Adam sat bolt upright, spluttering and coughing. In the abrupt shock of waking, it took him several seconds to register the water streaming down his face and soaking his tracksuit top. Wiping his eyes, he saw a small red-headed boy standing over him. The boy was holding an upturned bucket over Adam’s head, and there was a mocking grin on his face. He was dressed in matching dark-blue trousers, cap and jacket, with a yellow armband tied tightly around his sleeve.

“Wakey, wakey,” he squeaked. “Mr Pitt wants to see you.”

Adam’s head was pounding, and there was a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach. He was sitting on the floor of a tiny windowless room, in the narrow gap between a cot and a washbasin. A single light bulb hung down from the ceiling, dyeing the other boy’s features a grimy orange. There was a low rumbling noise in the background, and the cold floor beneath Adam’s palms was trembling.

“Where . . . where am I?” he asked, bewildered. “Who are you?”

“Save your questions for Mr Pitt,” the boy retorted. “He’ll throttle me if we keep him waiting. Come on.”

The boy helped Adam up and ushered him out of the room. In the dingy corridor outside, the rumbling noise was loud enough to make Adam’s head throb. He paused to get his bearings, only for the boy to push him sharply, sending him stumbling forward. As they walked past a series of identical wooden doors, Adam thought he heard a low whimper emanate from behind one of them. He wondered whether other people were trapped here too, or whether this was his own, entirely private, nightmare.

Fixing his eyes upon a circular window set into the wall, Adam broke away from the other boy and pressed his face against the glass. His cry for help died in his throat. He stared in shocked silence at a world of pitch-black night. Vague, wispy shapes slid past the window like forgotten memories. With a jolt, Adam realized they were clouds.

“We’re flying!” he said, a note of wonder in his voice.

The boy clapped sarcastically.

“What gave it away?”

Adam was too busy trying to digest this new information to acknowledge the boy’s derisory tone.

“So we’re on a plane?” he asked.

“Zeppelin,” the boy corrected. He snorted at Adam’s look of incomprehension. “Airship? You know – big balloon thingy?”

“I know what an airship is,” Adam said defensively.

“Good for you. Then I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that we’re in the gondola. It’s the cabin beneath the balloon, where all the crew and the . . .” a smirk spread across the boy’s face “. . . passengers stay during the flight. It’s nearly two hundred metres in length from prow to stern.”

Seeing Adam’s underwhelmed expression, the little redhead stopped and grabbed him by the arm.

“This isn’t any old airship, you know,” he said. “This is the Quisling – pride of the Dial.” The boy glanced up and down the deserted corridor before continuing in a whisper: “They reckon in the olden days the Commandant himself used to fly it.”

The boy’s eyes widened at the thought. Adam’s brain was deluged by questions, but he didn’t want to give his infuriating captor the satisfaction of answering any of them. Though he was a head shorter than Adam, and at least a couple of years younger, there was a casual superiority about the redhead’s manner that made him seem a lot older. It was easy to act that way, Adam supposed, when you had all the answers. Inspecting the smaller boy out of the corner of his eye, Adam wondered whether it was time to teach him a lesson.

As if reading his mind, the boy jabbed him sharply in the back.

“Don’t even think about it. I’ve worked on this ship for ten years now, and I’ve taken care of bigger and meaner kids than you.”

Despite everything, Adam smiled. Did this boy think he was an idiot? Ten years ago, he would still have been in nappies!

When they reached the door at the end of the corridor, the redhead stopped and carefully adjusted his cap in the window.

“It’ll be all right, you know,” he told Adam, in the friendly, knowing tones of an elder brother. “Even I was worried when they first came for me. But if you keep your head down and don’t cause any trouble, things become much easier.” He tapped his armband. “I’m a trustee now. I get taken on all the Quisling’s flights. You follow my advice, maybe one day you’ll be allowed up here too.”

“Um . . . OK. Thanks,” said Adam, utterly bemused. As he went to grasp the door handle, the boy stayed his hand.

“One more thing – a piece of advice from an old hand.”

“What?”

“For God’s sake, don’t make him angry.”

Before Adam could ask who he was talking about, the boy knocked on the door. From inside the room, a clipped voice called out, “Come!” The boy opened the door and peered inside.

“Mr Pitt?” he asked nervously. “I’ve got one of the new arrivals for you here.”

“Very well, Carstairs. Send him in.”

“Yessir.”

With a farewell poke in the ribs, the boy shoved Adam through the door and closed it softly behind him.

To his surprise, Adam found himself in a plush lounge area, his feet sinking into a deep maroon carpet. Slanting, rain-splattered windows ran the length of two of the walls, providing a panoramic view of the shifting landscapes of the night sky. In the middle of the room, a circular bar stood unattended, bearing rows of spirit bottles that glinted in the light. Beyond the bar, a door was marked with the sign “Control Room – No Unauthorized Access”.

Mr Pitt sat alone at a table in the corner, leafing through a stack of brown files, shrouded in a haze of cigarette smoke. He was a tall, angular man with slicked-down black hair and brisk, economical movements. A pencil-thin moustache sat in haughty residence on his upper lip, and a monocle was wedged over his left eye. There was a silver ashtray by his elbow, filled with a pyramid of cigarette stubs. As he flicked through his files, Mr Pitt scribbled notes in the margins, the light catching on a pair of chunky gold sovereign rings adorning his fingers.

Unused to the fug of smoke, Adam coughed. Mr Pitt didn’t look up.

“Come on over then, lad,” he said finally, not unpleasantly.

Adam stepped hesitantly towards the table.

“Name?”

“What?”

Mr Pitt looked up sharply. Behind the monocle, his left eye was filmy and unfocused. His right eye narrowed.

“Perhaps I should make myself clear,” he said slowly. “My name is Hector Pitt. You will refer to me as ‘Mr Pitt’, or ‘sir’. Failure to do so will not be tolerated. I’m a fair man, but one has to draw the line somewhere. Have I made myself clear?”

“Yes . . . I mean, yes, sir.”

“Ah! A fast learner.” Mr Pitt smiled, revealing a row of stained yellow teeth. “Now, let us try again. Name?”

“Adam Wilson, sir.”

Mr Pitt rifled through the stack of files, eventually pulling out one near the bottom. He began to scan its contents.

“Sir?” Adam ventured, halting Mr Pitt in the action of lighting another cigarette. He plunged on, as politely as possible. “Could you please tell me what I’m doing here? It’s just that, one minute I was walking home, and then these men jumped me, and now I’m. . .” Adam faltered. “Well, I don’t know where I am, or who you are, or what I’m doing here. Sir.”

Mr Pitt paused, and then surprised Adam by breaking out into a raspy chuckle.

“Of course, Wilson.” He struck up a match and lit his cigarette, before taking a deep drag. “No doubt you are finding this a most disorienting time. Let me try to explain things for you. Now then, you will be aware of your acquaintance Danny Lyons?”

Adam nodded dumbly.

“Good. And you’ll also be aware that five days ago you betrayed him?”

“I didn’t betray him!” Adam began. “You don’t understand, sir. . .”

Mr Pitt held up a hand.

“It’s all here in black and white,” he said, looking down at his file. “Last Monday evening Lyons caught you kissing his girlfriend . . . at a skate park, it says here, not that the location is material to this matter. Understandably upset by the actions of his supposed best friend, the next day Lyons takes his frustration out on a chemistry laboratory at your school. He is summarily expelled.” Mr Pitt snapped the file shut. “You, on the other hand, appear to get off scot free. . .”

“It wasn’t like that!” Adam protested. “Danny and Carey had had a fight that night – I was just trying to cheer her up! I shouldn’t have tried to kiss her, it was a big mistake, but it only lasted a second!”

“It’s too late for excuses, Wilson. The powers that be – my employers – have already placed you on trial, on a charge of Low Treachery. Needless to say, you were found guilty. A unanimous verdict.”

“What trial?” Adam exclaimed. “No one told me anything about a trial! My parents would have got me a lawyer!”

“Lawyer, sir,” corrected Mr Pitt sharply. “Let’s not fall out. Whether you knew about the trial or not is immaterial, Wilson. You know you betrayed Lyons, and we know you betrayed Lyons. No amount of legal tomfoolery could have helped you wriggle out of it.”

He stared unblinking at Adam, daring him to protest again. The guilty silence was interrupted by the door to the Control Room sliding open. A young man poked his head into the lounge. In the cockpit behind him, Adam could see a team of crewmen busily working the zeppelin’s controls.

The man gave Mr Pitt a crisp salute. “Sorry to interrupt you, sir, but I thought you should know – we’ve passed through the warphole and have returned to no-time, but the weather’s pretty hairy out here. Might be a bumpy journey back.”

Above the growl of the airship’s engines, Adam could hear the wind flinging handfuls of raindrops against the windows. The floor wobbled slightly as the Quisling sought to navigate a path through the growing storm.

“I’ve been through worse than this,” Mr Pitt said, after a dismissive glance outside. “Let me know when the Dial’s in sight.”

The crewman nodded and slid the door shut again. Adam’s head was bursting with so many questions that it was hard to know where to begin.

“Excuse me, sir, but what is the Dial?”

Mr Pitt nodded. “Fair question, Wilson. The Dial is the prison where you’ll serve out your sentence.”

“Prison?” Adam gasped. “For how long?”

Mr Pitt consulted the file.

“Let me see . . . ah, here we are: two hundred and seventy-four years.”

“Two hundred and seventy-four years?” Adam echoed incredulously. “Are you nuts?”

He barely saw Mr Pitt move. There was a flash of light, and Adam’s temple exploded with pain once again. He reeled away from the table, his head spinning. Mr Pitt rose up out of his chair, calmly wiping the blood from his sovereign rings with a handkerchief. After tucking the handkerchief back into his pocket, he shoved Adam to the floor and aimed two sharp kicks to his body. Adam would have shouted out, but the air had been buffeted from his lungs, and he found himself mouthing silent words of agony.

“You will call me SIR!” Mr Pitt screamed, drenching Adam in saliva and the stench of cigarettes. “Every day, for two hundred and seventy-four years, you will call me SIR! A good, solid stretch for a particularly vile young man who will learn the meaning of manners, if I have to tattoo it on his skin in bruises!”

As Mr Pitt clenched his fist and prepared to bring the rings down on Adam again, there was a loud bang, and the Quisling lurched sickeningly to one side.