He pauses, watching the woman whose mouth is coated in blood, speaking about running longer and faster and more easily. ....Did they do something to her? Give her some sort of drug? But that doesn't add up; the pieces don't fit. He had a dream too, just not the same one.

"Hungry....." The word lingers in the air between them, a question hovering just behind it. He's bumped into other people here who are hungry — a man feeding on an animal's heart, a boy sobbing into an animal's brains. Every few days he has to eat the remains of a grouse that his housemate slaughters for him. He pours the pulpy mix of blood and brains into a cup and that civilised act makes it easier, or at least he tells himself that it does.

"You mean in a way you can't control?"