With Amelia’s help, I monitored our progress towards the first secret mine. It wasn’t quick. As in we were barely one-third of the way there when the orange sunset we were driving towards dropped like a guillotine through purple to black. Francis sped on into the cone of our headlights. He didn’t even take off his sunglasses. Caleb’s ‘quick as possible’ clearly meant something to him.

I have to admit that despite the bumps and twists and turns I drifted off. I woke when we stopped and peered out. ‘Bleu-Neuf-Cinq’ seemed to be a deserted fork in the dirt road. The headlights lit up scrub and nothingness – anyone Caleb might have expected to see there had apparently gone to bed. It seemed we had no choice but to do the same. Francis – job done: he’d got us there – turned his head to one side and began snoring immediately. Marcel did the same. The rest of us slept one way or another on the big back seat. At some point I came to with Amelia’s head on my chest. Her mouth was open. My arm was numb behind her back, but I didn’t have the heart to move it. There are worse things than a numb arm anyway.

My dreams that night were Mark-shaped.

51.

Caleb was already out of the Land Cruiser when I woke up properly, morning having broken. He was sitting on the truck’s running board opposite Francis, who was squatting in the dirt. The driver had already boiled a pan of water over a little propane stove. He passed me a cup of tea so full of sugar you could pretty much have stood up a spoon in it, and in case that wasn’t sweet enough his idea of provisions for this trip was plastic-wrapped chocolate biscuits. Lots of them. He’d brought a big box and, as far as I could see, nothing else. I was so hungry I ate about ten and shoved more in my pockets.

‘Francis knows people here,’ Caleb told me as I munched. ‘If your parents have been through, they’ll tell us.’