It feels like hours before sounds spill out into the corridor. Far from the raucous commotion earlier, these voices are low and scratchy. Through the small window in the door, I see Ridley and another unfamiliar face dragging Belinda's slumped frame between them, her shoeless feet sliding along the concrete.

Blue follows, watching Belinda as she's deposited into her cell like a decaying vegetable, tossed to one side and left to rot. His face is bereft of emotion. What did I expect? He isn't the Blue I used to love anymore.

The adrenaline doesn't really pulse through my veins until my door unlocks, and then I scramble backwards fervently.

'Just a little visit, sweet'art,' Ridley says, scratching his goatee. 'You'll be used to it by now, if you've found a way of copying Prosper.'

Of copying them?

'Blue, help me,' I yell, though I can't see him.

A new guy beside Ridley, with weight around his belly sagging him down, doesn't register surprise like Ridley had in my bedroom. Instead they heave me down the corridor.

I stop wriggling when we pass through a set of double doors with a backswing on them as fierce as Andy Murray's. The rubber matting underfoot and starched white walls are as sterile as Blue's expression a short way ahead. He's still. He waits with his hands in his pockets, eyes trained on me.

'I'll take it from here,' he says.

Though Ridley looks disappointed, he steps back a few paces. Blue takes hold of my forearm, slightly higher than my wrist. For the first time, I feel marginally less vulnerable, though certainly not safe.

He escorts me to the end of the corridor, past an unlit sign saying theatre that makes me think of Belinda's rolling eyes as they dragged her back to her cell.

'Why are you doing this to me?' I say. 'After everything.' I can't bring myself to remind him of the past, of what broke us apart. 'What do you want from me?'

'You're going to be examined,' he says.

I pull back instinctively, and his grip tightens over my arm.

'You still need us, boss? Is she gonna be a screamer?' says the unfamiliar one.

'No!' Blue snaps, turning back. He takes a set of keys from the man's outstretched palm—my cell keys, I presume. 'Grow up. This is serious. There's—'

He doesn't finish his sentence, but I know he'd meant to say history. We'd shared so much history.

'Head back,' Blue says. 'We won't know anything for a while.'

Once they've gone through the double doors, I say, 'Where are you taking me? What are you planning to do?'

He walks on.

I used to dream about all the things I would say to Blue if I ever saw him again. I've bulldozed months of upset into a landfill-sized pit. Now all those questions are uprooting, colliding in my head, and I let them burn in my throat until the silence becomes oppressive.

'Is this how it's going to be, then? You can't ignore me forever, Blue!'

He sighs. 'It's just an ultrasound, Jade. Nothing intrusive. We'll just take some pictures of the baby. That will satisfy them.'

Only hours earlier, Adrian had talked his way into booking one at The Clinic as a way of getting those green notes. The irony doesn't escape me now.

'Nothing invasive?'

'No.'

The words 'not yet' spring to mind. I wonder if they're on the tip of his tongue, too.

'Why? What's this all for?'

He grits his teeth and walks on.

Nothing I can say will change the past: the way he'd looked me in the eye, pressed his lips to mine, whispered those words that had melted something inside me—and then left me without a second glance back.

I thought I would never have to face that pain or humiliation again. Instead, I am to be bathed in it. Blue leads me into an examination room reeking of lemon-scented toilet bleach.

The arrival of a lady shatters the stillness, and for once, I'm strangely grateful. Her hair is in a brown bun, which fits with the traditional white coat she wears, though the clasp of an upside down watch hanging from her breast pocket has no clock face on the end.

'Hi, Jade,' she says. Her tone is soft against the snap of the rubber gloves she pulls on. 'I'm Dr Pamela Jenkins. I'll be running a little examination on you.'

She's foreign—French perhaps—though her accent is so slight it's barely a whisper. She must have been here before the Dover bombing, before they'd sealed the borders and kickstarted the most thorough investigation since P.O.D. began.

At her neck, the line of an iD tag teases at her white collar. Must be a British citizen after all.

'Have a seat up here.' She gestures to the blue foam medical bed in the centre of the room. A band of paper tissue has already been laid down it.

'Nothing intrusive?'

'Nothing intrusive, my dear,' she says, a rolling 'r' on her final word.

Blue nods, and I climb onto the bed and lie down with my back against the paper tissue. I'm momentarily grateful for its soft pillow. The snatches of sleep in the garage offered little respite.

Standing over me, Dr Jenkins pushes my top up to just under the wires of my bra. She squirts some gel onto her palms and rubs them together.

'It's always a bit cold. I'm sorry,' she says, smearing my torso in jelly and working a handset across my bloated stomach in gentle waves. Occasionally she takes digital images. If she notices I have no scar then she doesn't comment.

Only yesterday I imagined holding Adrian's hand and seeing the tiny foetus for the first time on a computer no different than this. As my mother would say, 'be careful what you wish for.' And as usual, she is right.

Dr Jenkins studies the screen, her thin rouged lips twisting at the corners.

'What is it, Pam?' Blue says.

He leans over the computer and then they exchange a glance. Aside from the stone washed jeans and grey jumper, Blue is wearing his anxious face: drawn eyebrows, squinting eyes and hard jaw. The stark lighting here doesn't play to his angles as generously as usual.

'Do I get the luxury of a toilet? In case you hadn't noticed, I have something pressing on my bladder.'

I'd meant the baby, though Dr Jenkins snaps the wand away, wiping at my stomach with a paper towel.

'I'll show you,' she says, pulling my arm gently to ease me off the bed.

We leave Blue staring at the computer and take the corridor in the opposite direction from the theatre sign, to where a bank of cubicles are sheltered behind a curved glass-block wall. It might have been trendy if the grey grout hadn't chipped away.

'Go ahead,' she says, as if she's giving me her last pound coin.

She must have known there was no way I could squeeze through the letter box windows above the wash basins, though I deliberate on it anyway—four windows, one on top of the other, with aluminium lengths framing each pane of glass. Could I kick them out? Not likely.

I'm sure Dr Jenkins would hear me if I tried.

Once I've used the facilities, I stall in the area behind the glass blocks. This time when I assess my reflection in the tarnished mirror tiles, I see the scared, isolated girl I was yesterday, and I pray to be back there again with Adrian.

I don't know when her blurred white coat disappeared from behind the glass wall, but when I notice it, my beating heart nearly overwhelms my natural instinct to run. I make it out into the corridor without self-combusting and sprint away from the lock-ups.

My lavish escape takes me as far as the end of the corridor, where the hushed voices of Dr Jenkins and Blue halt me in my tracks.

'You're telling me that she doesn't have just a few, but they're all active? She has fully functioning ovaries?' Blue says.

I creep forward towards the corner, until I catch sight of the edge of Blue's black wax jacket, like the one his father wore for clay pigeon shooting.

'Not just a few eggs at all, Dave. There are thousands of them, in non-dormant follicles. I've not seen this since Primary Ovarian Deficiency really took root,' Dr Jenkins replies.

I don't like the way she calls him Dave. I nudge farther until her white lab coat comes into view.

'He must have transplanted them back into her though there's no scar. Perhaps that's why they're in her ovaries and not her fallopian tubes. Maybe there's a drug to make her body not release them all at once?'

'Self-indulgent scum,' Blue says. 'He thinks he can control the world but inject her with hundreds?'

Adrian? No one has ever injected me with anything.

Her hands rise to his shoulders.

'Seven years of medical research would tell me it's not possible. The body does not hold so many active eggs anymore. The basic chromosomes for that have mutated. To be quite honest, I don't know how she's made it this far without Prosper finding out.'

'Or made it this far in here. You know how Deborah or Kate in there can get, or Patrick Blakley or Sue Glynn. They won't understand the medical and scientific benefits of research like you or I do. They wouldn't listen.' His voice drops, now thick and serious. 'Do me a favour, wipe the test.'

'What?' she says.

'Don't upload it. Delete everything.'

Blue stares at her through a long silence, and I glare at the both of them as they play God with my life.

'You know what could happen if this gets out,' he whispers.

I'm feeling a sense of relief, when it happens.

Cold, bony hands close around my neck.

Thanks for reading Chapter Twelve of Sever. Uh oh, things have gone from bad to worse for Jade as tensions build and sides start to form within the camp. The next chapter is live now!

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CAST LIST (so far)

Jade Lively - Lilly Collins (the protagonist)

Belinda - Lindsay Lohan (fellow kidnappee)

Dr Pam Jenkins - Emma Stone (the doctor aiding terrorist faction, Freedom)

Adrian Lively - Alex Pettyfer (Jade's husband)

Marcus Lively - William Fichtner aka Alex from Prison Break (Adrian's father)

Blue - Liam Hemsworth (the protagonist / anti-hero and Jade's ex-boyfriend)

Mikey Drosner - Jack Black (Blue's lawyer)

Detective Pike - Viola Davis (Blue's prosecutor)

Prime Minister Christopher Seaford - Gary Oldman

Terrence Ridley - Mackenzie Crook (one of the pirates from Pirates of the Caribbean)