She was suddenly gripped by panic that they were going to have to make camp soon and sleep alongside each other. The thought did not help the clenching feeling in her stomach. She swallowed and felt her heart rate quicken. She had never been one for the strangled conventions of society, such as chaperones keeping men and women at arm’s length from each other at all times. That was one advantage, she’d heard, of life beyond the Shadow Lands; they’d moved on, progressed, laughed at the principles to which those living in the Shadow Lands remained chained. Yet, there in the gloaming, she couldn’t help but feel it would be much easier if they weren’t alone.

The sun had almost completely disappeared and both Lily and Jem were waning beneath the dazzling, rising moon. Their pace had slowed and Lily’s back ached with a dull constancy. She stopped and leaned against a tree, rolling her shoulders and her neck to loosen them. Jem pulled a dog-eared map out of his pack and consulted it, his brow creased with concentration.

‘Where are we?’ Lily asked. Jem sighed and turned the map upside down, clearly reluctant to admit his confusion.

After a few more moments, he looked up and shrugged.

‘Honestly? I haven’t a bloody clue.’

He started laughing and the laughter spread through him; he threw his head back, his guffaws echoing through the trees. Lily joined in; his amusement was contagious and the anxiety and tension that had built over the course of their journey, the responsibility of finding Alice and Grace, it had all become so heavy. The laughs came freely, a tonic to the stress of the situation in which they had unwittingly found themselves. They crumpled to their knees, eyes watering, stomachs aching from laughter.

They finally got a grip on themselves and their laughter died down. A barn owl flew overhead, a sentinel of the oncoming night, and the urgency of their situation returned once more. Lily moved to take the map from Jem’s hands.

‘Here,’ she said, a soft caution in her voice, ‘let me have a look.’ He surrendered the parchment and watched her as she studied it. She gazed up to the canopy and found a streak of silvery moonlight shimmering through the leaves and, walking to it, she knelt down in the underbrush and placed the map under the pillar of incandescent light to study it further.

Jem followed, patiently waiting for her analysis. She pointed to a deep green section of the map, to the north-west of the coastline they had left behind. The patch of green was slender but long and stretching further northward. ‘I think we’re somewhere here. If you follow our path’—she pointed to where they had marked the lighthouse and moved her finger across the moorland and into the forest that she believed they were in—‘then we only have this distance’—she gestured to a point on the map that was an inch or two away from their current location—‘left to walk. Here’—she tapped on a grey area that they had marked with red ink in their preparations—‘is where we’re headed, right? That must be less than half a day from here. I think we should set up camp where we are now, or at least somewhere near here, and then make the final journey at first light. Agreed?’