She had been told to watch out for the flare; that was the signal to abandon the raid and start running; above all to get back to camp with the machine gun strapped to her back. She wasn’t sure which asset was more prized by them – her life or the gun. Weapons were in desperately short supply, making their sabotage unit ever more valuable to the Republican powers as they disrupted the fascists’ infantry supplies and field operations.

Briefly it occurred to her she had become a bandit. They were notorious back home, the area such a stronghold that a hundred years earlier, the government had been impelled to create the Civil Guard just to deal with them. Arlo used to run around as a little boy, pretending to be one, until the day their father had roughly explained that they were exactly the people the bandits had wanted to rob and hurt; he hadn’t slept for a week after that, waking in the night and crying, climbing into her bed.

Arlo. Her other half, her gentle-spirited twin. She closed her eyes, feeling the pain that always came whenever she thought of him. It was a physical ache, as though something had been bodily removed from her and left in its wake an endless hollow that couldn’t be filled or replaced. Her mother had always said they were connected by an invisible thread and she could feel it now, a nerve ending, exposed and raw. ‘You came into this world together,’ she would say. ‘And you must promise to stay in it together.’

Instead, they had been separated before they reached seventeen, already worlds apart. There had been no other way: he could not leave and she could not stay. His every decision was rooted in fear – of his father’s anger, of his mother’s disappointment – and one word of her plans would have sent him running to them, because losing her was his biggest fear of all. He would have betrayed her just to keep her safe and she couldn’t allow that. She couldn’t live that way any more.

But could she keep living like this? In the dark moments when Miguel took the pound of flesh that was the price for his protection, she made herself promises that she would see them again when the war was over. But it felt like an impossible dream. She was no longer the girl who had climbed out of that window. War had taken her innocence, her childhood, her hope—

A sound whistled past her, a bullet screaming into the nubby bark of a tree just ahead. She gasped and ducked, her hands instinctively covering her head as she heard another spinning at high velocity. Her cheek pressed into the dirt and she dared to look upwards: the sky was glowing red and the distant crack of gunfire, of shouts, splintered the still silence of the night.

She looked behind her but could see nothing. Not yet anyway. But those bullets had come from somewhere, someone was coming down and she couldn’t afford to stay here. Abandoning the blanket and her coat, she quickly scrabbled to her knees and wrestled the machine gun onto her back using the makeshift harness she had made with some dead fascist soldiers’ belts. It was heavier than she had expected and she struggled to stand; she was only supposed to have been safeguarding it here. Hers was the midway station – neither up nor down – and Quincy, the handsome American captain, had intended to bring it himself when he came back down. That was how he was: war hadn’t diminished his manners; if anything, it seemed to magnify their importance for him, as if he believed that those alone were all that was left to distinguish them from the beasts. If he only knew what an animal he served beside, Miguel doling out a nightly torture to her under his very nose and against which he was supposedly fighting. But she could say nothing; to ask for his help would be to demand his suicide. She had chosen freedom but it had trapped her as surely as any cage.