Melissa snorted as she walked. We were heading through the butterfly fields – best route out for a horse and cart, according to Mr Opal.

“Una?” I said.

“Mmmm?”

“I still can’t wiggle my ears.”

“S’only been a week.” She grinned her gappy grin. “You’re gonna have to keep practising for longer than that.”

Only a week?

Really?

Only a week, and everything had changed. Just like Elsie said it would.

I was in the middle again, squished between my two favourite wanderers in the whole wide world. But this time it was me holding the reins, and behind us were seventeen more ponies, seventeen more traps. Carrying mums and dads and brothers and sisters and aunts and uncles and cousins – all looking for their eldests.

All following me.

They sang as they went.

The new song, that the Rickard sisters wrote.

“Out of my window, looking through the night

I can see a middler heart burn bright.

All across the east fields, all across the west

I will sing her name from wake till rest.”

They sang sweet and loud and strong and true.

I listened close.

There were sounds under the voices.

Mr Gebby. Clank, clank, clunk.

The cows calling, up at Leap Cross.

The wind rustling the leaves.

A single chirping cricket who didn’t know summer was gone yet.

And there – soft as you like – the old, dead relatives, joining in.

“Maggie, will you let us follow you?

Will you help us save our eldests too?

Maggie, will you lead us from the town?

Will you help us break our boundaries down?”

A red admiral quivered down on to Melissa’s back. Wide black wings and bright red stripes. Impossible to believe it used to be a caterpillar. Melissa swished it away with her tail and it fluttered off towards the boundary ahead of us.

EPILOGUE

Ker-ackkkkkkkkkkk.

Mum struck the first blow.

Dad and Trig held the ladder steady while she swung her axe right into Andrew Solsbury’s neck. His head rolled clean off and cracked into two pieces in the middle of the square. Pigeons scattered and flapped, and all the parents who’d crowded around pulled their littlests back towards them.

Her second swing took out his right arm.

“Whoa.” Una spoke through a mouthful of Dad’s goldie pie. “Your mum means business, doesn’t she?”

“Always.” November air swept round my neck. I turned up the collar of my coat.

It was all Mum’s idea. Destroy the statue and replace it with a monument for everyone who’d gone to camp too long ago and weren’t ever coming home. There’d be names inscribed on it and everything. She wanted to see Lil and Felix and all the others remembered forever more.