But he knew that was a vain hope. After what had happened here, the Kin were now out in the open. Mallian might have failed, but in a way his dream of Ascent had been seeded and bloomed here. A slower Ascent than he’d wanted, but an exposure nonetheless. Footage of the fight would be analysed, kept secret, inevitably leaked onto the net, and the whole world would see a mothman taking down an Apache attack helicopter, a pixie caving in the skull of a soldier, and other strange creatures killing and running and rejoicing in a newfound freedom.

Just a few minutes after they started uphill away from the greyness of Longford behind and below them, a massive detonation reverberated around the valley. Breathing hard, Vince and the others came to a halt on a rocky outcropping and looked back down into the valley.

Where the old town of Longford lay, a fire bloomed. It was a strange fire, gushing horizontally from a fault in the air, not vertically as if from an explosion. Vince knew that this was not something the military had done, but the act of the fairy.

Grace was furious, and she was illustrating that fury in flames.

“Run,” he said. The conflagration spread quickly, powering across the landscape as if forced from a giant blowtorch. Wind roared before it, stirring up dust into swirling tornadoes, dark twisters that caught dawn’s early light and then burst aflame as dust turned to fire.

“Up the hill,” Bone said. “Up!”

“No more running,” Sammi said. “It’s too late. She’s here, it’s happening, and we can’t outrun whatever she intends to do now. All I can do is protect us if I can.”

Vince did not doubt her ability to protect them all.

The conflagration spread, becoming more furious as it expanded, scorching the air and setting alight everything it touched. Even the silt seemed to erupt into flames, and soon the entire valley floor was a blazing scar upon the land. The fire struck the river and the water exploded into a great, steaming geyser blasting water, rock and soil skyward. Vince hoped Shashahanna had escaped the flames. She’d probably disappeared into the shadows along with some of the other surviving Kin.

Waves of superheated air started to reach them, taking their breath away. Sammi cooled them. Smoke caught in their lungs, and Sammi gave them fresh air. It all seemed effortless, and Vince realised her inability to hide them earlier had been feigned, so that Bone could find his true self. Yet with each act he saw something sad in her eyes, as if she knew that every magical step she took carried her further and further away from who she had once been.

They saw a Humvee downhill to their right, crashing a path up between the trees with several soldiers hanging onto its exterior. The fire swept past it and consumed it with a dull, inaudible explosion.