The car was coming from my right, a red blur emerging into view on the right-hand side of the lake. I picked up my pace again, waving my hands at it, trying to get the driver to see me through the trees, and then I slipped, stumbled, my hands hitting the ground, then my knees, and I slid forward and smacked into a tree. Not as hard as Jo had hit hers, but hard enough to wind me. It took me a couple of seconds to recover, and then I was back up again, finally moving from the forest into a sea of long grass. It whipped at me, frost-bitten, hard as glass, snow crunching under foot.

I looked for the car.

I could hear it but couldn’t see it.

Trying to run faster, I kept going, even as my feet slipped, even as my skin throbbed, red-raw from the cold. I could no longer see the road because I didn’t have the elevation of the slope: it was just sky above, hills emerging along the crown of the grass, and the slant of the forest behind me, its trees like the scales of a great dragon.

Faster.

Come on, you need to move fast –

I heard the car pass.

‘No,’ I shouted after it. ‘No!’

Ten seconds later, I broke through the grass, on to the road, but by then it was too late. The car was too far away already. I could see a shape inside at the wheel, and the registration plate on the back, and it took me a couple of seconds to process both. To start with, all I could do was watch as it disappeared around a bend in the road, like a vision that was never even there; but then, as everything went quiet again, as the hum of the engine vanished and I looked out across the stillness of the lake, as I realized the hills I’d seen ahead of me were actually mountains – huge, snow-capped – something started to dawn on me.

I looked left, to where the car had gone, and then right: half a mile away there was a road sign, small, impossible to read from here. I dumped my backpack, not wanting to be slowed down by it, and started running – as fast as I could – towards the sign.

And, as I ran, I remembered.