‘You should get some more kip. We don’t know how far we’ll have to cover in the morning, and catching Crows isn’t going to be easy. You can walk right past him and not even see him, though that might only be at night. I don’t know what we’ll do if he wants to make a fight of it.’

‘Do you think he will?’ He looked at her carefully, judging her mood by how tense her body was as he couldn’t see her expression.

‘He doesn’t fight. He avoids fights. That’s what probably got him here, Down: he ran away until he couldn’t run any further. He’s got scars from when they caught him. I think he’s as scared of Down as we are, he just hides it better.’

‘Is that what we are? Scared?’

She dragged her hair out of the way and tilted her head towards him.

‘I don’t know what’s happening to me. I can do stuff like you can only do in films, except this is real.’

‘I used to be scared of heights,’ he admitted. ‘I couldn’t even climb ladders.’

‘Fuck off,’ she said. ‘You threw yourself off a fucking cliff. You expected me to catch you.’

‘I climbed up the outside of Bell’s tower and through a window. Just hanging there, in space, only my fingers and toes in the gaps between the stones. I should’ve been terrified. I wasn’t.’ He stared into the embers. ‘You’re not the only one who’s changed.’

‘Look, Dalip. Everyone’s asleep but us. I wanted to … I …’ She couldn’t manage it, whatever it was she was trying to say. ‘Forget it.’

He genuinely didn’t know what she wanted to tell him. What if she said she liked him? Romantically? He had no experience of that sort of thing, at all, ever. Perhaps just the once, then, and he’d been too scared to act on it, even to talk to the girl in question. What would he have said to his parents afterwards? Easier by far to keep silent and not bring shame on himself or his family.

‘Go on.’ The words formed by themselves. He didn’t know where they came from.

She struggled on. ‘I’ve never had a friend that I haven’t let down. You know, badly, so they dump me like I’m a sack of shit.’ She was shaking, despite the warmth of the room. ‘When you jumped, and pulled me after you, you were going to die, and I wasn’t. But you knew I was going to catch you, even before I did. I’ve never had anyone trust me with as much as you did. I don’t … understand that.’

Dalip felt the low heat from the fire on his face, almost as warm as the embarrassment coming from Mary.