The first breath is the worst. Pain flares through my chest as my lungs struggle, useless as empty sacks. Then air, laden with grit and smoke, but air all the same. I heave it in, sand spraying from my lips. Somewhere, a voice curses, saying my name.

‘—sake, Low!’

I open my eyes. One of them obeys, the other remains stubbornly closed. Darkness all around, lit by a strange, muted red light.

‘Low?’

I raise my head a painful inch. A small figure looms out of the shadows, smeared with blood and smoke. I try to say her name, but my mouth is too full of dust, the air too weak in my lungs. She unties my hands and hauls me up to a sitting position, even though I want her to leave me here, because I feel as if my body is going to snap.

‘Are you listening to me?’ She slaps at my face. ‘Low, we have to move. This ship is like a goddam beacon, and… I keep hearing things.’

My head is so heavy, but I blink and try to focus.

The craft lies wrecked on the sand, its nose buried in the dirt. Parts are scattered around it, like gobbets of flesh. The red light comes from its belly. An emergency light, I realise, growing dimmer and dimmer. And beyond it…

No stars, an endless black void. I shrink from it, cowering in fear of being sucked into that emptiness.

We are in the Edge.

‘Moloney?’ I whisper.

‘Dead.’

I close my eyes but the General will not leave me be. She slaps at my cheeks a second time.

‘That light is going to die any second,’ she pants. ‘And then—’

She doesn’t need to go on. Lost in the dark.

I haul myself to my knees, then to my feet, though the pain almost makes me vomit. One of my arms feels badly sprained, and I’m sure several ribs are broken. More besides. I have no mind to count the damage then. I lean on the General and feel her shoulders, stronger than any child’s should be, bearing my weight.

‘Why are you helping me?’ I gasp.

‘In crisis conditions two individuals are of more use than one. Even if one of them is a rat.’

We make it to the smoking carcass of the craft. Moloney slumps at the very front, still strapped in his pilot’s chair, like a figurehead on the prow of an ancient sea ship.

His skull is broken open. Blood drips from the end of his nose but his eyes are wide and blue and glassy. Just as I saw. Just as they promised.

I had hated him. In another time, another place, I would have killed him myself, but – confronted by the end of that ferocious life – something like grief surges through me.

‘He knew,’ I hear myself say. ‘He knew it was death to come here.’