‘I don’t like blood,’ he said in a small voice.

‘We’re all blood.’ Ethan shrugged. ‘We’re all just big bags of blood, that’s all. There’s pints and pints of it inside you. That’s all we are, really, bones and muscles and blood.’

‘Can I do it next time? Tomorrow?’

‘What? Are you chicken?’

‘No.’

‘Do it, then.’

‘I don’t want to hurt it.’

He braced himself for an onslaught of mocking laughter and swear words, glanced up the hill towards the villa, wishing, praying, that one of the grown-ups would walk through the trees right now to tell them all to come back for tea, or something. To rescue him from this.

But they didn’t laugh, or swear. They just looked at each other, then back at him.

Ethan took the knife from his hand, shaking his head. With one swift thrust he impaled the beetle on the end of the blade. There was a soft crack as its shell was pierced. He drove the point all the way through and held it up, studying it, legs flailing in its death throes.

Daniel flinched backwards.

‘If you don’t want to do this,’ Ethan said, turning the blade from side to side, ‘there’s another way you can do the initiation.’

Daniel blinked up at him, confused. Was this a trick?

‘What other way?’

Ethan flicked the dying insect into a bush and wiped the blade on his shorts.

‘Come on. We’ll show you.’

Chapter 49

49

Daniel

The edge of the cliff was jagged and uneven, with some bits that stuck out and some that looked like they’d sort of crumbled away. In the middle of it, where the trees gave way to the clearing and the clearing gave way to the edge, there was a crescent-shaped gap in between two scraggly low-down trees, a semi-circular space that looked as though it had just kind of sheared off and fallen into the gorge, maybe like a million years ago, Daniel thought.

The crescent-shaped gap was about five feet across – about as wide as Daniel was tall, he reckoned.

‘Here,’ Ethan said, standing right on the edge, in the gap between two spits of rock. ‘It’s just like doing long jump in PE.’

PE was Daniel’s least favourite lesson at school. He always got picked last for football and when they had to play tag rugby – ugh, he hated tag rugby – he made a point of running in the opposite direction to where the ball was. He was OK at running and jumping, though. Running and jumping he could do. Well, everyone could do them, really. They weren’t really sports, were they?

‘Long jump?’ he said, trying to stop his voice from going high.