Nefyn stood, holding her breath, the dark pools exposed by the slack-water glistening around her, the limpets gasping for the tide. She listened as the sandpipers and plovers, stark in winter plumage, questioned the dawn moon with their cries. She hadn’t been able to sleep for weeks, her tiredness making her feel as if she were drowning. She exhaled, her breath billowing into the blue stillness. From here she could see the curve of the coast. The warm glow of lights over the sleeping village a few miles to the south, and to the north, the sharp angles of the military base, unnaturally rigid, magnified somehow by the weight of rain in the sky.

She turned, pulled her coat around her, and walked barefoot along the beach in search of today’s offerings. The strandline lay just out of reach of the water, a fragile trail that traced the coast, configured and reconfigured at each tide’s turn. An ever-present collection of disparate things brought temporarily together. The glass cabinets in the cottage were full of specimens she had collected over the years, shells and whelks, egg cases and seeds. So now she would only bring home the most remarkable things, knowing she would have to sacrifice a beloved object for its place. Her feet found footholds along the shingle beach, her soles impervious to its grit, having walked this way since she was a girl.

The cove was deep, the steepness of its rise making sound move differently, voices reverberate more, making light linger a little longer. You could not hide anything from the sea; the cove itself was evidence of this. The waves had sought out and worn the softness of the coast away in their merciless quest to expose its hidden shape. Her father had dared build a boatshed at the foot of the cliffs and spent his life launching his boat from the beach, searching for whiting and mackerel. Watching him, Nefyn had learnt to see through the water. To calculate where the stone arch of Porth y Wrach on the headland met the pool where the mackerel idled in August, and to recognize the glassy surface of blue water where the whelks sheltered in winter. To read the bay’s hidden language. There were no boats today; the alarms had been sounded and flags raised. Everyone knew the consequences of straying into The Range whilst the military tested their drones. The bay would be closed for weeks at a time and when it was, Nefyn could do nothing but lie sleepless on her bed, listening to the distant thunder of munitions, each strike awakening in her a new depth of dread.