“I didn’t bury him. Waste of energy. Pulled him into the open and left him. He was dust in a week.” She sighed. “Then I was alone. Eventually joined up with people on the move; and came up here. Left them, then I was alone again for a while, then with another group of Tribals – males and females. That was a disaster; and then I met Caroni.” Her voice had fallen to a whisper.

“Why was the male band a disaster?”

“I don’t really want to talk about it.”

“D’you ever wonder what happened to your mother and your siblings?”

“Not anymore.”

“I still mi… aahm, think about my mother.”

“After all this time? For what? She’d be weak and need looking after. Put us all at risk.”

“You’re hardhearted,” Sorrel had said and regretted the words immediately.

“You think so? I tell you who’s hardhearted. Those old people, dead now. They left us this world to deal with and they knew what would happen. But they kept right on with their meat every day and their homes with rooms no one went into and their holidays. I hate every generation before this one, more than the Domins. I hate it that I’ll never have a chance to confront them.”

The river had been cold when it was deep – now it was warm as blood. The gravel of the stream bed shifted slightly beneath Sorrel’s body, accommodating her weight. Emrallie said she had been with a male band for a while. Sorrel thought about being touched by someone else. A male. Touched intimately. She knew a few of the older females were lovers, but her new, unwelcome dreams were of bodies different from hers. Boys. Men. These dreams seemed to flow out of her body, not her mind.

“D’you ever think of boys now?” she asked Emrallie.

She said nothing for a long while, then said, “Think of them how?”

“Being with them. Touching them.”

“Having sex, you mean?”

“I guess.”

“No. I don’t think of them. Males are dangerous. And it’s too much of a risk. I’m fertile, at least I used to be.”

“Don’t you want children?”

“Children? To have a baby? To be torn apart from the inside? Up here? And then see them die? For what?”

“Will humans die out then? The things that reproduce survive. Like the ferals.”

“You think too much, Sorrel. I don’t think about humanity. I think about how much of this breadfruit I’m gonna get, if it can be eaten at all. If I’ll ever lie in a river again, or if it’ll be back to licking the underside of rocks and sucking on agaves. Whether we’ll find a good place – no, any place – when we leave Jiba. I don’t think about males.”

The earth shook slightly, and a few stones rolled off the cliffs. There were tremors all the time now.