Groggy, she jerked and her stomach leapt like a hare. She was hanging precariously at the edge of her cradle in the middle of the tree. Below her, glowing in the moonlight, the water eddied and lapped, black and deadly. She must have closed her eyes, drifted off. Images of red mountains fled from behind her eyes. Her eyelids were like weights, her feet stung with cold. All she wanted was to sleep. She must not sleep. Please God, don’t let me sleep.

*

Arthur groped with the oars, blind in the blackness, pulling, heavy and slow in the little boat through the floodwater. A deep ache jarred across his shoulder blades each time he pulled the oar back, as though he couldn’t do it again. Yet he did, over and over. He was a body, that was all. The hatred he felt for Jack burned inside him like a fireball of pain. It hurt, and burned slowly, as if it could not be quenched. He saw Jack’s red head in the autumn field interchanging with the barrel of his rifle, the explosion in his ears, the reverberation in his shoulder. Jack gone. He knew he was grinding his teeth and gripping the oars but he’d set himself on a path that he couldn’t now get off. The original plan to row to the farm seemed like a parallel world of ideas and reasoning. All that was left now was this place of darkness. A darkness that seemed to come from within him.

Jack’s torch had died. Arthur’s eyes had adjusted to the night and he could make out the deeper black of vegetation and the lighter grey sheen of the water. They relied on the intermittent moonlight, breaking through cloud cover, to cast a silver glow on the flooded fields they were crossing. Even with the moon, it was hard to tell which was the earth, and which the sky, it was all a smudgy shimmer of black, silver and grey. The flooded fields reflecting the sky and back again.

Neither of them spoke.

Out of the emptiness, Arthur heard a high, human voice – ‘Peter!’

‘Verity,’ he said, in wonder, and then, ‘Oh God.’

‘Verity?’ said Jack. ‘You sure it’s her?’

‘She can’t be out here, she can’t.’

There it was again. Closer. It was impossible for it to be her voice and yet it was. They couldn’t both be hearing things.

‘It is her,’ said Jack. ‘Jeez, we’ve got to get her.’

There was a new tone in Jack’s voice, a determination, and Arthur knew with absolute certainty that they would do anything to find her.

They both started shouting her name in chorus, their voices rising together and dying with the fierce cry of the wind, vying for supremacy.

*