I blink, before I realise I can see something: a faint, fitful grey line – like a black cloth washed too many times.

Light. There is light on the horizon.

I laugh. ‘It’s the end of the Edge, we made it.’

Together, we stagger towards the rising sun. As we walk the light increases, casting a sickly yellow-grey film over everything. The moment it is bright enough, I look over at the General.

She is holding her side, below where the cable loops her waist. Behind us, in our wandering tracks, there are bright red spatters, soaking into the sand.

‘You’re hurt,’ I croak. ‘We should stop.’

Her eyes are fixed on the horizon. ‘Not now. We are nearly there.’

Step by step, it grows hotter, night sloughing off its empty cold. I focus on walking, one foot, then another. Finally, the cable jerks taut. The General stops, staring ahead.

‘What?’ I rasp.

The pale line hasn’t moved. There is no sun on the horizon, just the same horrid yellow half-light. Fear floods my body. I have been here before.

‘We should be out by now,’ she says desperately. ‘We didn’t fly far before we crashed. If that’s east, we should be out.’

‘It’s not east.’ My voice shakes. ‘It’s nowhere. The Augur said we would have to walk to hell—’

‘The Augur is completely mad.’ Her eyes are frightened. ‘We don’t need stories. We need to keep walking.’

She pushes on, and I stagger behind. Hell, Hel, the words beat through my head. Are they one and the same? What is hell? Faces. I close my eyes, feet sliding in the sand. The faces of the dead stare back at me in their thousands and I can do nothing to escape them. People don’t care about your reasons for killing them when they’re dead. I remember the feel of the fingers, trying to drag me into the sand, and painfully swallow a noise of terror.

I’m almost glad when the General stops again, so I can look at her face, flushed and frustrated and still full of life. Not dead. Not yet.

‘This is absurd,’ she gasps.

I follow her gaze, hoping to see something, anything. But the harder I look, the less I see, until I realise that even the trail of our footsteps is gone.

‘There must be something,’ she says. ‘A base, a settlement?’

‘There is no one here. Except the Seekers.’

‘I refuse to believe that. An entire area of this moon lying empty? The Accord would have—’

‘No.’

‘What do you mean, “no”?’

There’s something wrong here and whoever walks in never walks back out. Only the Seekers can bear it. Only Hel.

‘We have to get out,’ I say.

‘We would be out already if you had not pulled us off course.’ The General glares at me, her eyes reddened. ‘Check the compass again.’