Now, my headstrong daughter, my only child, wants to abandon the safety of the dark. I tell her Tribals don’t exist – they are a myth that the young have created to hang onto hope – but the Toplanders are real. I’ve seen classified reports about the Toplanders and their raids on young Lowlander females to use as slaves. The raiders are led by a cruel, reckless man the reports call The Colonel. There was Essan, a girl Sorrel’s age, who disappeared while she was out searching for food and we knew it was the Domins who’d caught and sold her to the Toplanders. And Amaryllis, snatched from her doorstep in the presence of her parents and never heard from again.

What I know for sure is that in this time of killing heat and hunger, there is no safety anywhere. Every day the sun comes up it will blind or kill us if there is not a roof over our heads. Every day the Domins are on the hunt for young women and the ferals can surround us and tear us apart.

I’m forty-five and the end is coming fast for me. What use am I without my daughter? Maybe the only thing I can give her is a chance to escape this hell. To die with her would be better than to die alone.

CHAPTER 5 – FLIGHT

Two days had passed, and the loudspeakers had begun transmitting evacuation orders, throughout the night. The stream of people on the road had disappeared and Sorrel knew all the best places in Bana would already be taken.

On the SATMAP, they had found traces of an old aqueduct close to the dry stream bed, which they could use as the point to start their journey to the mountains. They’d searched for possible hiding places along the way: big rocks, caves, old-time trees, but knew the images they were looking at were old.

Her mother was sleeping. It was not yet peak heat. The street outside was silent. Were they the only ones left without shelter in Bana? The shutters were closed against the day. Sorrel wanted to be moving, to be distracted from the risks of their decision, to face whatever was ahead.

She began to make a pile of the things they would take with them: solar charger, graphene filter, a funnel, neemoil. All the alganola they had. A tube of algafuel. Four sky nuts in an algaskin. A change of clothes. Three pairs of socks. Dark glasses. UV proof hat – all of them, life or death choices. She considered an almost full tube of old sunscreen and put it down. No amount of sunscreen would help if they got caught outside in the day.