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M uffled, furtive footsteps. The creak of a floorboard. A gentle tinkling, metal on metal.

These sounds first reached Emily in her dream, which so far wasn’t making any sense. She was at home in Dublin with Mark, but it wasn’t their apartment and Mark didn’t look like Mark. In the middle of the night, Not Mark had woken her up to show her the first finished copy of his new book, which he said had just arrived. But when she’d turned on the bedside lamp, taken it from him and cracked its spine, she saw her name all over its pages. His book was about her . She was about to ask Not Mark what was going on when she heard it.

Footsteps. Floorboards. Tinkling of metal on metal—

Emily opened her eyes.

—and the unmistakable clink of a key in a lock.

It took her brain a beat to slip the bonds of sleep and piece together where she was and what was happening. Lying, fully dressed, on a couch that wasn’t hers. The couch was in a house in the town of Sanctuary, Florida, where she’d been staying. Working. Helping a man to protest his innocence, to write a book about why he wasn’t the murderer of his wife, actually. She’d had half a bottle of wine instead of dinner and that was why she had a dull headache now. The noises were real.

The noises were real.

Had someone broken in?

Was someone else in here with her right now?

Emily jerked upright, into a sitting position. She was in the lock-off, a small studio apartment attached to the main house. From the couch, almost all of the space was within her eyeline and there was just enough light – moonlight? Street light? Security light? – filtering through the thin window blinds to see it.

The light had an odd quality to it, like a sunrise over snow.

Someone could, theoretically, be hiding in the bathroom or behind the breakfast bar, her two blind spots. But how could anyone have got in? Over the last twenty-four hours, she’d become paranoid about safety chains and deadbolts and window latches, checking and double-checking all of them before she went to sleep.

Maybe she’d forgotten to do it earlier.

She hadn’t been thinking straight after what had happened.

But this was moot, because Emily saw now what was making the noise. She was the only one in the lock-off, but she wasn’t alone: there was a shadow on the other side of the glass in the front door.

A tall figure, bent at the waist, head level with the lock.

Trying to get in .

Emily’s heart began to hammer beneath her breastbone. She needed to banish the dark. She jumped up and smacked the light switch on the wall behind her, but nothing happened. She flicked it again, and again, but no light came on. She lurched at the lamp on the end table, knocking it over, catching it just before it fell, feeling its ceramic neck for its switch – but it clicked uselessly too. She jumped up and ran the five steps to the bathroom, hitting the switch on the wall there. Still nothing.

The power was out.

She looked back at the front door: the shadow was gone.

She took a few tentative steps forward to get closer, to get a better view, to double-check.

There was no one out there now.

They must have seen her shadow moving inside and run off. Or maybe there’d been no one out there to begin with. She could’ve imagined it, confused the twilight zone of her dreams with reality.

Then she smelled the smoke.

And she saw the smoke now, too: a thin, lazy haze, hanging in the air. It was what had made the light look odd to her, she realized in hindsight.

Where was it coming from?

Maybe someone had built a bonfire on the beach. Maybe the dry, wiry brush that sat between the house and the sand had caught and now smoke and the smell of it burning was wafting inside. This was her first thought, despite the fact that all the windows were closed and she couldn’t see anything like a bonfire through the windows on the beach side.

In fact, the beach looked pitch-black.

Emily picked her phone up off the end table. Only 11:20p.m. She’d been asleep for, at most, a couple of hours.

When she activated the phone’s flashlight, the smoke became a grey, ghostly mist in its beam. She turned slowly, sweeping the light across the room, until it landed on the door that connected the lock-off to the main house.

Smoke was drifting lazily in from underneath it.

The door had a mate on its other side, like doors in adjoining hotel rooms. Ever since she’d arrived in this place, she’d been making sure that the one on her side was securely locked, its bolt slid into place. Now she ran to it to reverse the action and pulled back her door, revealing the other connecting door closed behind it.

She rapped a fist against it, once, twice.

‘Hey!’ she called out. ‘Hey!’

When there was no response, she pressed both palms flat on the door.

The wood felt warm.

A snippet of health and safety training she’d had a few months ago came back to her: don’t open a door if it’s warm or hot to the touch.

And then she thought, Get out get out get out get out get out .

That same health and safety seminar had said to leave all valuables behind, but Emily ran to the breakfast bar, to where her backpack was hanging from one of the chairs. She unzipped it and shoved a hand inside to confirm what the weight of it suggested, that her laptop and notebook and voice-recorder were still inside. She slung the backpack over one shoulder and shoved her phone into the pocket of her jeans.

The smoke was getting thicker by the second, feeling gritty in her eyes and hot in her mouth.

It had a solidness now, a physical presence. Its tendrils were reaching into the back of her throat to snatch at her breath. Emily started coughing, which only drew more smoke down deeper into her chest.

But it was OK, everything was going to be OK, because she was at the front door now, sliding the deadbolt back, and in a second she’d be outside, in the fresh air, safe.

Emily pulled on the handle, braced to run—

The door didn’t budge.

Confused, she pulled harder. Checked the deadbolt. Depressed the handle more. Pulled even harder on it again. Put both hands on the handle and leaned back, putting all her body weight behind her, pulling until her arms burned with the strain.

The door rocked a little on its hinges, but didn’t open. It was jammed shut.

Emily didn’t know why this was happening but she knew there wasn’t time to figure it out. Her chest felt like there was a large weight settling on it and she was starting to feel funny, as if her head were too heavy for her shoulders.

She needed to find another way out, quick.

She thought, balcony .

It must be twelve, maybe even fifteen feet off the ground, but she might survive a fall. She definitely wouldn’t survive suffocating or being burned alive. She’d land on beach scrub and sand, and there were cushions on the balcony furniture. She could throw them over first.

She just had to make it to the other side of the room.

The distance may as well have been an ocean. Emily feared she’d drown before she made it to the other shore.

Wet a rag and hold it over your nose and mouth.

She felt her way along the kitchen counter to the sink, and to the neatly folded towel she knew she’d left there this morning. She soaked it in cold water from the tap and pressed it to her face. The cold water was glorious against her hot skin, on her parched lips. She wanted to drink some of it too, but there wasn’t time.

Stay low – crawl beneath the smoke.

She dropped to her hands and knees.

It had been eerily silent, but now noises were coming from the other side of the connecting door. An occasional whooshing sound. Popping and crackling. A dull, loud boom as something heavy fell over.

Emily found the balcony door by touch, and then, when she reached up, its handle. It only had one lock, a simple knob that turned easily through ninety degrees. She flipped it clockwise, hoisted herself to her feet, pulled open the door and went to run—

Blooms of white, hot pain exploded across her vision as her forehead instantly met something solid and hard.

Emily fell over backwards, landing on her left side, onto the backpack, the corner of the laptop jabbing painfully between her ribs. When she opened her eyes, she saw yellow-red flames flickering around the edges of the connecting door.

She remembered something else from that health and safety seminar, something one of her colleagues, a twenty-something with a head of thickly gelled hair and a red rash on his chin, had whispered to her during the video part. Burning alive only hurts at the start . After the flames burn away your nerve-endings, you don’t feel any pain.

Emily was tired, her eyelids heavy. Every breath was a battle. She’d lost the wet towel. She had an overwhelming urge to stay where she was and succumb to sleep. But …

She thought of Jack’s scars, his melted skin.

No. She had to get out.

She was at the balcony door, inches from being outside, from being almost safe. From being able to breathe again.

All she had to do was go through it.

Move . Come on. Get up.

Slowly, she hoisted herself back up onto her knees. When she reached out her right hand, it closed around the edge of the door. So she had opened it! But when she reached out her left, into what should now be a portal to the outside, she felt something hard and smooth and … Metal? Plastic? She dragged her hand down the length of it.

She felt evenly spaced horizontal ridges—

And sick to her stomach as she realized what they were.

The hurricane shutters .

She’d found the switch on the evening she’d arrived and pressed it just to see what it did. There’d been a mechanical whirr and then off-white aluminium shutters had started to descend over the windows and door at the back of the lock-off, covering up all the glass that faced the beach. The shutters were down now and with the power out, she didn’t know how to get them back up again.

And the front door wouldn’t open.

Emily was trapped.

She felt for her phone, but her jeans pocket was empty. It must have dropped out as she’d crossed the room, or when she’d fallen. It didn’t matter now anyway. Unless help was already right outside, she was out of time. She’d made a mistake. On seeing the smoke, she should have immediately found something heavy enough to smash through the glass of the front door and got out that way. It was too late to do that now. There was so much smoke, and she felt so sleepy …

Emily thought about how quickly everything could change. A few minutes ago she’d been asleep on a couch in a house by a beach, and now she was going to die in a fire.

But then, this hadn’t happened quickly, had it?

This was an ending to a story that had been years in the writing. She’d forever be a character in it now too.

Someone had made sure of that.

The shutters must have made a loud, grinding noise as they descended. She wouldn’t have slept through it. And since when had half a bottle of wine knocked her out? There must have been something in it, something to keep her asleep while someone else came in and brought the shutters down.

The shadow hadn’t been trying to get inside. It was someone locking the door behind them as they left.

Locking her in.

Making sure that, when the fire took hold, she wouldn’t be able to get out of here. And that everything that held the truth, the only things that did – her laptop, her notes, the voice-recorder – would be destroyed.

Taking this job was the worst mistake she’d ever made, and that was saying something.

Well , Emily thought, at least the book will have an ending.

As she closed her eyes, she wondered who they’d get to write it now.