Snip snip! Snip snip!

The little boy awoke. Disconnected thoughts and feelings flooded his mind through a thick fog of pain.

Blinding whiteness. Numbness. Smells. He struggled to take in his new surroundings. The caustic sting of disinfectant flavoured with fear and pain. Hands and feet bound. A dentist's chair. Lights so bright in a white room. As his eyes adjusted, vague shapes materialised against the whiteness. He wondered what had happened to his constant companion, but it was too bright for Shadows here.

Snip snip! The strange sound again, this time accompanied by a sing-song voice.

'I don't know, Look at him! So young, all bruised and broken. Why are we doing this now? We should wait.'

The voice came from somewhere behind his head, a woman, muttering to herself like his mother doing the housework. He moaned at the ache in his neck when he moved to see her. To his left, the wall seemed to be alive, undulating with a hypnotic patchwork of flashing lights. Some sort of huge machine. Screens drawing graphs and shapes and streams of words he could not read and did not understand. Wires everywhere. A white coat hunched over a bank of buttons, plugging in cables and tapping keys.

He could not see a door.

Snip snip!

'Yeah, what's this kid got that we don't already have?' A man's voice. The hunched figure. WhiteCoat, Billy thought.

'God knows. They said he was the one, though.’

‘The what? You mean that stupid techie story is true? I don’t believe it.’

‘We’ll see. You nearly done?'

'Getting there.' WhiteCoat sounded frustrated. 'Give me a minute.'

Snip snip!

'Help?' Billy wanted to say, but his mouth felt dry as a desert. The word stuck in the back of his throat as if it too were afraid to show itself.

'He's trying to talk,' the woman said. She was softly spoken, soothing. KindVoice, he thought.

'Yeah?' WhiteCoat laughed. 'Don't worry, I've taken care of it.' So they had done this to him, taken his words. What else had they done?

'Are you sure you can reverse his speech?'

'Oh, sure. I've done it literally tens of times. On monkeys. They were fine.'

Help me! Billy tried to shout, but still the words would not come. Instead, they rattled around his head. He had forgotten how to speak. He heard the words in his mind, knew the sounds they should make, but his throat refused to make the right noises.

‘Nnnnh!’ he said.

The straps around his arms and legs were tight, but he could not even lift his head, let alone break free. When he strained against them, a sharp red streak from left to right shot across his vision, pulsing in time with the blood pumping in his temple. His arm ached with a dull blue fuzz. He watched the pain-colours mix and linger together like a lazy mist on the floor. The Shadow watched - at least he could sense it watching - and waited. The overpowering sensations forced him to stop struggling, and he trembled, fists clenched, drowning under a wave of nausea.

'Uh-oh, he's starting to fight,' KindVoice said, moving around to Billy's side. 'Best try to lie still, dear. Here. This'll help.' She took hold of Billy's chin, and holding his head still, pushed something cold against his neck. He felt a different sort of sharp pain and the blood rushing up into his face like a hot tide. His vision blurred. The woman swam in and out of focus. She waved a large pair of scissors in front of him. Snip snip!

'These are sharp,' she said. 'You don't want to get hurt.' No wonder his head was cool. A few cuts later the scissors clanged into something metal.

'I need to shave your head now, so you must keep extra still for me. Can you do that?'

'Mm-mm.... Mmm!' Billy shook his head as vigorously as he could, which was not much. The woman moved out of view and the cold steel of a straight razor began to scrape over his skull. He barely felt it. The drug she had given him made everything appear to be happening to another little boy, far, far away.

'Don't worry,' said KindVoice. 'It's just a routine procedure. You're being very brave.' She lifted his head to reach the back, and added conversationally, 'I hear you're a very special little boy!'

'Very special,' said WhiteCoat. Billy thought he sounded almost disappointed. Impatient even, as if he had somewhere else to be.

'Mmm Nnnnh!' Still nothing. He felt light-headed.

'Hush. Don't try to talk. Afterwards we'll go and get ice cream. Would you like that?' Billy tried to show all of his anger through his eyes. The woman just smiled sympathetically and stroked his forehead, as if she could comfort him.

'No thanks,' said WhiteCoat, chuckling to himself. ‘They don’t have ice cream at the conference. You realise what I’m missing to be here?’

‘Oh yes, you keep telling me - the amazing future.’

‘If I’m not there by 10:30, I’ll be as obsolete as this machine will be tomorrow, trust me.’

‘You’re so melodramatic. If you don’t get this boy scanned, we’ll both be obsolete.’

The argument continued much in the same vein and while KindVoice shaved his head, Billy wavered in and out of consciousness, a state he was in danger of becoming used to.

The three children and Mr. Hagen had been led, carried and shoved through mile-high stacks of containers and busy forklifts. Billy called out, but the workmen barely noticed the folorn procession and just carried on as if it was the most ordinary thing in the world. In a clinically spotless steel elevator the big man called Johnson had hit a button labelled B3 and the lift descended without a murmur. Billy was surprised to see that the B numbers went all the way up - or down - to ten.

He had tried to reach Alex, but the woman called Katerina had her hand around his arm, holding him so tightly he felt that his bones might break. The other little girl - the one with all the computers - clung to the handcuffed man beside her and watched red numbers counting down, weeping quietly.

Billy kept quiet too. He was thinking about the old man and the river. The way everything had slowed right down as if the world itself was stopping. He no longer felt the wetness of the water or the pain in his head, just the thick, choking presence of the Shadow as it claimed him.