That night, in her bed in Oaklands Close, Zoe was woken by the thunder. She shuddered each time the lightning cracked in the sky like a giant breaking bones. When she eventually slept, her dreams were of Eva. She dreamt that Eva and she were in a motorboat, hunched against the rain. The rain splashed across the windscreen and sloshed against the doors. The windscreen wipers lolloped back and forth across the glass.

It is lighter there in the summer, Grandma Eva said, and darker in the winter.

Where? Zoe said.

Where we are going, said Eva.

Where are we going? said Zoe.

Away, said Grandma E. This entire country might lift off and float away, she added.

The islands are like blobs of meringue floating in a bowl of custard, Zoe said.

No they are not, said her grandmother.

That birch tree with the yellow leaves is like a thousand puppets dancing to the same tune, Zoe said.

I don’t think so, said Eva.

What is it like, then? Zoe asked.

I think it is like itself.

I am like you, Zoe said.

How so?

But she wasn’t sure.

ZOE: When I woke up, my grandmother Ruth was sitting on the end of the bed. My mother Nina was crouched by my pillow.

Zoe cried out.

LUCIJA: Given how little they want you to come to their country in the first place, leaving it is harder than you might think. After we had locked Amjad Maher in the cellar, I sat in the kitchen and thought: we have maybe eighteen hours before anyone notices our absence and alerts the authorities. I thought: we have to get out of the islands before that. I thought: let Mariam go up to collect the things we need, passports, money, clothes, while I sit here in the kitchen and think. I thought: if we get to an airport, and take a flight out, to Sarajevo, Zagreb, we can get away, make a new life, leave her crazy past behind us. There are cheap flights to Croatia. Just then Mariam returned with her passport. Mine was burgundy. Why was hers green? I took it from her and had a look. Of course I didn’t know the half of it: immigrant teenager on a spouse visa, Pakistani passport, fleeing from her husband. Plan B: drive all the way to Sarajevo. At checkpoints between countries, Mariam could hide under the seat. That was how many people I knew had got out of the disintegrating Yugoslavia in the first place. But we were on an island. I couldn’t get a car on to the ferry without somebody asking who it belonged to. I thought: why are some lives lived in the extreme? And others wholly placid? Plan C: Papa Astrid. We nuns have declared the convent a law unto itself, outwith the writ of any nation-state’s jurisdiction. As spiritual force fields go it’s quite potent.