Thrown the block of ice into the flowers, where it still sat resisting the sun. Melting stubbornly.

Leo’ll still be a while, she told herself. There’s still time. He’ll be a while before he’s home.

He was worried about his parents. They lived right by the coast, and the land was falling away. They would not move.

There’s still enough ice.

Use his solar drill to break it up, with one of the chisel fittings. Or his fossil hammer. Like a mini pickaxe.

She’d expected clothes, and big shoes, and perhaps a favourite mug to find their way into her place; but chiefly he’d filled the place with tools. And unexpected curious things. The tiny red and white lighthouse he had treasured since a child. An architect’s scale model of a section of the water pipeline his father had worked on years ago. Bags of salt his parents sent, that they scraped from their desalinator. That she had intended to scatter on the ice. To speed the melt and heat transfer.

She pictured how beads of condensation would form around the outside of the aluminium bowl, as it did against the body of the train.

He will be tired. And you could give him hand-made ice cream. From ice he pickaxed from a reservoir.

There’s still time, she said to herself. Come on. Be brighter. They just surprised you. Close the chickens first.

The hens were bunched on perches. After the dry day, there was a faint ammonia smell.

With the sun dropped, it was colder than Cora had expected. There were goosebumps on her skin.

The sheep out on the hill looked like dull patches of dropped paper. A minerally white like the inside of the eggshells.

Cora thought of the reservoir. The deep prehistoric patience of the water hung there in the hill above.

Felt a sudden increased chill. The landscape darkening away into the twilight. The dam like some strange impassive eyelid in the mountain.

Then she heard the click. Snap.

The hens bridled. Unfurled, and clucked quietly, quick gulps they swallowed in their neck.

There, with impossible solidity, was a figure. A face, dark with mask, that bore into Cora, and she felt her centre drop out, as the door of the run banged, and she was caged, with the crack of the latch, rocking.

And someone was there. Loomed. Gloved fingers curled around the wire, the black absence of a face; began to shake the run. And talk. And tell her.

We’ll take the train. We’ll take the train. We’re going to take the train.

Then he was gone, into the night.

SOUND

The calf gave a confused hiss, and lowing, then dipped slightly as if it would bury into the water.