“It makes no sense, exposing ourselves to more unknowns. The clan know we’ve been alone overnight now. Alexandre will bring back the Saints themselves to help find us. Sie will. We all know that.”

“I suppose so.” She stared at the closest morox corpse. “I need to know something,” she said, and picked up a rock half the size of her own head.

“What?” he asked, then recoiled as she brought the sharp edge of the rock smashing down on the morox’s head. Two more blows and she’d cracked the skull open. She shoved the edge of the rock through the fissure and began to prise it farther apart.

“Yirella!”

He had to fight back nausea as she began examining segments of the gore that was its brain.

“Why didn’t it get eaten?” she asked.

“Huh?”

“They were so ravenously hungry they ignored a fire to try and kill us. Yet here they have three fresh corpses of their own kind, and they ignored them to carry on attacking us.”

“Do they eat their own?” he asked, trying not to look at the way her carrion-slicked fingers were probing the brain tissue so enthusiastically. Yet there was something horribly fascinating about the scene.

“I don’t know. I don’t suppose we should judge them like they’re terrestrial animals. Although you’d think basic instincts would be almost identical.”

“I guess,” he said. “So what are you hoping to find?”

“Don’t know till I find it,” she answered grimly.

“Okay.” He knew that tone; she wasn’t going to be stopped by anything he could say.

Cheering broke out around the sleeper tree. His clanmates had piled scrub bushes up around the trunk, which were now burning hot and fierce, their smokeless flames shooting vertically into the tree’s boughs above, which were starting to smolder.

Dellian was glad of the excuse to look away from Yirella’s gory task. Despite the fresh air gusting across the slope, he was feeling sluggish. Lack of sleep and his throbbing arm seemed to be making his body intolerably heavy. Which was strange, given he was very aware of his empty stomach. With growing dismay, he knew it wouldn’t be long before they’d have to start using the hand pump filter…

Falar and Uret were taking it in turns to attack another sleeper tree with the axe, the thuds reverberating through the crisp air. More boys were dragging bushes back to the rapidly expanding blaze. Dellian looked up at the invitingly empty sky with its flotilla of artificial stars. “Why can’t the skyforts see us?” he murmured.