For the first time, I started to have doubts. They weren’t doubts about me though. I knew what I had to do.

‘Do you want to stop? Do you want to get out and get in Lana and Kate’s boat?’ I said. ‘To stay behind with them? It’s fine if you want to.’

‘No. No, I need to,’ he said. ‘I just . . . I think . . . if this works, I mean, if we do it . . . then I want you to know that I enjoyed my life. That time on the Jellyfish was fun. My life was fun on there. I think . . . I’m just not sure life will be so simple for us in the future. Whatever happens.’

There was a sudden high wave then; we were getting further out, and we tilted down into the trough with a splash. ‘Yeah. It was good,’ I said. ‘We were very secure, and very loved.’

‘And we knew what was expected of us, and we had friendship,’ he said. ‘Whatever happens now, it was great being on there with you.’

He was silent for a minute.

‘I need to kill it too, Martha.’

‘Yes.’

I looked back towards land as we rowed further away from the shore. The view was becoming more familiar now, the world becoming the one I knew again. You could fool yourself into feeling that it was safer, happier, better from back here, out on the ocean, away from people and problems and nice clothes. But it wasn’t. Nothing was safe here now – and maybe it never had been.

‘It was great being there with you too, James,’ I added. ‘We had some really good times.’

Kate called something out to us.

‘What?’ I called back. ‘What did you say?’

‘Lana says there are five types of female body shape. Which one do you think you are?’ called Kate.

‘What?’

Lana held up a magazine. It had looked like they were going slower than us. It looked like Kate was doing most of the rowing.

‘What?’ I let out a loud sigh. It wasn’t loud enough for them to hear, but it was loud enough to show James that I really didn’t care about my body shape. Well, not very much. Everything had changed, but everything had needed to change. Going back to the past would kill us. Literally. The past, Before, whatever it was humans had done, or had failed to do, had killed them and changed the world. But staying in our past, on our jellyfish, would have killed us too. We couldn’t stay the same; we couldn’t keep doing the same things; we had to live in the new world – even if that meant killing our past.