Some instructions are not meant to be questioned.

Moritz came to Mlaga to recover. He’s a German art teacher worn down by burnout, and he has synaesthesia: sounds bleed into colour, smells arrive with tastes, and stress brings images he can’t explain. Lately those images are of fire. He sees smoke, a figure he can never quite make out and seven flashes of light, and he counts them every time. When Eva suggests he enrol at Instituto Guerrera, a language school looks like exactly the routine he needs.

His teacher is Lola: quick, funny and impossible to dislike. She knows how to keep a room moving. She also counts to seven over a candle flame, and her past is something the director, Manuel, keeps on file, where he can reach it.

Manuel has his own reasons for wanting Moritz in Lola’s class. At Guerrera, students learn remarkably fast. One of them, Bianca, speaks flawless Spanish but can’t remember what she did the day before. Then Bianca disappears, and a workshop outside Mlaga burns down after Moritz has already drawn the fire. When he starts asking questions, the answers keep changing. What he saw is explained away, and things he told Eva in private come back to him from other people. The harder he insists on what his senses tell him, the less he looks like a witness and the more he looks like a suspect.

Lola knows more about the fires than anyone. What matters is what she does with that, once Manuel tells her what he needs.

Imperative Ember is the second novel in the False Friends series. It’s a psychological thriller about obedience and perception, and about how easily the truth gets pinned on whoever is least likely to be believed. Inspired by real people and a real school.