‘What’s that?’ Katherine asked, pointing at the rubble.

There was a dark shadow moving across the white snow, backlit by the glowing embers. It made it maybe fifty metres from the blaze, then collapsed in the snow.

‘Let’s get out of here,’ Andy said.

‘Is he moving?’ I can’t remember who said that.

‘If he’s hurt, it doesn’t matter who he is or what he’s done,’ Juliette reasoned. ‘We can’t just leave him here like this.’

‘I’ll go check on him.’ I was surprised to hear myself volunteer. There was a murmur of half-hearted dissent that didn’t overpower the relief that none of them had to go, so I hauled myself to my feet and staggered towards the shape. I had a vivid memory of another black shadow in a field of white, but I shut it out.

I reached the body. It was Jeremy. He was lying on his back, his eyes shut. His hair was burned, his cheeks cooked in places and ash-streaked in others. His chest was moving up and down, very slowly. I sat down beside him, because there was nothing else to do.

‘Who is it?’ Jeremy spoke slowly, with a lisp as his broken jaw slipped, his tongue slicked black with blood.

‘Ernest . . . your brother.’

It was quiet for a while.

‘Do you dream of choking?’ he asked.

‘Sometimes,’ I admitted. I understood the ash, the choking, the torture, now. That repressed trauma leaking through, of being trapped in that car. The things that he couldn’t remember but bubbled up to haunt him. I can’t breathe when I get angry.

‘Okay.’ He sounded pleased. That I was like him, perhaps. That was all he wanted to know.

He wheezed out a long time. His chest stopped moving.

Then, just when I was about to leave, it started again.

I looked from my brother back to Gavin’s big yellow tank. There stood a collection of people, only a few of whom had my blood and even fewer my surname, waiting for me. They were a collection of hyphens and prefixes and married names and ex-this and step-that. And there was one more Cunningham lying next to me, struggling to breathe.

I’d been so desperate to make a family, to force Erin to make me one, that I’d forgotten the one that had formed around me. Family is gravity. I realised then what Sofia had told me back at the very start of all this. Family is not whose blood runs in your veins, it’s who you’d spill it for.

ME

CHAPTER 41

‘We can go,’ I said, hauling myself up the high step and into the Oversnow.

They’d all piled into the contraption by the time I got back. Gavin punched the engine, which spliced the night air with its waking cough.

‘What happened?’ Katherine asked as I sat down next to her.