As best she could, she began to run down the hillside, her feet slipping on the wet leaf mulch. She held her arms out, running from one tree to the next, partly to control her speed, but the legs of the tripod kept catching against the trees and alternately either wedged her in place or else sent her spinning. The mechanical rat-a- tat-tat of machine gun fire made her cry out in fear, unable to see where it was intended – her or someone else? Where was Miguel? Whatever else he was, he had kept his promise to her: he had kept her safe, kept her alive this long.

Her legs wheeled, her arms pumping, lungs burning, eyes tearing. She didn’t know where she was, the road now out of sight and every tree looking like all the rest, but as the gradient steepened, the forest and needle-carpeted ground suddenly giving way to rock, she knew she was nearing the gorge. The cave was down there. Safety. Their agreed meeting point. She scrambled quickly around the boulders and granite outcrops that replaced the trees, grateful for the childhood that had given her a nimble agility, a childhood that could never have predicted she might one day be using those skills to run for her life with a machine gun strapped to her back.

Sure enough, the land dropped away suddenly – the undoing of those who didn’t know to slow – and as she looked down she saw the oxbow bend of the river far below. The cave aligned with the three-quarter point along the top of the curve. She was nearly there.

Her nails broke as she dug her hands into the rock face, the so-called path used by the wild goats barely as wide as her foot. Facing in, she shuffled along, knowing that one strong gust of wind might be all it took to unbalance her with the alien weight behind. But within a few minutes, she could already see the tips of the olive branches ahead. Only the unnatural angle of them betrayed that they had been cut and wedged in around the boulder that doubled as a door. It was a much-used bolthole – barely evident from across the gorge, far less from the sky as the fascists flew over in Hitler’s Luftwaffe planes.

Her hands felt the mouth of the cave, finding the blessed curve inwards that took her deeper into the earth and away from the danger of man – his bullets, his mortars, his knives. Panting, realizing she was weeping, she pushed against the branches, into them, feeling them scratch her face as she found just enough width to wedge herself in and fall to her knees, away from the drop.

Whimpers escaped her as she struggled with the harness; the ties had drawn tighter around her shoulders from where she had become tangled in the trees, the downward momentum drawing her onwards momentarily before being abruptly locked in place. Her fingers fumbled with the knots, still lazy with cold, and it was another few minutes before she freed herself and could let the gun fall. She cried out with relief, throwing her head back as she rolled her shoulders, easing out the cramps, before pulling the gun out of sight from the shelf and replacing the branches again. She squeezed sideways past the boulder into the black cavity, exhausted. It was damp, the air fetid, but she had done it. She was safe. She was—