She sleeps for a long time, but when she wakes she feels worse. Her clothes are drenched in sweat. A freezing wind is blowing in through a broken window. She shifts, stretching her legs, and the pain is so sudden that it makes her scream. Still, she manages to stand, pushing herself upwards against the stone. She totters into the street and begins to walk, holding onto the wall like a blind woman.

She must bury Efi before the dogs find her. After that, she will look for Andromache and Apostoli, but when she thinks of where they might be, the city spreads before her in her mind, vast, maze-like and broken. Her friends have disappeared. Everyone has disappeared. Even Tom. Feathers’ words keep threading themselves through Zoë’s fever, needle-sharp and bitter. ‘You’ve been a ghost all this time,’ she whispers. ‘Just a ghost. But I have always loved you, and I always will, now.’ She reaches into her pocket for Tom’s badge and then remembers where it is: locked away in a dead woman’s hand. Charon, you are too greedy, she thinks. We’ve all gone to you now. I’ll be going too, in a little while. The horse and cart will take me, or perhaps just the dogs and the crows. When there is no one left to bury the dead, to sing over the dead … She stops, and rests against a lamp post. She is freezing and shivering uncontrollably, but her stomach feels like a bucket of hot coals. But she knows now. At last, she knows what she must do. There is one last thing she can give.

By the time she gets to Koumoundourou Square the sun is beginning to set. She has had to stop and relieve herself twice, almost crying for the shame of it, in a ruin and behind an abandoned car. In the square, a party of British soldiers is busy in the far corner, stacking things, talking loudly. The odd word comes to her but where before she would have gathered up the foreign words like crumbs, she doesn’t listen now. She walks straight out between the trees and onto the grass. There is a wrecked Bren carrier there, and she stumbles where the earth has been rutted by explosions. I left Efi here, she thinks, and Feathers … But there are no bodies. She stumbles on.

A person must give some thought to the hour of her death

When she will go down into the black earth

And her name will be erased.