At the top of the rise she paused. From here she looked down into a clearing a hundred meters across. There were pinewoods on every side, thick with the heat of the afternoon. Vast faces hung from the trees. Posters. Girls of her own age holding stuff: kayak paddles, stethoscopes, ice axes, phones. All in close-up. All with an eye to the camera, one thumb raised. At the bottom of every poster the letters iff, white on red, and the thumbs-up logo. Near the middle of the clearing, to the left, was a large red-painted stage. To the left of the stage, banks of seats rose vertiginously towards the pine trees.

Red banners cascaded from the lighting rig:

International Future Female: Empowering Everyone, Starting With Girls

To her right she could see the back of the main house. Here too there was a giant banner: two girls, one light-skinned, one dark, right hands crossed at the wrists, thumbs up, left hands across each other’s shoulder. All those eyes, gazing down on you.

Don’t be racist!

Take no drugs!

Recycle, recycle, recycle!

“Bring condoms and whisky,” Leela had said, laughing. Had she meant it? Hard to be sure. She had brought both, in case Leela wasn’t joking, though she wasn’t expecting to use either.

At the far end of the clearing were the first of the dormitory cabins. People were trailing from the cabins to the stage; others were already sitting on the banked seats, talking without animation, looking nervously down at the two policemen who stood before them in the middle of the stage.

The policemen were smoking, letting the ash fall from their cigarettes. Behind them at the edge of the clearing was a vast poster of a girl looking down, crushing a cigarette in her left hand, her right thumb up.

She knew she should walk across the clearing to the policemen, hand them the key. But that would draw their attention, and she wasn’t sure she wanted their attention. Something about that look they had given her down at the dock, a sense of something out of place.

There were way too many eyes; there would be too much staring. She would wait until the policemen had finished speaking; she would approach them as people were drifting away. There were a lot of people here. Overwhelming numbers. There were boys dotted around too, in among the girls, talking earnestly, nodding a lot, demonstrating they were listening. Boys got extra points for listening to girls.

One of the policemen, she noticed, had his hand on his service weapon. Which was weird, she thought. He hadn’t been wearing a pistol as he stepped from the boat. She was certain of that.