Jon is in pretty bad shape. If he’d looked like the end of Die Hard, as Georgie said, at the end of a week of run-ins with other Avatars, he now looks like the end of one of those large-scale natural disaster action films: blood all over; rips and singed holes in his clothes; a large bruise set like a collar around his neck. Standing is out of the question at the moment. Even sitting upright is too much for Jon to manage.

He isn’t angry or elated or even relieved when Murmur appears. Instead, Jon sighs, despairing and defeated, and squeezes his eyes closed.

“No,” he whispers, pleadingly, “please. You need to leave.”