We’re not staying; we’re leaving on that mechanic’s boat within the hour. But I know what he meant.

We roll past the last of the stone cottages and Jo’s outlying tearoom and village shop, and then we hit the dirt track up through the heath, passing nobody else to ask. Everybody’s cleared out, off to Sunnan or away at war.

God, how many people are left here? I scan the horizon, and it feels more than ever like a desert isle, like we’ve been marooned. I like that feeling most of the time, the sense of having escaped the chaos and cruelty of the rest of the world, but today, it makes me cold down to my bones, like I’m swimming in a dark current of water.

I can’t help but make a list of dangers, one for every direction. The cliffs lining the east side of the island with their crumbling edges. The rocky beach to the south where the puffins gather, where the sand sucks ankles tight as the tide rolls out and won’t let go unless you’ve got someone tugging you back.

Drowning is the easiest hazard for me to imagine. All those years of picturing how my sister must have looked as they dragged her out of the swimming pool have made that image spring readily to mind.

I drive the thought away now and think of the northern tip of the island, the cell tower and barrow. That area isn’t all that dangerous, just eerie.

It was so lively up at the barrow when I moved to Lute and all those archaeologists and cheerful young students were here digging, cataloging, publishing, but they left when the war began, and now, apart from the grazing goats that have turned wild and overrun the place, it’s just the ancient grave it always was, silent and half-exposed. It looks like an open wound now. Desecrated. Jesus, that’s a strong word, but it does feel like the right one.

I went up there on one of my morning walks a few years ago, but at the edge of the hill, something crawled into my stomach and urged me away. I haven’t been to that corner of the island since.

I hope like hell Charlie hasn’t somehow made his way to the barrow.

As I squint west past John’s head, my eye catches on a trio of brightly colored figures headed down toward the beach. They look so reassuringly ordinary.

“Are those tourists?” I point out the window.

John looks blank. “Holidaymakers, yeah. They’re Scandi. Don’t know which country.”

It matters which country. Finland surrendered to the Russo-American armies a month after the war began, the first big domino to fall.

“Should we—?”

“Yep, let’s see if they’ve seen him.”