‘Is this where we’re stopping for the night?’ She looked up and around. ‘I suppose it doesn’t make much difference, right?’

She started to head off towards the river, to see if it could offer them anything, when Dalip called after her. ‘Don’t go far.’

‘Fuck off, all right?’ she said, and kept going.

Stanislav jerked his head in her direction, and Dalip got up to follow her.

She was lying down, looking over the river bank at the slack water beneath, trying to see if there were any fish there, when Dalip came up behind her.

‘We need to stay together,’ said Dalip.

‘Fuck off, Dalip. I’m fine.’

‘No,’ he said, and tried to explain, but the words got stuck. He sat down, back to a tree trunk. ‘Stanislav thinks we’re walking into a trap.’

Now he had her attention. She rolled over and leaned on one arm. ‘We’re what?’

He wanted to explain, and he tried, but Mary wasn’t at all convinced.

‘This geomancer is paying the wolfman to be her lookout, to send people up to her, whatever, church? What the fuck is she going to do to us when we get there? We can just walk out if she gets heavy on us.’

‘I don’t think it’s that simple. I don’t think the wolfman’s on his own.’

‘He’s got a gang? So have we.’

‘He’s got wolves, Mary! I mean, look at us. We’re dressed in bright orange clothes, we have a cigarette lighter, a small blunt knife and a rusty axe between us. We’re not a gang. We’re just a bunch of people thrown together by the fact that we didn’t die.’ Then the final penny dropped. ‘He’s watching us now. We’ll never spot him, but he’s followed us this far, and he’ll follow us until we get where we’re supposed to go.’

She sat up and stared into the forest, checking random directions.

‘You’re scaring me.’

‘I’m scaring myself. But it’s too much of a coincidence that he’s the first and only person we’ve met. We should’ve been more careful.’

‘There’s nothing wrong with what we did,’ she said, and was suddenly distracted by something happening behind Dalip.

Shouting. Rushing. A scream.

‘Get down.’

Dalip rolled to one side, pressing himself against the ground. After a moment, he started to raise himself, to see over the undergrowth. It was as if the forest itself was moving, brown and green shapes darting from cover to cover, and the few orange boilersuits he could see were running.

‘We’ve been so stupid. Naive, trusting … idiots.’

Mary crawled next to him. ‘Who are these people? Why are they doing this?’