Thanks to the tools that we’d kept with us all this time, we were able to build a kind of stretcher. We felled two trees that were nice and straight, trimmed the trunks and bound the chair to them, using tightly plaited strips of fabric. Dorothy was very weak and felt cold all the time, so we wrapped her in blankets, then we strapped her to the back of the chair and four of us carried her, taking care to walk in step so as not to jolt her. But we only kept it up for a few days because she found even that tiring, and then it became painful for her to stay sitting. We nailed branches across the two wooden poles so that we could carry her lying down. She thanked us profusely, and told us that she felt better, but we could see she was short of breath, and while we moved, she kept her eyes shut most of the time. At first, she slept, and the slightest thing awoke her, then we realised that she no longer reacted when we stopped to change bearers. Anthea said that she’d fallen into a light coma. Some of the women wanted us to stop, but Dorothy woke up and wouldn’t hear of it:

‘If you stop, I’ll say to myself that half an hour later we might have found something, and I’ll die angry. I want to keep going until my last breath.’

And that was how Dorothy died, gently rocked by the women while Anthea walked beside her holding her hand. After a while, she could no longer feel her pulse. I saw tears trickling down her cheeks.

‘It’s over,’ she said.

The others caught up with us and we walked on until sunset, thirty-nine women and a corpse, a long, straggling column crossing the plain, a silent procession through the impossible, unwillingly taking possession of the void, alongside the stubborn woman whose wish had been to die without stopping.

We buried her during the night. There was a fine drizzle. Rose’s funeral lament hung in the air above the plain.

We stayed by the tomb for several days, as if loath to abandon Dorothy and as if we no longer had any reason to continue. I don’t think any one of us still believed in those cities that would be our salvation, or in a bunker where the cage would be open. Almost every evening, Anthea gazed at the sky, wondering where we were. She said that on Earth, we’d have noticed the changing of the seasons, but here, over several months, the days had barely become shorter, and the weather was not noticeably cooler. There’d have been snowstorms or heatwaves, not this unchanging weather, with hardly any rain and this sparse vegetation. Why move on? We wouldn’t be any the wiser as to our whereabouts, she said, we’ll always be near a bunker and we’ll die one by one.

From that time on, I was fully aware that one day I would be the last.