The girl from Belgrade looked at the cars on the motorway. The winter sun was rising milky white on what looked like miles of farmland, as barren as the surface of the moon.

‘What country is this?’ she said.

‘Austria?’ said one of the young women in the hijabs. ‘Germany?’

‘A rich country.’

The man came out of the toilet, pulling up the zip of his trousers with one hand and clicking his fingers with the other.

Click-click.

‘No more,’ he said, and the women must have looked confused. He impatiently snapped his fingers in their faces. ‘No stops no more,’ he explained, rolling his eyes at their inability to understand his fluent English.

Soon they were back on the motorway.

‘No stops,’ the kind girl said, her face splitting in that wide white smile. ‘No suitcase. No time.’

‘No parking!’ the girl from Belgrade laughed.

‘No smoking!’ said an Asian woman.

One of the women in a hijab waggled her dead phone. ‘No signal!’

They all laughed together. It was the last time they laughed. For it was cold inside the lorry now, far colder even than midnight in Belgrade in January. At first she thought it was because the ground was steadily rising and they seemed to be passing through mountains.

But then she saw the steam on the breath of the other women.

The cold was not outside the lorry.

The cold was inside the lorry.

And it was getting colder by the moment, far too cold to sleep.

And in the end, far too cold to live.

The girl from Belgrade shivered. Even the air was freezing. It hurt her eyes.

She touched the metal door next to her and it was so cold that it burned her fingertips.

The blood drained from her hands, flooding deeper into her body, trying to protect the organs that kept her alive, and she felt that the icy air had seeped into her blood like poison.

She stamped her feet, flexed her hands, trying to bring some warmth to them, some movement, some life.

The kind girl was looking at her.

‘So cold,’ the girl from Belgrade said, feeling foolish for stating the painfully obvious.

But the kind girl nodded.

‘Yes. Share my gloves.’

‘No, no.’

‘Please, sister. Put your hands inside with me.’

And so they sat like that for a while, with her numb hands squeezed together inside the kind girl’s gloves, palms pressed against palms.

But then her feet began to hurt. And it was so much more than cold. It was the presence of a blinding, aching pain. As she stamped her feet, she felt the muscles in her neck and shoulders tighten. She moved her head in a horizontal figure of eight, the way she had seen her mother do when her neck was tight, and it made not the slightest difference. She saw the kind girl begin to shiver and watched with silent horror as the shivering became a kind of trembling.