He curls up inside the tree, wishing he had food and water. He wants to cry but will not allow himself the tears. He thinks that once they begin they will not end, because all his fears are backing up inside.

Around noon he looks out from high in the tree to see what is happening back down in the town. He can no longer hear gunshots. A calm has settled over the buildings. The strange mist has gone, burnt away by the sun, and now sunlight glints from a tall fence being erected in a rough circle way outside the town’s outer boundary. He hears drills and hammers, and several helicopters drift in from down the valley, heavy platforms laden with building materials swinging beneath them. These are normal helicopters with loud rotors, not the stealthy things he heard over the town last night.

Back inside the oak he remembers Jake and Emily, and how they once climbed this tree together.

* * *

He doesn’t know where to go, so he stays close to the only place he has ever known.

A day and a night have passed. The boy spent the night in the tree, and next day he stole some food from a big army truck he found beside a forest track with no one inside. He’s seen several army vehicles, and soldiers wander the hillsides looking threatening and important. None of them have seen him.

He has a talent for not being seen. Sometimes his mother said he could flit by the corner of her eye all day long. She told him he was sleek. She said it like it was a special word, a big word, and he always believed there was much more behind it still waiting to be told.

She will not tell him now. He’s pretty sure she is dead, along with his father Mohserran and the rest of Longford. That is a truth he keeps to one side and views from the corner of his eye, because if he allowed it in close it would break him, and he would no longer be sleek, and they would find him and do the same to him.

None of the soldiers goes down into the valley. The only people going into and back out of the valley are the people in the silvery suits, the ones building the fence. He guesses they’re soldiers too, but they’re different. Occasionally he still hears a lonely gunshot.

On the fourth day after fleeing Longford and home, he doesn’t hear any more shooting at all.

* * *

The boy moves around the valley. He pretends he’s carried with the breeze, drifting from bushes to trees to rocky outcroppings, hiding in their shadows when soldiers are nearby. He’s afraid and alone and confused about what has happened and is still happening, but he is also determined not to be caught. Mohserran didn’t give him his last breath just for that to happen.