"Smile for camera," an accented voice echoed as blinding flashes illuminated the pitch black in strobes of disorienting images. I couldn't even make out a full silhouette, but somebody was stood before me unknowingly close, and with the haze of light fever it was difficult to distinguish anything now my eyes were beginning to adjust. Unlocalised pain radiated through me, the same deep ache I'd suffered for however many days of being transported across land in the back of containers. As steadily as I could I began to piece together a picture of everything I knew. Somebody was in front of me, a wall was behind me. I could feel the damp meeting point of ground and wall and edged my fingers towards the fold, seeking comfort in the safety of absolute shelter for at least part of my body. I huddled as close as I could until my back was pressed fully up against it, making sure my arms and head felt the resoluteness of concrete. If I got close enough maybe it would swallow me up, and whatever lay in store for me next would simply disappear.

Murmured conversation began, and I strained my ears to distinguish words, phrases, anything that could tell me what their native tongue was. Throughout the days we'd spent as human cargo I hadn't heard a word; the container had been opened and miserly scraps of food and water had been passed in, but nobody had spoken. We had changed hands once, hooded and bound, immediately transferred into another truck, smaller and filthier than the last. I didn't remember arriving here, wherever that was. How we got from the truck to this location was a complete mystery to me, and all I could be sure of was that I'd been conscious and in the same spot for no more than an hour or so before whoever was now in the room had entered.

There was something final about this destination, I knew that much. The hood had been removed; my skin exposed to its surroundings without so much as a hint of a breeze to curb the relentless dry heat. I'd been sweating and shaking in the stifling torridity of the trucks for the duration of our journey, and the humidity had been unforgiving.

As voices pricked up again I desperately tried to capture their conversation. Turkish, I realised, they were Turkish. With that sinking knowledge I swallowed down a lump in my already dry throat. Their nationality pieced together fragments of our journey through fractured memories, starting with the rocky shoreline in Lesbos. We'd been knocked unconscious, and the next heady awareness brought me to the steel confines of a container being hauled across land on the back of a truck. They'd almost certainly dragged us into the dinghy and on to the trawler across sea to Turkey, and after days of travelling across land, we had been moved a fair distance. No sane Turkish freedom fighter would keep Western hostages in Turkey, so we would have been moved across a border. There would be no sense in moving us East, far from their presumed cause; so, we were south. Syria.

Lights blinked on with an audible judder and I jumped with a lurch of fear. The sudden physical jolt made my already aching bones groan and I gripped my fingertips hard into the corner of the wall, desperate to cling to something. I winced my eyes closed, white specks of light racing across the blank inside of my view until I prized them open little by little.

"Smile, sexy one," a voice echoed. Amid bleary adjustment I attempted to glace at the surroundings. A laptop sat on a table directly in front of me- of us, I realised, as I noticed Jas slumped a few feet away. She was out cold, her sandy blonde hair splayed across her face. Where were the others? There had been five of us at one point, but on the transfer from one truck to another our hoods had been removed, and only Wajid, Jasmin and I remained.

A prickle of heat raced down the back of my neck and I kept my breathing steady as I glanced, unmoving, around my surroundings. My heart raced deafeningly in my ears, and I fought against the urge to panic until I was trembling with tears with every shred of conscious thought I had. We were in what looked like a basement- concrete walls and floor, no windows, only one door. What lay beyond that was unknown to me, were there stairs? Were we in a city, or somewhere rural? Was anybody looking for us? Did anyone even know we were gone?

The cameraman barked at a young accomplice in Turkish, too fluently for me to make out any words I may have recognised. The young and robed accomplice turned on his heel instantly and did a limping jog towards the door. He slithered out of it so quickly it would have been impossible to get a look at what lay outside, but I was too alert to the sudden proximity of the man before me to study it closely.

Cameraman had shuffled towards me, long dirty toes poking out of filth covered sandals. He crouched down and gave me his sweetest smile, with yellow crooked teeth glaring at me. Unkempt dirty hair darted out at all angles from underneath his prayer cap. I should have been more petrified, wracked with worry about what his next move would be, but all I could think about was the splintering browned toenails. Traumatic Dissociation, I noticed. It was entirely unconscious too; I was almost pleased to have felt a real-life demonstration of a topic I had studied and written about in some depth.

"Someone come for you," he grinned unpleasantly. I kept my breathing steady, each judder in my chest from my racing heart forcing me to remember I was alive, and determined to stay that way. A ridiculous thought floated through me- was I reacting appropriately? Was it normal to be silent and calm? Should I have been wailing and screaming and fighting my way to an exit? I was good in a crisis, generally speaking; it was probably why I found the intensity of the camp environment relatively easy to handle. But this, however- I pressed my fingertips against a cooler patch of the unsettlingly warm concrete floor to ground myself- was not an environment easily handled.

The door jolted open with screaming steel scraping against hard ground, and a second man entered with the young limping apprentice. I was too preoccupied with assessing the new figure to look beyond the doorway; the man had a hauntingly familiar look about him. A slight swagger in his walk, and a well-groomed beard told me this man was not one of the others, but whether or not that bode well for us or not I couldn't tell.

"Nice," he stroked his beard as he assessed me and nodded. "Nice." His accent was clear, a beacon of false hope. This new man was British, and I watched him for a fraction of a second as I debated whether or not to speak.

"Where are you from?" I croaked, and as he smirked, I wondered what his first assessment was. Had he marked me as brave, or stupid?

"Hackney. And yourself?" It was a normal conversation. We could have been sitting on a bus, or standing in a queue in a supermarket.

"North London," I replied shakily. My lips were cracked and sore, forming words was more painful than I'd considered.

"We have many brothers around those parts," his lips pulled in to a smirk.

"Are you going to execute us?" My mouth was so dry the words came out in a strangled wheeze, defying the perception of even calmness I wanted to portray.

"Maybe," he stood still, resolutely. "We had to lose your friend, Wajid." His words were like a knife to my gut. Sweet, smiley Wajid. Three kids, another on the way, all now fatherless. "We executed him; would you like to know how?" Hackney crossed his arms; he was preparing himself for some entertainment.

"I'd like to know why," I murmured through gritted teeth. Hackney cupped his hand around his ear theatrically.

"Why?" I repeated as firmly as I could muster.

"He was a kuffar. A traitor. We had no use for him."

As sick as the knowledge made me, I had to take Wajid's execution as a promising sign for Jas and I. They wouldn't have just done it because he was surplus to requirements, it also sent a message. We're not afraid to end lives here. Hackney didn't realise it inadvertently told me it would be unlikely they would be planning to kill us all, otherwise they would have surely grouped us together at least to pick us off one by one. Instead, they had taken Wajid's life, and probably sent the footage to whichever governments they wanted to reach with the threat that the same fate would befall the rest of us, if they didn't get what they wanted. And if they wanted something, that meant we were bartering tools. That meant a way out of here.

"If you don't want to kill us right now, what do you want?"

"I like you," Hackney stepped forward with a mock thoughtful expression. "That's a bad thing for you, you understand." He knelt down so we were close enough for me to smell his cologne. "I'm going to tell you exactly what we're going to do. In a few minutes, my we'll be on a live stream with the American government. They're expecting our call, they'll have all the right people there. We're going to wake your friend up," he nodded towards Jas's unconscious form. "And we're going to torture you both, while they watch. Then we're going to tell them what we want, you're going to beg them to save you, if of course you can even talk by that point. So, you had better hope they play ball." I dry swallowed, unable now to keep the tremors of fear in my bones from rattling my hands. Hackney turned his head and snapped his fingers to Cameraman. A bottle of water was hastily brought forward.

"Here," Hackney said gently as he twisted the cap off. "You need to stay hydrated; you'll need all the energy you can get."