarity: the creature’s finger at her nipple, the way it had rubbed her milk between two fingers, the low sound it had made to the other.
She looked at her arm.
There was another red mark above the first injection site.
A new one.
She rubbed at it with her thumb, hard, as if friction could erase the fact of it. As if she could scrub away the needle, the missing time, the impossible relief in her breasts. Her skin only reddened beneath her fingers.
Sarah slid down the wall until she was sitting on the floor.
The metal was cold beneath her thighs. She pulled the gown over her knees as far as it would go and folded herself around it, trying to make herself smaller, warmer, less visible.
She cried again.
For Isobel.
For Lewis.
For Twiglet, who might be lying hurt somewhere in the dark, still attached to the stupid extendable lead.
For herself.
She put both hands over her face and let herself break.
A sound came from behind the crates.
Sarah’s head snapped up.
She held her breath.
For a moment, nothing moved.
Then a small face appeared in the gap between two metal crates.
A human face.
A child.
Sarah stared.
A little boy was watching her.
He could not have been more than eight. Pale, thin, filthy in the way children became when no one had washed them properly for days. His brown hair had separated into greasy strands across his forehead. His eyes were wide and white-rimmed with fear. His lips were pressed together so tightly it looked as if he were physically holding back tears.
Sarah was on her feet before thought caught up with her.
The boy flinched and retreated.
She stopped instantly.
Of course he was afraid.
She lowered herself slowly into a crouch and held up both hands, palms out.
“It’s okay,” she said.
Her voice came out broken.
She swallowed and tried again.
“It’s okay. I won’t hurt you.”
The boy did not move.
His fingers crept toward his mouth. He began chewing at the skin around his nails.
“My name's Sarah,” she said softly. “What’s your name?”
Nothing.
His eyes flicked behind the crate.
Sarah followed his gaze.
Another face appeared.
A little girl this time.
Blonde hair, tangled and dull. Round cheeks gone pale with fear. Not more than five, Sarah thought. Maybe younger. She clung to the edge of the crate with both hands, peeking out from behind it.
Sarah’s heart broke so suddenly she almost made a sound.
Two children.
There were two children here.
They were wearing the same white gowns as her. The boy’s hung too large from his narrow shoulders. The little girl’s was marked with grey smudges at the hem and sleeve. Sarah saw red dots along the boy’s arm, small injection sites like her own.
She kept her hands raised.
“Hello,” she said.
Neither answered.
“It’s all right. I’m not going to come any closer.”
The boy kept chewing his fingers.
"Do you speak English?"
The little boy only looked at her a moment. Then, slowly, he nodded.
Sarah sat back on her heels, making herself lower than him, smaller than him, though everything inside her wanted to grab both children and pull them close to her.
“Are you alone?” she asked.
The boy hesitated.
Then he nodded again.
Sarah glanced at the little girl.
“Is that your sister?”
The boy looked back at her and shook his head.
Not siblings, then.
Different children.
Different places, maybe.
Different families who were losing their minds somewhere on Earth.
Sarah had to close her eyes for one second.
When she opened them, the children were still watching her.
“Are you hurt?” she asked.
The boy shook his head.
The smallest breath of relief left her.
“Good,” she whispered. “That’s good.”
She wanted to collapse again. She wanted to put her face in her hands and scream until the room disappeared. But she could feel the shift happening inside her, terrible and necessary.
Before, she had been alone.
Now she was not.
Now there were children watching to see whether she was safe.
So she had to become safe.
The little girl stepped out from behind the crate. She came to stand beside the boy, one hand gripping the loose fabric of his gown.
For a moment, she only looked at Sarah.
Then she pointed.
“Why are you wet there?”
Her voice was very small and sweet, with a soft Northern Irish accent. She spoke with a faint lisp that made the question almost unbearable.
Sarah looked down.
Milk had begun to leak again, a fresh dampness spreading through the front of the gown.
Her throat closed.
She pressed the fabric against herself, trying to blot it dry with as much dignity as she could manage.
“It’s milk,” she said.
The little girl blinked.
“For my baby,” Sarah added softly. “I’m a mummy. My baby drinks milk from me.”
“Oh,” the little girl said.
She seemed to think about that.
“Where is your baby?”
Sarah’s face almost crumpled.
She fought it with everything she had. Every fibre. Every last piece of herself. She could not break in front of them. Not now.
“She’s at home,” Sarah said.
The words hurt.
“With her daddy.”
“Oh,” the little girl said again.
Sarah thought of Isobel’s dark hair. Her soft round cheeks. Her tiny, chubby hands opening and closing against Sarah’s skin. The little rolls on her thighs. The milky smell of her breath. The way she frowned in her sleep, as if dreams were very serious business.
A memory came so sharply it was almost cruel.
Isobel at three days old, red-faced and furious in the middle of the night. Sarah lifting her from the next-to-me cot, still sore and exhausted and half afraid she was doing everything wrong. Holding her close. Whispering against her tiny head.
Mummy’s here. I’ve got you. I’ll always come when you need me.
And now Isobel would cry.
And Sarah would not come.
The tears fell before she could stop them.
The boy and girl watched her in silence.
Then the boy took one careful step forward.
Then another.
Sarah stayed very still.
He came close enough to touch her and lifted one small hand. Awkwardly, almost formally, he patted her shoulder.
Once.
Twice.
The gesture was so small. So useless against the enormity of what was happening.
It nearly undid her.
A laugh broke through her tears, sharp and cracked. She smiled at him because he needed her to.
“Don’t worry,” she said, though her voice shook. “I’m okay. I just miss my baby.”
The little girl came closer too, standing on Sarah’s other side.
“Can’t her daddy look after her?” she asked.
Sarah wiped her cheeks with the heel of her hand.
“Yes,” she said. “He can.”
And he could. Lewis was good. Lewis was gentle. Lewis knew where the nappies were and how to warm a bottle and which stupid song made Isobel stop crying when nothing else worked.
But he was not Sarah.
And Sarah was not there.
She drew one careful breath.
Then another.
The children were still looking at her. Frightened. Dirty. Hungry, probably. Alone.
And somehow, impossibly, they had comforted her.
She was twenty seven years old. A wife. A mother. An adult by every reasonable measure. But in that moment she felt like a child herself. She wanted someone bigger and calmer to walk in and gather her up and tell her what to do.
She wanted her mum.
She wanted Lewis.
She wanted anyone.
There was no one.
Only her.
Sarah wiped her eyes again.
“Can I sit with you?” she asked.
The little girl looked at the boy.
The boy looked at Sarah.
After a moment, the girl reached out and took Sarah’s hand.
Her fingers were small and cold.
Sarah let herself be led behind the crates.
There was a narrow space there, hidden from the middle of the room. Not safe. Not really. But sheltered enough that the children must have made it their place. A corner of metal and shadow and the faint warmth of two small bodies.
Sarah sat down with her back to the wall.
The children came to her almost immediately.
Not all at once. Not trustingly, exactly. But with the exhausted instinct of children who had been afraid for too long and had found an adult who spoke softly.
The boy sat on one side. The girl sat on the other.
Sarah lifted her arms slowly, giving them time to pull away.
They did not.
So she put one arm around each of them and drew them close.
Both children were cold.
A deep, violent tenderness moved through her.
It frightened her, almost.
If those things came back and tried to touch these children, if they tried to take them, hurt them, lay one finger on their small bodies, Sarah would tear those creatures apart with her bare hands. She would gouge out all four of their black eyes. She would do anything.
Anything.
She had no weapon. No shoes. No plan. No strength beyond her own terrified body.
But the feeling remained.
Mine, some ancient part of her said.
Not because they were hers.
Because they were someone's. They were someone's babies who couldn't be there to protect them themselves. Someone who would be crying for them.
They were someone's Isobel. And someone had to claim them.
“What are your names?” she asked softly.
For a moment, neither child answered.
Then the boy said, “Elliot.”
His voice was so quiet she barely heard it.
His accent was not like hers. English, yes, like her. But southern. Polished. A little posh, even through fear. Whatever had taken them had not only taken from one place.
Sarah looked at the girl.
“My name is Suzie,” she said, around the thumb she had begun to push into her mouth.
Sarah smiled as gently as she could.
“Hello, Elliot. Hello, Suzie.”
Suzie leaned more heavily against her side.
“Do you know where your mummies and daddies are?”
Both children shook their heads.
Of course they did not.
Elliot stared at the crate opposite them. His face had gone very still.
“I’m hungry,” he said.
Sarah looked down at him.
The words hit her harder than she expected. Hunger was so ordinary. So fixable. So impossible.
She looked around the hidden space as if food might have appeared because a child needed it. There was nothing. No bottle. No packet. No crumb. No water.
“When did you last eat?” she asked.
Elliot shrugged without looking at her.
“Ages ago.”
Sarah closed her eyes briefly.
Helplessness rose in her again, hot and choking.
She pushed it down.
“I’ll try to find something,” she said.
The promise felt dangerous the moment she made it, because she had no idea how to keep it. But she could not say nothing.
Elliot’s eyes moved toward the open room.
“The monsters come,” he whispered.
Sarah’s arm tightened around him.
So they had seen them too.
The creatures were not a fever dream. Not a hallucination. Not something the drugs had made in her head.
The monsters were real.
“I know,” Sarah said.
Her voice was steadier than she felt.
“I saw them too.”
Suzie pressed closer, thumb in her mouth, eyes round.
Sarah looked between them.
“I won’t let them hurt you,” she said.
It was a lie.
It had to be.
She could not stop those creatures. She could not even stop them from putting a needle in her arm. But Elliot needed the lie. Suzie needed it. And maybe, if she said it firmly enough, some piece of herself might begin to believe in the woman who would try.
“I won’t let them near you,” she said again.
Elliot looked at her.
For the first time, something in his face loosened.
Not trust. Not quite.
But the beginning of it.
Sarah stroked his hair, then Suzie’s, smoothing gently over the tangled strands.
“You should sleep for a little while.”
Elliot stiffened.
“What if they come?”
“Then I’ll wake you,” Sarah said. “And I’ll be right here.”
Suzie’s eyes were already heavy.
Elliot fought it longer, staring out at the room as if keeping watch were his duty. But he was eight, or close to it, and exhausted beyond endurance. After a few minutes, his head tipped against Sarah’s arm.
Suzie curled into her other side.
Their breathing slowed.
Sarah held them both on the hard metal floor, her back against the cold wall, the damp gown clinging to her chest, her wrists burning, her throat raw.
Beyond the crates, the room hummed.
Beyond the window, space waited.
She looked down at the two children tucked against her and tried to think.
Food.
Water.
A way out.
A weapon.
A door.
There had to be a door.
There had to be rules to this place, routines, patterns. The creatures came and went. They brought needles. They took samples. They moved her from one room to another. That meant they had reasons. Systems. Mistakes they might make.
Sarah pressed her cheek against Elliot’s hair and shut her eyes.
She could fall apart later.
Not now.
Not while there were children sleeping against her.
Not while Isobel was somewhere beneath all that blackness, needing her mother.
