“But that doesn’t make any sense,” she said, her throat still raw from a night of screaming, her wrists from a night of twisting and thrashing against the ropes that had bound them. But only one night. She would have known if more time had passed, would have grown hungry, would have died of it or thirst if it had been even a fraction as long as they said.

She would have been older, weaker, she would have known. But the sadly, horribly sympathetic faces staring back at her and the news they’d shown her on half a dozen different shining screens said the same – that one awful night, screaming herself hoarse and desperate with no one to hear, had counted somehow, outside the death-black basement where she’d done it, for years.

Almost ten years since she had been snatched from the street by someone whose face she’d never seen. Someone who had never returned after tying her down there in the dark. Were they still somewhere out there, ten years older and free as well? Would they find her again? It would be easy, if they tried. After all, she, alone among everyone and everything in the world, hadn’t changed.