Someone clutched her in a blanket and carried her. The person’s panting breaths sounded loud in the stifled silence of a stone staircase. Sandals slapped on stone steps. Down, down, down.
A door creaked, footsteps shuffled. The door shut with a soft thud. The person who held her heaved something aside with the grating of stone on stone. A deep reverberating thud. Jessica wrestled in the constriction of the blanket. She was very young and didn’t understand what was going on around her, only that something bad had happened. A small light flickered into life above her. Wan and eerie, it lit the face of a woman she felt she should know. The woman’s straight nose and long eyelashes threw ghostly shadows over her face. Her skin was pale; she had high cheekbones and hollow cheeks. Deep black eye
