Caleb slid in beside her, putting his arm around her and drawing her to him and trying to put his own body between the woman and child and the entrance to the adit. Anything to block the smoke. She leaned her head against his shoulder as he eased Danny from her grip, laying the boy’s head in the crook of his own arm. The boy’s breathing was faint, his pulse weak and irregular. His pain seemed to have eased but the sweat still ran from him. Caleb drew him in close so their hearts beat as one, willing his own life force into the child.

Held close by both adults, Danny relaxed, falling back into his uneasy sleep.

Adelaide held a hand to her mouth. ‘How long does it take to die of asphyxiation?’ she asked, as if she were asking how long it took to boil an egg.

‘We’ll fall asleep,’ Caleb replied, without much confidence. His experience with victims of smoke inhalation was hardly extensive.

Adelaide coughed again and he tightened his grip around her shoulder. ‘Adelaide,’ he whispered, ‘I want you to know that I love you. You and Danny—you are my world now.’

It had taken him a lifetime to utter those three words, and now it was too late.

‘Thank you, Caleb,’ she said and closed her eyes, her voice barely above a whisper. ‘It is good to be loved. To die in that knowledge—’

A flash of light, followed almost immediately by a crack that shook the earth, jerked them both from their torpor. Adelaide squeaked with alarm, her fingers tightening on his.

‘Just what we need,’ Caleb said. ‘Lightning to start more fires.’ His words were almost drowned out as the earth beneath them shook again with the accompanying thunder. The storm must have been right over them.

They sat listening as the lightning moved away. The earth stilled, the wind dropped and from outside the cave came a new sound, a heavy plop … plop … plop. The humus smell of wet earth rose in the smoke-filled air as the rain came down in sheets, lit by lightning.

Caleb released Adelaide and crawled to the mine entrance, knocking out the wall he had built. When he returned to her side, Adelaide gripped Caleb’s hand and began to laugh. The smoke that only minutes ago had clawed at their throats and eyes slunk out of the cave to be flattened by the torrent beyond, the fires on the hillside above them vanishing in a last sizzle of resistance.

‘It would be ironic if we were to drown,’ Caleb remarked.

‘I hope we are out of here well before the river gets that high,’ Adelaide said.

Another, more distant, arc of lightning illuminated the sky and the bare limbs of the tortured trees on the ridge above them.

‘It’s beautiful,’ she said. ‘So beautiful.’

She relaxed into the circle of his arm. Danny stirred and whimpered but did not wake.