Once, she had dared to go to it in the day. She had dressed in her oldest clothes and, though feeling guilty, had climbed into the bath and soaked herself. She did not remember anything about getting there except the lacerating light. Her clothes began to dry immediately. In her scramble to crawl out, her cheek had brushed the rock’s rough surface and she’d cried out and jerked away. When her mother saw the blister, Sorrel had confessed that she had been outside and Bibi had confined her to her room with just alganola and water, no PlAK. She still had that scar.

The sky was lightening in the east and the air seemed to contract, like the singeing of her skin against the red-hot rock so many years ago. Sorrel felt short of breath. A sheen of sweat spread over her exposed skin. She wanted to shed her clothes. Once the sun was in the sky, human sweat would dry between one breath and the next. Skin would crack like the salt flats near the Burning Rock Plain. People without efficient sweat glands never lived past childhood.

Where was her mother? Bibi was never late. Maybe she had gone to the seawall for provisions: dried and salted jellyfish, algaoil for the bars that were their main source of food; maybe some of the mussels which now clung to every surface in the sea and smelled faintly of paint.

Sorrel hoped for a sea-egg. They carpeted the seafloor but were too deep for a casual wader and were harvested by licensed divers. There was a black market, of course, and her mother knew all the sellers. She wished for a fresh one, still smelling of the sea. They would crack it and fry it, add salt, and eat it at the kitchen table.

The sound of skateboards had stopped. The footsteps she could hear sounded too rapid. People out there were running. No one ran anymore; it wasted energy. She thought again of the Tribal girl running, being caught and dying on the Burning Rock Plain. Sorrel walked to the gate and looked down the road.

People were travelling through the gloom in groups: men and women carrying children. A few old people. Some hauled small carts; others were laden with overstuffed backpacks. She heard the clip clop of a mule or horse – a rare sound. Those people out there had very little time before the sun came up and they would face dawn danger.

Bibi had told her once that there had been dawn bunkers in case you were trapped outside at sunrise, but they had been built in the wrong places and the rising sea had claimed them.

“Sorrel!” It was her mother’s voice. She strained to separate Bibi from the groups of hurrying people. “Why’re you outside?”