Simon cried.

Not because of the abundant agony, or the humiliation of being dragged, naked and bound through the dust whilst voices taunted and laughed above. He could no longer distinguish his injuries, they blurred and blended into a totality of pain. He cried out of sheer frustration, knowing that he should be able to think, once had the ability to reason and plan and remember. The drugs kept his faculties just out of reach, stripped his capacity to make sense of anything. He no longer knew past from present, reality from dream. The drugs. The nightmare cocktail of mental poison shunting him into another tumbling slew of images and sensations The sharp sting of the needle no matter how hard he fought. He was bound in chemical chains into submission, to the whims and wants of his captors.

He cried.

He was seven years old, in a club, the screaming, cacophonous riot of sound hurting his ears. Bodies pressed against him, the stench of sweat and vomit filling his throat. He was lost. No. That was the past. He tried to concentrate, but thinking felt like grasping for a fish in a river, slipping just past his fingertips.

He was hiding, in his room with Tommy, watching the shadows of his mother and father as they fought in the hall. His mother screaming that she was done with him, the useless fucking bastard and she had got rid of all the fucking snakes anyway, and then he'd gone for her.

No. That had already happened too.

The burning cold air in his lungs as he walked above the water, laced with a nauseating petrochemical stench. Salt and frost crunched beneath his boots on the metal grating. Icebergs on the horizon beyond the shapes of men with faces he did not know and then the vision lurched away.

"Do you want to see a magic trick?" A voice in the darkness that he recognised, but could not place. He felt his blood surge, the deep electrical hum starting in his ears and then fading as the voice trailed to a whisper.

He tried to focus, and found himself staring at the sky, the stars clearer than they had ever been above him, the stench of tobacco smoke, sweat and blood. He was moving, lying on the back of a flatbed truck as it juddered and shook beneath him, ploughing over a rough, potholed road. Laughter. A flash of orange arched across his vision and there was a sudden, sharp pain as the butt of a lit cirgarette landed between his legs and then rolled away as the truck lurched. A voice laughed, but he was beyond shame. Was this now? He wasn't sure.

He wanted to die.

Magic. Did he want to see a magic trick?

No. He wanted it to stop. He wanted it to be over. He wanted to to die.

A face loomed over him, and after a while it resolved into Manual Robas, grinning between his words spitting flecks of saliva and ash onto his skin as he spoke words Simon couldn't understand. The face shifted the skin and fat falling back, the bones rising to the surface. Pain exploded in his head.

Magic. I'll tell you the secret of magic.

Uncle John walking in the dim light of the descending stairwell, turned to him and opened his hand to reveal fire there in his palm, real fire that burned him when he reached out with a small finger and poked the flames. Magic. The buzzing, thrumming noise in his head again, his blood rushing suddenly in his veins. Yes.

The flames engulfed him and John disappeared. The sky was suddenly so blue, so clear and endless beyond a haze of heat. The stench of petrol. The thundering, pounding roar rotors overhead and man, a man he did not know lying beside him, clearly injured, clearly in great pain, sweat and tears on his face as he strained to reach his hand out towards Simon's own. The thrumming noise in his head so loud it blocked out all other sound. The rush of blood so powerful that his vision blurred.

Yes.

Then dark, and silence.