Something is changing. The world is moving, with shifting lights and a vibration through the ground. There’s a strange smell on the air, a sweet burning taint like popcorn popping or apple pie warming in the oven. He hears what might be a scream, but when it comes again he realises it’s more like a roar from a human mouth. It sounds so unnatural. It sounds mad.

“There isn’t long,” Mohserran says. “Trust me. I’ll save you. Because I love you.”

The kid blinks in the night and the creature comes close.

Teeth and blood and torn skin and flesh and the taste in my mouth and the storm in my head—

Mohserran holds his face between its hands and the boy feels the tackiness of blood. He isn’t sure whether it’s from his father’s strange hands or his own face, but now it’s on both.

“Now get ready to run, and hide, and don’t stop running and hiding until you’re out of the valley. Never stop.” Mad and covered in blood, still Mohserran looks sad as it holds the boy’s cheeks with its soft, downy hands, vicious claws withdrawn, and brings his face close. It whispers, “Hold this breath all the way.” It presses its mouth to the boy’s and exhales.

He feels himself expand, his senses brightening and sharpening, and his knowledge of the mortal danger all around becomes clearer and more focused. I’m only eleven years old and this shouldn’t be happening to me, he thinks, and it is a very grown-up thought followed by one so childlike: It’s not fair.

Mohserran falls to its knees, one hand clawing into the ground, the other waving at him to go.

The boy holds the breath he has been given and runs.

* * *

He does what Mohserran told him. Impossible though it is, he holds his breath all the way up the hillside and out of the valley. He’s come this way a hundred times before, sometimes with his mother, occasionally with his father, more often with his friends Jake and Emily, lunch packed in their rucksacks ready to be eaten when they reach the hilltop. Sometimes they are explorers, sometimes soldiers, sometimes astronauts landing on a strange planet and charting each footstep for the very first time. Always, they are adventurers.

As he reaches the top of the slope he wonders where Jake and Emily are now.

He gasps out his held breath—he has been running and climbing for half an hour, at least—and he feels a wrench at letting it go. He understands that it is something exotic and mysterious, but he is a child whose mind is open to such things. He has never known anything different. When he draws in a fresh chestful of air, it tastes of heathers and darkness. It is tainted by the fear that his whole life is about to change.