He tries again. This time he lays the camera on the ground, angling it up so he looks bulkier. He waits. No sound from the camera. The timer must have been knocked off. He lets go of the drill handle. In the moment that he reaches down for the camera, the rod of the drill stalls deep in the rock, sending the handle shooting upwards and zeroing in on the side of his head with enough force to lift him off his feet and into the air.

The last thing he knows once he’s hit the ground is that the camera has gone off. Blood begins to swamp his ears and pool around his neck. Right before he passes out he wonders if this will make a cool shot or if it’ll just be too gross.

The helicopter takes a long time to arrive. Twenty minutes from the call. Too long. Dag is unconscious and deathly white. He keeps fitting. He has lost a lot of blood. Erik is leaning over him, shouting and sobbing. Maren sources a first aid kit and bandages the head wound, but it’s clear to all of them that this is a life-threatening injury.

Even when they arrive at the hospital, he has not woken up.

Tom sits in the hospital waiting area holding a cup of water that he has not touched in fifteen minutes. He feels as though he’s in a trance. His clothes and hands are still covered in Dag’s blood. Erik is pacing the corridor slowly, his hands in his pockets, a man resigned to the whims of fate. Dag is in surgery. Erik greets each doctor with the courtesy and patience of a man who expects his child to survive this, but Tom saw the nurses’ faces when they pulled Dag from the helicopter. He doesn’t expect Dag to last the night.

This is his fault. If he’d used explosives like Clive said, they wouldn’t be in this predicament. In this purgatory. No. Wrong to think of oneself that way. His suffering is nothing. Dag is a boy. He deserves to be at a night club right now, checking out girls – or boys, whichever takes his preference – not lying on a table with someone sawing into his brain. His life hanging by a thread. Even if – if – he survives this, what if the injuries leave him with life-changing disabilities? Tom is in torment. He wonders what is worse – experiencing your own child going through something like this or watching another parent suffer, knowing that you alone have caused their child to go through this?