Sorrel grew – I’d even say she thrived. I told myself that she would adapt to the world she was born into. Alganola would be food and she would never long for the Sunday lunch of my grandparents’ generation. I was wrong. There were a thousand ways to learn of everything that had been lost – my mother’s stories, school, the internet. Her genetics spoke to her too.

My daughter’s face caused guilt and fear to rise in me in equal measure. I read that when an organism is threatened, it reproduces; determined to pass on its genes into the future. My mother used to talk about how the fruit trees went in for an orgy of bearing just before they died. I was an animal, after all. We all are.

As food got more and more scarce, Drew began to collect weapons; well, it is more accurate to say he began to fashion them. He could make anything. He made machetes and axes and spears – mostly implements for cutting and stabbing. He’d heard the tech centre had a 3D printer for making guns, but he never found it.

What are you going to do with these? I asked him, as the axes piled up under our bed. Knives would be more useful. Make some knives. He made another axe, his face gone so thin it was like a knife. Sometimes he went outside at night and practised with the weapons he had made, fighting an enemy only he could see.

Of course, I asked him why he cut down the skynut tree. Why not just the nuts?

I had to see if what I made would work, he said. The axe worked like a dream.

Why not cut a tree with no fruit?

The nuts were high, he said, and I couldn’t reach them, couldn’t climb up. We were all hungry. One of us working wasn’t enough.

I always knew when he was lying to me. Tell me the truth, I said, that first time I saw him in jail after his arrest.

I just wanted to swing at something, he confessed. Destroy a living thing. Take what I could. Like so many others did. I did it for us, and I’d done it before, they probably told you. Skynuts last for a long time; it’s not like they would have wasted.

I saw the hopelessness and despair in his eyes.

When the Domins came they found all his axes, machetes and spears and that made things worse for him. They took them all away, except the knife we carried with us from Bana, the one Sorrel killed the feral canine with. They’d missed that one.