She looked down and saw that the small sounds were made by the insects that swarmed everywhere. They were tiny, green-backed, iridescent in the light. They were big, black, lumbering. They were many-jointed, yellow and green, with absurd helmeted heads, that suddenly scared her by jumping a metre at a bound. Some were striped black and yellow, smooth or furry, buzzing furiously as they clung to the flowers.

She could have watched them for hours, but suddenly she remembered where she was and what she had to do. She jumped, unthinkingly, to her feet. No more than two hundred and fifty metres away was the great Dome, its enormous expanse of plastic gleaming silver in the sun. She dropped to her knees in the grass. Had anyone seen her? How stupid it would be to be caught now, after she had been so clever at getting away. Typical Ruth, they would all say.

Cautiously she raised her head above the grass and looked around. To the south the grass stretched in soft curves like a gentle ocean. To the west the river poured into the small lake above the broken dam. To the north and east were the mountains. Her mountains, that had called her ever since ... ever since when?

She had been twelve when her dreams had begun, she remembered. And in the last year had come the longing for freedom, the need to escape from the Ark and the Web. Into her head drifted a wordless tune. She began to hum it:

Ay-di-doh, ay-di-doh dah-day

Ay-di-doh, ay-di-da y-dee ...

It was an up and going sort of song, and Ruth found herself turning her back on the broken dam and the lake, on the silver eye of the Dome. She strode, as fast as she could, through the shivering grass, towards the east, towards the mountains that piled up, soft green close to, dark behind, with purple mistiness behind that, going on and on for ever.

When she was out of breath she dropped into the grass and lay on her back watching the clouds. Once she was rested she walked on again, her heathery hair bouncing in time to the spritely tune that danced through her head.

She must have covered six kilometres or so before the sun slid behind a cloud. At once the mountains ahead of her lost their welcoming glow and looked dour and forbidding. Her legs ached. Her left sandal, which was a little loose, had rubbed a big blister on her heel. She sat down to look at it. It was puffy and the skin around it was red and sore.

Her face burned with the unaccustomed sun and wind. Her lips were cracked and dry. She licked them and thought, how thirsty I am! And then, how hungry!