Someone barrels into her and knocks her to the ground. The air leaves her lungs with a whump. ‘Ah!’

The bright day reels. Everything is pain, sharp in her shoulder blades, shocking her pelvis, her ribs. The man on top of her raises a rock.

‘No!’ Kira wheezes, rolling her head away. The rock smashes into the earth. ‘I’m real! Callum, I’m real!’

She stops. Her hair is trapped. Time expands. Callum wouldn’t fly at someone unprovoked, no matter how threatened he felt. He suffered enough when he knocked out the huldra, and she’d come to the house to kill.

It’s not him. It’s his smell, his hair, his frenzied face, acknowledging her, recognising her, but no, it’s a trick, another damn game. Beneath him, she stills. Her heart is painful. It’s no more Callum than the fire man was, and she has to run.

‘Are you okay?’ The not-Callum stares. The sunlight blinds her. She could trust him, let him help her up, recover in the country air for a while before finding Romy and Jay.

No. Kira seizes her paling mind. That’s not her, and this isn’t Callum. Wrenching herself to the side, she thrusts him off her, scrambles up, stamps on his ankle, kicks his gut, grabs his rock, and runs.

Halfway down the lane, Kira dares a glance back. The earth in front of the church is empty.

Gripping the rock, Kira judders to a halt, her legs a tangle that could carry on for life. At least she was right, and it wasn’t Callum she assaulted…but how many more are there? Do they regenerate? Rasping, sweating, she clutches her chest. How will she know the right one?

That’s not a bridge to cross right now. Ignoring her battered body’s groans, Kira staggers back into a run. All that matters is putting space between her, the Callum, the fire man, and that sickly, sickening church.

The church which, when she looked back, had shrunk to a quaint parish innocence. It sat alone, ringed by bluebells, its steeple on a level with the woods behind. Kira runs, and gasps, and gawps. She could be on an English country lane: tractor trails through clipped hedgerows, drystone walls, a field of sheep. Hills in waves, bushy trees, yellow-orange grasses.

Quaint. Innocent. Fields. Fells. A pond, a brook, rushes and reeds. After all of this, she’s in Cumbria.

No. A breathless laugh puffs from her chest. No, don’t be stupid; the sun never shines in Cumbria.

Another laugh erupts, more than slightly manic, as Kira fights her brain for control. She’s not in Cumbria, but that’s not why. The sheep are bigger than they should be; the church is smaller than it’s possible to be, from the cavernous space inside; and not-Callum tore from nowhere with a rock. If they were on the outside, he wouldn’t have stayed by the door, hanging around to attack. He’d have fled, just like her. He’d have run for his goddamn life.

And if it was that easy to leave Urnäsch, nobody would stay.

Which means she’s still there. Which means she needs to move. Amassing her scattered, fractious wits, Kira runs, for her goddamn life.

The countryside ambles by. On the outside, she’d hit a portly, rambling village, with a pub named the Cheshire Cheese. Tearooms, musty bookstores, whitewashed cottages. Sweetshops that don’t exist anywhere else, full of sherbet and fudge and rock. Bags of mint humbugs, that she and Romy peered at, on a fusty, forgotten trip. Mathew rolled his eyes, and sighed. Kids today. These girls of ours.

He bought a bag of everything, and Anna only smiled.

No wonder. Does Whiteland have sweets? Chocolate branches? Liquorice death? Curling through the rustic, cloudless day, Kira laughs. It’s a tad less manic than before, but still; liquorice death? She’s slowly going insane.

Her body is, at least. Hitting a stile, she stops to climb it, and, shaking, aching, gasping, her legs and lungs collapse.

Okay. Sliding to the grass by the low, mossy wall, Kira leans back and gives in. It’s uneven, and uncomfortable, but you know what? Who cares. Her heart whoops. Sweat lifts off her. She needs a sleep. She needs to pee.

She needs three years of food. A howl in her stomach declares it succinctly. How long have they been here? God, she’s starving. Shading her eyes, Kira squints against the sun. What did the first not-Callum say? I hate this fucking place. I’m so sick of everything happening to us, like we’re nothing. He wasn’t real, but he also wasn’t wrong.

It’s time to make things happen.

Having found a convenient bush, the first port of call is food. Flopping back down with a healthy dose of pessimism, Kira rummages in her coat. Her pessimism rings true: everything was put in the bags, and the bags are dead to the world. Why did she not fill the coat up, too?

Because it weighs a ton as it is. No; three tons. The whole of Scotland. Frowning, she shifts, hot against the wall. The sun and the run have put her in a kiln, but exhaustion is a juggernaut, and frankly, she can’t be bothered to take it off. Not to mention that, last time she did, everything sailed off without her. Her shoes, her phone, Erik’s water, Erik’s coat…

Erik. The thought of him sparks in her chest, through her growing fug. She should have left Fiona with a message for him.

Yes, because they had such a good conversation, and left on amazing terms. Kira shifts against the mossy wall, her eyes slowly sinking. There’s a bump on her skull, and a hundred bruises clamouring on her back. She never even spoke to the huldra.

No. Fiona, though…the memory swims through a woolly doze. She said to enjoy the Chlause.

Softening into sleep, the jumbled thoughts drift.

Kira jolts awake with a hot shock of horror. She slept. She slept?

She slept a long time. Kira’s eyes adjust to dusk with a twinge of disbelief. The sun, and the light, and the day have gone. How could she have been so daft?

You’ve got a thing for suddenly falling asleep.

Kira’s chest pangs again, and aches. Callum; the real Callum, wry and dry. The real Jay, the real Romy. Her real dad.

She’ll find them. She’ll stay on fifteen separate guards, and find them. Time to make things happen.

Using the rugged wall as a prop, Kira stands. Her bruised back grinds. Her jabbed ribs gripe. Her cramped thighs groan, and, as arthritic as a puppet, she leans against the stone. She’s still alone; nothing befell her while she dozed, nothing crept up to leer. Rubbing the clogs of sleep from her eyes, she surveys her odd domain. Lavender twilight, fields of sheep, the overlarge sheep themselves asleep. The country road she pelted down curves to the left, and rolls away through the hedgerows.

Thank God she can’t see the church from here. Letting out a small breath, she turns. Beyond the stile is a ploughed field, and above it…Kira blinks. Above it rise two slivers of moon.

A low laugh splits from her lips, a bewildering-news kind of laugh; Mayday, Mayday, two moons in the sky tonight. It sounds like a song.

It’s mesmerising. Kira watches them, suddenly soothed, trickled through with peace. Curled like cats in the purple evening, the silver slivers conjure something magical. Even here, even now, there’s light.

Like a singing husky, her stomach cries. The howl snaps her back, and reluctantly, she turns. She can’t risk keeping her back to the lane. Playing murderous Statues with her would only increase the Chlause’s fun.

And she really, really, really needs to eat. Kira blinks through a giddy, black-spotted head rush, holding as still as if she were the statue, gripping the warm stone wall. What was the last thing she ate? Pretzels?

Trees. Hope leaps inside her: beside the stile grows a thick, gnarled tree, short and stumpy with oceans of leaves. Throwing caution to the moons, she ducks beneath its branches. Right now, she’ll eat whatever. It’s not like she can get any more screwed.

The smell beneath the leaves is heady. Gripping a bendy, weedy branch, Kira peers through the shade. There must be something here. There must be something here. There must be something.

There is. As her eyes adjust to the unlit canopy, Kira wilts. Big, fat olives, as hefty as the sheep.

Typical. Normally, she’d bite her cheek and graciously decline, but beggars can’t choose when their bellies are pits. Touching an olive to her lips, Kira waits. No tingle, sting, or burn. When her tongue is also safe, she devours like she’s drowning.

They may not be poisonous, but god, they’re repugnant. Dropping stone after stone to the scrubby grass, Kira sets her face in a pucker. Do they have to taste so much like dust?

This is crazy. Almost choking, Kira laughs, and again, and again, and again. She’s alone in the shade of an olive tree, under a two-moon purple sky, on the run across three different worlds…and, at the end of it all, she’s feasting on stale fruit. What has life become?

‘Kira?’

Her throat dries. The laughter dies. She whips around to see the voice pushing through the leaves, and in one strange motion, she tenses and relaxes. It’s Callum. Is it Callum?

Kira lifts her fifteen guards and more. His planetary coat drapes over his arm, bemusement stained like ink on his face, and he doesn’t seem to have a rock…but does that mean anything?

‘Are you real?’ she blurts.

Callum frowns at her. ‘What?’

‘I’ve met two of you that weren’t real.’ Folding her arms, Kira looks him up and down. What happened to her rock? Did she drop it by the stile? ‘I was with one for ages before he went weird.’ She hunches into herself. ‘Creepy. Lecherous. He turned into a fire man. Are you him?’ She steps forward carefully, searching for deceit. ‘Did you follow me from the church?’

‘Whoa.’ Callum lifts his hands. His widening eyes are brown, not dark or full of something off-kilter. Kira’s guards start to droop. He looks so Callum. ‘You’ve got some horses that need holding. What happened while I was asleep?’

Asleep?

‘You…’ Kira blinks at him. This, she wasn’t expecting. ‘What do you mean, while you were asleep?’

Warily, Callum shrugs. ‘I mean I was asleep? I woke up in the field with a bunch of sheep, and thought I saw you by the wall.’ A peculiar expression crosses his face. ‘Aren’t they the biggest bloody sheep you’ve ever seen?’

Kira laughs, a single peal of surprise. ‘You…’ She peers between the low branches, the simple, waxy leaves. ‘You haven’t been—seen—I mean, you’ve been sleeping this whole time?’ She casts her eyes across the field. Asleep. With sheep. ‘Nothing’s happened to you?’

Callum lifts his shoulders. ‘Not since Karliquai.’ He searches her face. ‘What’s happened to you?’

He steps forward, as if to reach for her. On instinct, Kira steps back. The guards are not done yet.

‘Okay.’ Frowning, Callum stops. ‘Okay.’ Toying with an olive nestled by his head, he flashes his furrowed eyebrows. ‘Big olives, too.’

Kira twists her fingers together. Guilt blends with awkward blends with funny how we know you. It still might not be him.

‘Okay.’ Callum flicks the olive. ‘Okay. I know what to say.’ He plucks it free, tosses it up, and catches it with a slap. ‘You only started trusting me once we’d seen the mist.’

Kira stares. ‘What?’

Oh.

‘I’m getting you to trust me.’ Callum spreads his hands. ‘I remembered how you changed when it happened before. It was obvious.’ His lips twitch to the side.

Another guard drops. It’s his usual smile, uncertain but there. Kira balls her hands in her sleeves. ‘It was?’

‘Yeah.’ Callum dumps his coat on the ground. ‘The way you acted, more than how you talked. You were less self-conscious. I guess you stopped doubting what I was doing so much. I remember, because it was weird, how careful and reckless you could be, somehow both at once.’

Now, he smirks. Kira’s face feels strange, like her features are in disarray. It’s probably funny, but he’s far from wrong: pressing together in the dark, having trapped themselves in the community hut…it changed things. The fear, the incredulity, at what they’d just outrun, at the escalating web that was tying them in knots. His argument with Lena about it, when, hours before, he’d denied all belief.

And then, when he patched her up, and she took off her shirt without thinking about it…she hadn’t noticed, but things were different. He’d soared past the accidental acquaintance, the stranger she’d tangled with; he was involved. They both were. Was that the trust?

‘Callum.’ Closing the gap between them, she throws her arms around his neck. It’s not that other-Callum couldn’t be this right, but rather this un-wrong. ‘Please don’t hit me with a really big rock, or blame me for the Russian Revolution…’

‘I have no idea what you just said.’ Callum taps the small of her back. ‘My shoulder might know.’ His voice lifts, as if halfway through a sentence. Kira pulls back to find him squinting around, at leaves and sunset fields. ‘Now can you tell me what’s going on? I’d like to know why we’ve returned to my homeland.’

Kira tilts her head, looking at the hedgerows, bushy and bristled in the dusk. ‘I thought it seemed more like Cumbria.’

‘Bah.’ Callum scratches his head. ‘Same difference. It’s a big-sheeped version of the motherland.’

Kira snorts, and instantly covers her nose. ‘You sound like a Nazi farmer.’

‘Well, you should know that about me by now.’ Callum shrugs. ‘Unless, you know, you’re not real.’

Batting him, Kira rolls her eyes. ‘Oh, now aren’t you funny.’

‘I try.’

‘Mm-hmm.’ Kira plucks an olive. ‘You won’t be poking fun when you’ve heard everything.’ She holds out her prize. ‘Have an olive. They’re delicious.’

It’s her turn for smugness. His revulsion goes to town. ‘Don’t you like them?’ She sits against the knobbled tree, a sweet, innocent picture.

The look he shoots her is shrivelled outrage. ‘Don’t you—no, I bloody don’t. They taste like gone-off beer.’

Kira swallows her lips. ‘Yeah, but once you’ve had eighteen, they’re fine.’ She pats the stubbled, rooty ground. ‘Sit down. Storytime.’

Watching him pick his scowling meal, Kira’s tension starts to drain. Kira shakes her head at herself. Already, the horror is fading; the false crucifixion, the false friend, the real attack with a rock. Now that there are two of them, nothing seems as bad.

Kira stretches out her weary legs. Either that, or everything’s too unreal to really feel real at all. Or maybe, beneath a dappled tree on a balmy country night, it feels as though nothing can touch them. It’s an island in an impossible river, to be seized with grasping hands.

‘You’re an evil pixie.’ With his olives cradled in his hands, Callum lowers himself to the bumpy roots. ‘Go on, pixie. Bewitch my mind. Fill it with lies. I can resist your fairy stories far better than food.’

‘I’m sure.’ Kira slips out of her sticky coat, chucking it onto Callum’s. Now they could be picnicking.

Callum prods her cheek with an olive. ‘Hey.’

She frowns. ‘Callum.’

‘Hey.’ He prods her. ‘Hey. Hey.’

Exasperated, she turns. ‘Callum.’

Pushing the olive past her lips, he pops it into her mouth.

‘Nngh!’

‘Have an olive.’ He grins as her face rucks in, squawking like a wound-up cat. ‘They’re delicious.’