The fire was one great mass, arching up, shape-shifting. I moved closer. There was a boat in the flames, then a hill, then a great slick object that moved as if through water. And there were dresses and hands and feathers, looming closer, and I waited for them to rise, come out of the flames and stuff themselves in my mouth, plumping up in my lungs, wings expanding out and filling every inch of me.

Closer.

‘Easy there.’ Adam’s voice in my ear, warm and spiced, his hands pulling me firmly backwards. ‘Probably best not to actually roast yourself to death.’

‘Polly,’ Lottie was hissing. ‘What are you doing?’ She and Adam were looking at me.

My cheeks were melting. ‘I just … the fire. There’s stuff in it.’

After telling Lottie I was going home, I wandered away down the field, the heat still prickling my skin, the wings heavy on my back. Only one bird-shaped cloud was left in the sky, its body thinning until the wings had gone and it was all neck, then just beak and bone, then nothing but bone. The wind was getting up, and maybe there was rain, or it might have been midges, speckling my nose. Or feathers. I didn’t know any more. I didn’t know anything any more.

The rain and the sunset. The day and the night. Just like before.

They always said that on the night when the light was longest, the dark things were strongest, hanging like a cloak on your back. I am the dark thing now, the dark and the white.

She must see me. She must tell you.

I took the road away from the village, the colder air sliding over me. The sky was vast and purple-blue. I wanted to fall right into it. Fly.

The mountains were reduced to their simplest state in this lack of light, all their detail gone. I kept walking, the ouzo blazing a clean line down my throat, until the trees crowded in again.

Drops of rain, sure of themselves. Rain and sun.

And a sound. Like a giant’s bone breaking.

A sound that made every other sound stop dead. That made me stop dead. A sound with a powdery echo.

My breath curled out. It had come from above me, or beside me. The tinny music from the car in the field filtered back in.

Again. Nearer. A rock hitting another rock in the air.

No. A gunshot. Near me. At me.

I began to run.

With a bullet, the sound doesn’t come after the pain, nor the pain come before the sound. They happen exactly as one. The time it takes to click a finger, to take a breath. I remember it.

Our stories, coming together. Twinned.

Three more gunshots, each with the weight of great birds. Huge gulfs between them, caves of silence, apart from my breath and my boots as I ran. I waited for one to hit me, a dark, sharp punch in the shoulder, in my neck, my back. I waited to be smashed into the road.