Chapter 1

For a second I thought it meant that the rescuers were coming. Not winching down from a helicopter but doing the sensible thing and walking along the river. Maybe Kenny would be with them. I shouted out, “Hey! Here! Kenny!”

But it didn’t feel … right. There’d have been noise. Lights – yeah, they’d have torches. And why would they send Tina ahead of them?

No, this was something else. Something bad. Tina was here because something had gone wrong. I shouldn’t have sent Kenny off on his own. I didn’t know what lay past the bend in the river. It could be anything. A waterfall. Proper rapids. Or just a big flat area of water, reaching from wall to wall of the gorge.

I had to go and help. Had to get to Kenny.

But my bloody stupid useless legs.

Tina came close to me. She was whimpering and shivering. She scrunched herself next to me, trying to get warm.

“What’s happened, girl?” I said. “What’s happened?”

I wanted to lie here under the shelter of the rock. Lie and wait for the rescuers to come.

But they weren’t coming. Kenny needed me. I had to be the rescuer.

My leg. I remembered something from the telly, where a guy got dropped in the jungle and told you how to survive. One of those programmes where they act like they’re alone, even if they’ve got a massive film crew with them. And they go off every night to stay in a Premier Inn and eat at Nando’s. Nando’s … Wish I hadn’t thought of that. It’s warm in Nando’s. Food …

Stop it, Nicky. Come back. Focus.

On the programme there was a thing about fixing a broken leg. Something about a splint. But then, if you didn’t have a splint, something else you could do. What was it? Yes, tie one leg to the other one. Use the other leg as the splint. With your belt. Yes, that was the way.

I unbuckled my belt and slid it out from the loops. Even that small movement hurt like hell. I was afraid to touch the messed‑up leg, but I knew I had to do something so I could move. I felt down along my left leg carefully to find out where the break was. Everything above my knee was OK. I prodded at my knee. Sore, but that wasn’t the problem. I stretched and felt along the outside of my leg. Ten centimetres below my knee I came to it. A bulge, like an egg. Just touching it lightly wasn’t too bad. My leg didn’t seem to mind that. And, yeah, I know it’s stupid, but I was coming to think of my leg as something different from me – a separate being. Separate, but the same. The black sheep of the family. Something to be embarrassed about. The leg definitely had a brain. Or at least a mind. It thought things and felt things. It had views and opinions. And the leg’s main opinion was that it didn’t want me to move it.

I knew the next bit was going to hurt. Hurt a lot. But now I wasn’t just doing it for me. Kenny needed me. He was up ahead somewhere, stuck and in trouble.

I began to wrap the belt around my legs. The belt was an old one of my dad’s and way too long. I remembered him poking extra holes in it with one of the tools from his toolbox. Looked like a screwdriver but with a sharp point on the end, not a flat bit. What did he call it? An owl? No, an awl. My dad was good with tools. Told me my granddad was even better. He was an engineer in the mine. He kept the machinery turning. And my granddad had passed his knowledge down to my dad. But bits of it had been lost. Forgotten. And my dad had tried to show me things. How to measure and mark the wood before you start to drill. How screws were better than nails. How to keep your chisel sharp. But I never really listened. What would I have to pass on to my kids, if I ever had any? Changing a sodding lightbulb freaked me out.

But these thoughts were all instead of the thing I was dreading. The thing I was putting off.

Kenny. Kenny. Kenny.

I reached the place where the egg grew from my leg. I lightly wrapped the belt around that, and then down as far as my ankle. My legs were now loosely tied together. But that was no good. I held my breath and tightened the belt. My scream filled the gorge, drowned the river, reached the sky, stretched out into space.

But even as I screamed, I carried on tightening the belt to bind my two legs together.

There was a weird taste in my mouth. I spat. Blood. What had I bitten? Tongue? Cheek? Or had the blood somehow come up from inside me?

It didn’t matter now. The searing agony passed. I still had the loose end of the belt in my hand. The buckle end was clamped between my knees. I didn’t know what to do with the loose end. It wouldn’t reach back down to the buckle. I tucked it under and round one of the loops, and pulled it into a knot, as tightly as I could. More agony. But oddly, there was something “right” about this agony. The pain seemed to be saying, “Yes, this is the right thing to do,” like the last stab of pain when you pull out a splinter.

I knotted the buckle end in the same way. Now my legs were tied tightly together. It felt … better. Terrible, but better.

But the water was still rising. I felt the spray on my face. I glanced at Tina. She was shaking and looking as rotten as I felt.

“Come on, girl,” I said, “walkies.” I’d have laughed at my own stupid joke if I’d had the breath.

I began to crawl on my belly, like some stranded fish. Yeah, like an illustration I remembered seeing in a book about evolution. It was the first fish to pull itself out of the water, on its way to becoming an amphibian. That was evolution going forwards, but I felt I was going back, becoming that dull‑eyed, cold‑blooded animal. All that counted was crawling forward. The pain was nothing. I had to find Kenny.