We walk for hours, the sun high in the sky overhead, but none of us gets sunburned, not even the redheads.

At last Holly stops and points to the ground.

Cautiously, I pull out one of my earplugs. Everything is quiet, so I nod, and everyone else follows suit. ‘Why are we stopping?’ I ask.

‘Here,’ Holly says. ‘This is where we need to go to find Finn and the other kids. Right here.’

‘But it’s just a hill,’ Cardy says.

He’s not wrong. It’s a hill like we’ve been walking up and down and around for the last – I pull my phone out of my pocket and look at the time. 1:57 p.m. In the distance, there are more hills, their sloping curves like lines drawn by a master artist.

I turn around. I could have sworn we were walking through an orchard not more than fifteen minutes ago (and Julian has the fruit stains on his face to prove it), but back the way we came there’s only hills as far as the eye can see, grassy knolls completely bare of trees.

There are only two colours in the world right now: the blue of the sky, and the green of the grass. The ground under my feet feels like a prison, and I want to run up the hill as fast as I can, and then run faster than that, faster than I’ve ever run before, faster than any human has ever run before, and launch myself into the sky, letting the blue pull me away from the prison of all this green.

I wonder how long it took the field of death flowers to grow back.

‘There’s nothing here,’ Phil says. ‘Are you sure we’re in the right place?’

‘Of course, I’m not sure!’ Holly says. ‘You think I have any idea how Emily’s stupid powers work?’

‘Not an attack,’ Phil says, holding her hands up. ‘It’s just … this seems like the fairy equivalent of the middle of nowhere.’

Holly sinks down on the grass. We’re all still tied together, so we end up sinking with her. ‘It’s like there’s this thread,’ she says. ‘Like a trail of breadcrumbs or something. I can’t see it, but I can … I can just sort of feel it. And this is where it leads.’

‘Then this must be the place,’ Cardy says.

‘Or we’re lost,’ Holly says. ‘Emily didn’t have perfect control of me. What if I don’t have perfect control of her powers? What if –’

‘No, this has to be the place,’ I say, with more certainty than I feel. ‘Where’s a better place to hide something than the middle of nowhere?’

It’s Cardy who finds the crack in the hillside. It isn’t a crack, really – it’s just a line, something you could dismiss as a trick of the light, a thin strip of grass that’s slightly darker than the rest. But once he points it out, it’s impossible to not see – not a crack, not a line, not a strip.

An edge.

‘Can you open it, Jules?’ Phil asks.

‘I don’t want to.’

‘We have to.’

‘If you get hurt, I’ll heal you,’ I say. ‘I promise.’

His face screws up in pain, but he kneels down beside the edge anyway.

For a moment, nothing happens, and then it’s like his fingers disappear into the ground. His shoulders tighten with effort.

The hill shudders beneath our feet as the door into its depths opens.