She wanted to know what was happening. It was almost scarier being shut in here, blind and helpless. Almost. She had hated it out there. Hated the grown-ups. Hated the blood and the fear and the stink. She had to look, though. She went over to the door, trying to find a spyhole of some sort. There was a tiny spot of light coming through part of the handle. There was a gap there. She put her eye to it, but then almost immediately jumped back as the point of a spear suddenly punched through the heavy plastic of the door, missing her face by centimetres. The spear was pulled free. She waited a moment, and then put her eye to the new hole, praying that another spear thrust wouldn’t blind her.

She could hear the cries of the children, but all she could see was the glow of the fire, dark bodies going past it. She sat back on the toilet. Put the beads of her necklace into her mouth and closed her eyes. She clamped her hands over her ears again, rocking backwards and forwards. Rocking and rocking until she was too tired to carry on and she leant against the wall. In the end her tiredness was stronger than her fear and she drifted off into a sleep where her nightmares were no more frightening, strange or confused than her waking life had been.

Chapter 15

15

‘No, Mum, no, it’s me, it’s Ella …!’

But her mother wasn’t listening. She was chasing Ella, fingernails like claws, trying to scratch her eyes out.

‘Mum, no, please …!’

Ella woke with a start to the smell of smoke and blood. Feeling stiff. Sitting scrunched up, her head against a wall. For a moment not sure where she was, trying to throw off the last of the dream, still jittery, trying to convince herself it hadn’t happened. But what had happened? Where was she?

And then it came back to her in a sudden, painful rush that jolted her fully awake.

The toilet. The barn. The battle.

She leant forward and peered out through the hole in the door.

It was morning. The sun was up. Just. There was a haze of smoke drifting in the air. Otherwise the barn was still. The concrete floor was covered in bodies, like a thick, dark carpet. Whether there were any children’s bodies among them Ella couldn’t tell.

She listened hard. It was quiet. The sound of the grown-ups, that breaking wave, that humming, hissing, swarming noise, had gone. The army must have moved on.

Did that mean …?

Was she alone?

She waited and waited, too scared to open the door. She didn’t know what she’d find. She couldn’t bear the thought of being the only one still alive. She’d rather have died.