I heard a voice. ‘I’m looking for Elizabeth?’

Another searcher – he cast his torch beam fully into my face. I blinked in the shock of light. I knew him by his thick, grey beard. Aaron Morgan.

‘Is that you, Elizabeth?’

I shook my head. My throat was too sore to say much. Was my face as blackened as Aaron’s? Would Caleb recognise me? Perhaps no one belonged to anyone anymore, here in this underworld of soot and charcoal and falling ashes and the occasional gold bright of a tree still alight.

Aaron lowered his torch beam and trudged on, vanishing into the smoke.

Then I saw him. Caleb. I recognised him by the slant of his shoulder, by the odd lolloping stride he’d developed since his car accident. Beneath layers of filth his uniform was still yellow. I coughed to clear my throat and find my voice.

‘Caleb! Caleb! It’s me! It’s Mum! Stop! Caleb!’

The man walked on, one hand clutching the side of his helmet as though in pain. He didn’t respond to my call.

Perhaps there were other shoulders like his, other lollopers. My confidence crashed.

No, I couldn’t be wrong. That was one of Caleb’s ever-present sketchbooks clutched in his hand. I was his mother. I knew. Perhaps he couldn’t hear me? I jogged. A tree crashed in the distance. Perhaps whatever he had been involved with since this morning had deafened him?

I thought of the music I’d played for him, all his life, and a sob rose in my throat. If he’s deaf, if he’s injured… I ran to him, and touched his sleeve. The man’s face was black with soot and ash. His eyes… They were old eyes. Blue, like Caleb’s, and wide-set like Caleb’s, but the eyes of a much older man. Of a man who had done much and seen more. Of a man who was tired, jaded, needed rest.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I thought you were…’

‘Mum,’ he said.

Caleb’s voice. From one eye, a line of tears made a line of pale skin down his cheek. Towards the snakebite piercings.

And not quite Caleb’s voice. The way Caleb sounded when he had a chest cold and had been coughing for days. Caleb’s voice, with the strength removed from it. Caleb’s voice as I should never hear it, belonging to a future Caleb, the frail old man who could only exist after I was long buried.

But… Caleb. I threw my arms wide to pull him close, the wholeness of the man now far larger than me, like I’d pulled close the boy whose little body had been light in the safety of my arms. His thick, ashy uniform brushed against the ash on my face. I coughed and gazed up at my enormous child. ‘I’ve been looking for you.’

Caleb nodded. He leaned back and with one hand pulled off his helmet. Beneath his other arm, he carried a black sketchbook. His head was covered with a black bandana in a style I hadn’t seen since his childhood pirate days. Strands of black hair fell from it. I passed him my water bottle. Ash darkened to mud around his mouth as he swigged.