“Robert Bonham,” he mutters. He looks left and right, past the tree she’s got her back to. He’s afraid that others will be close by, and he remembers the shooting he heard, the lines of silver-clad people driving all the living things before them. The bloodied fox. Lucas the mad puppy.

“Eh? Speak up.”

He mutters his name again. This part of being sleek, of being unknown and unseen, is almost instinctive. The soldier frowns and turns her head, leaning in closer.

“Eh? Bone? That your name? Bone?”

Bone, the boy thinks, and then he runs. He dashes towards the soldier and then steps left, sleeking past and darting behind the tree, up the slope, jigging left and right and waiting every moment for the bullet that will take him down.

There is no bullet. There is no gunshot.

With his new name intact, Bone escapes.

* * *

Three days later something else changes. The river, running almost dry for the past few weeks, surges back into the valley with a roar. Its path is now blocked by the massive construction that has been worked on day and night, and when it strikes the structure damming the valley it boils and churns, white water turning dark with mud, dark as blood. From his vantage point high in the hollow oak tree, the boy can see ant-like figures scurrying around both ends of the dam, watching as the river flows, flows, and rises.

He stays there for another three days. When the water rises enough to start flooding the streets of Longford, he turns his back on that place and finally walks away. He crests the ridge above the wide valley that was his home, and even as the drowning town drops out of sight behind him Bone will not allow himself to cry.

* * *

Life becomes complex and dangerous, as does Bone.

The first time he returns to the valley is nineteen years after he left. He knows what he will find because he has followed the story of Longford, both the faked public version and the more elusive truth. He is surprised to discover the old oak is still there. He cannot fit inside now, but he shines a torch into the hollow, amazed at how small it seems. There’s nothing to reveal that he once made this place his home.

He climbs the outside of the tree instead, and perches on a branch close to the crack in the trunk from which he watched, afraid and alone, all those years ago.

Bone sits and watches for quite some time. It’s very peaceful in the valley, as if it has always been this way. Much like him, the reservoir presents a calm surface, hiding the potential for endless chaos beneath.

The next time he returns, another twenty years into the future, that chaos will rise.

2

2

She flows across this land that she has made her home.