After tea, Prue took a chaos lamp and went up to the field, where she got to work connecting the new moto-heart in the mechanimal horse. The farm had been in Mrs Haywood’s family for years. Mr Haywood had been travelling and researching new technology for his home island’s farms when he’d met Mrs Haywood. He never went back. He said he’d found home.

But nothing felt like home any more. Not to Prue. Not without Francis.

Prue sat in the barley, took the card from her pocket and turned it over. Since the visit that afternoon, something had changed and her mind wouldn’t be still.

What she’d read about had seemed like such a remote dream; that in Medlock they’d found a way to bring ghosts back, held inside animal-like machines. Yet there had been a craftsman on their very doorstep. She looked at the metal horse in front of her. “Imagine if you could talk?” she said. She knew from reports that the ghosts in Medlock had no memory, that there was no way to know who was who when they came into this world … but she couldn’t help but think: what if she could find a way? What would it mean to her parents, to bring Francis back? A band tightened around her heart. She missed him more than she’d ever thought possible. Surely Craftsman Primrose’s visit was a sign.

The light was fading, and Prue quickly finished the last of the connectors, inserted an ion battery plate and shut the side panel. With a whirr and clunk, the mechanimal horse’s metal legs shuddered. She pressed the homing button. It lifted a foreleg, took a step, then was off, heading back towards the storage shed for the night.

“Come on, Prue! I give up,” he pleaded. “Where are you?”

She stubbornly ignored Francis’s calls to surrender.

“It’s so late now! Mum’s going to be mad if we’re much later for tea!”

He eventually stumbled across her in the storage shed, inside the belly of a half-made mechanimal horse.

“Prue, I can’t believe you didn’t submit. It’s been two hours!” He helped her out. “Honestly, you can be an annoying lubberwort sometimes!” He was so agitated in his urgency to leave the shed, that he slipped and landed on broken glass – a chaos lamp Prue had dropped earlier; she’d honestly meant to clear it up. It cut deep into his cheek. It was entirely her fault, yet as Dad patched him up, Francis had told Mum that he was to blame, that it was his idea to play out late. Even when Prue tried to contradict him, he insisted.

But that was Francis; he always had her back.

Prue stood on the hilltop watching the silhouette of the mechanimal horse until it was safely inside the shed.

Then she looked back to the lane. And sighed.

*