She’d barely got any distance before she heard footsteps hurrying after her. She didn’t turn around, just kept walking.

‘Haven’t you learned anything from films?’

‘Fuck. Off.’

‘Seriously. We don’t know where we are, we don’t know what’s out there. You can’t just wander off like this.’

There was very little undergrowth: mostly small, thin plants and long looping briars. The leaf litter made every footfall release a deep, earthy scent. The overlapping branches above formed an almost complete canopy, throwing deep shade over everything below. Where a tree had fallen, there was a clearing, bright with sunlight and hazy with insects. They were like islands in a sea of gloom.

She stopped and looked around. She could see tiny flashes of orange boilersuit coming from the tree line, but if she went only a little further, she’d be lost, unable to find her way back.

It wasn’t like a local park at all, with paths and play areas, and a lake with scruffy-looking ducks. This was the wild wood, stretching beyond this point for as far as it pleased. There were no tower blocks on the borders, and the realisation struck her with all the force of a punch to the side of the head.

The turbaned kid had a stout branch in his hands, his fingers digging into the rough bark. It was the best weapon and, unless his little blunt knife counted, the only weapon that they could muster.

She didn’t want to lose face. Neither did she want to carry on any further. She could have gone down towards the river, but hadn’t. Instead, she was in the middle of a forest with a stick-wielding kid in a blue turban and a ridiculous beard.

‘Fuck.’

‘Look. Stanislav’s right: you can do what you want, but it’d be stupid to just wander off after all we’ve been through.’

‘What if there’s someone just over the hill who can help us, and we’ll never know unless we go there.’

‘And there might be someone – or something – just over the hill that might eat us. We don’t know that either. So being together is always going to be better, right?’

Who was she going to be? Was she going to be the one who came through the fire and survived, or was she the one who was too fucking arsey to be with and eventually abandoned? Because that wasn’t a pattern that had repeated itself throughout her entire life, was it?

Into the forest? Back to the river?

She looked one way, then the other.

‘Fuck it.’

She turned on her heel and stamped back to the tree line, and the turbaned kid trailed after her, still carrying his stick.

‘I’m Dalip,’ he said.

‘Congratulations.’

‘Your—’

‘I’m what? You don’t get to say what I am.’ She whipped around, and he was proffering her discarded bandanna.