“You win,” I said. “I’ll come and see.”

I stared into the darkness of the tunnel, recalling my panic and the bats. Not in the dark. Not if I could help it.

Avoiding another lunge from Farthing, I scrambled up the rock pile to the surface and ran to the fire, now just a tiny flame.

I looked at the fiddle case. Without it, Scratch would be ruined.

What would your da say?

“I think he’d say I should stay bricky and do what is right.”

He would say you should help a friend.

I took the old fiddle out of the case and laid him gently inside the boat. Before I could change my mind, I raised the open case I’d taken such great care with all these years, and smashed it down on the rock. It cracked lengthways and, on the second go, into long jagged sticks.

“Sorry, Scratch,” I said, my throat tight. There was no reply. Farthing was waiting at the hole, clawing the ground and growl-whining.

I thrust the end of one long stick into the embers. The old wood had dried in the sun and quickly caught.

With the rest of Scratch’s case in the other hand, I ran after Farthing once more.

The light of my makeshift torch bobbed and flickered as I ran, and I could only just keep Farthing in sight ahead of me in the dark tunnel. I passed the crack in the tunnel roof much more quickly than I would have expected.

At first, I didn’t notice it getting warmer. I was already sweating from running and had tied my neckerchief around my forehead to catch the drips before they stung my eyes. The tunnel had taken a downward slope and then a number of turns. I held back. I was sure I’d passed the place where I met the bats last time—where was Farthing taking me? But when she yelped and whined, darting at my trouser legs again, I continued after her.

Suddenly the air became hot and dry, and the heat of it seemed to touch my eyeballs. The floor shook and I careered from side to side, like a drunkard. Was something else happening with the volcano, or did the tremors just feel stronger because I was deep underground? Farthing darted ahead, outside the pool of my torchlight.

“Farthing?”

My voice echoed in a new way, the repeats of my words spaced further apart. Without warning, the tunnel ended.

Ahead of me was a cavern. It was a gigantic bubble in the rock, the size of a cathedral. High above my head was an opening to the surface, the sun streaming down. We must be at the foot of the volcano by now. A wave of heat struck me, along with an unholy stench of fish and rot. I drew my sweat-soaked rag of a kerchief over my nose and mouth and stepped down out of the tunnel into the epic space, my bare feet crunching painfully on something. I couldn’t see Farthing. The floor was thickly covered with some kind of rock or gravel—jagged, shifting, and uneven.