Heat seemed powerful as solar flares, then more intense than the sun, as though a foreign star was hurtling through the atmosphere, ready to swallow the earth. The ground underfoot became too rough to ride on. Caleb would get to her house faster now if he walked. A series of explosions rocked the valley. The wind attacked a stringybark, just before the turnoff to Setback Mountain Road. It shook violently as hands around a throat. Caleb jumped to the ground and left his bike where he’d find it later. The wind pulled and stripped bark as if shredding it for toothpicks, and a fierce shower of golden embers turned to hail. A bark strip the length of two men was brutally ripped free and whipped into the air. The wind decorated it with embers like a piece of forge-hot gold, awaiting gemstones. The stones fell, turned, bit… and the strip of bark, free, was alight, was carried away, dancing in the wind, celebrated by a shrapnel cloud of ashes and cinders that spiralled southwards ready to rain on Brunton. Perhaps the monster planned ahead, taking eventual aim at Melbourne itself.

Caleb strode through the hellish landscape to Penelope’s house. Mixed with the smell of smoke now was a crueller smell: burned meat and wool. He crossed a pasture where sheep normally trailed each other in peaceful lines, chewing grass. Now it was littered with their twisted, tortured bodies. The luckiest were already dead. The less lucky had been betrayed by fire-retardant lanolin in their wool. They had collapsed, bleating, over the burned stumps of their own legs, the ashen ruins of their hooves. Caleb had to abandon the sheep. Penelope’s father – who knew Caleb wasn’t good enough for her – and her mother – who disapproved of Penelope’s pastel goth ‘phase’ and clearly believed Caleb was even worse – what if they were home and in trouble, and…

What if, after all, Penelope had gone home?

The world was out of joint. Caleb wasn’t a helpful person. This was something he should have explained to Jack, way back when Jack first mentioned the CFA.

‘You know, you remind me a bit of myself when I was your age,’ Jack had said.

Mum, Caleb remembered, had looked surprised.

‘I was a naughty boy who liked the company of other naughty boys,’ Jack said. ‘My mum said the army would sort me out. I wouldn’t want to put you through that sort of sorting. But the CFA is active, and a way to help people. You might enjoy it.’

It felt – though Caleb knew this was ridiculous – that if he’d been more honest back then, he could have stopped today from happening. But what if he hadn’t come? No one else was coming. If Penelope’s parents were home, they’d need help. It was up to him.