One

Jane reached for Stanley's hands again, hearing the panic building in his son's voice. He could see the birds now. Birds of prey. Owls and buzzards, kites and hawks. But there was something wrong with them. They spiralled, falling, not diving; they were struggling to stay aloft. And now Jane could see why; they were destroyed, their wings parting from the patagium. They seemed able to remain airborne, yet void of any counterweight they spun like seeds to the earth. There were hundreds of birds. It was like weather, of sorts.

Jane grabbed his son's hands. 'They're going to hit us, Stan,' he said. They would have to gain shelter, fast, if they were to have a chance of evading the talons and bills of so many plummeting birds.

He pulled and it was too easy. He rolled and the hands rolled with him. He glanced back and froze. Stanley's hands ended at the forearm. What remained of the bone was socketed in the wet sleeve of flesh. The great chiselled bill of a foot-high raptor came suckingly free of Stanley's opened chest. The screech it loosed as it gulped down bits of his son jagged along Jane's spine like a curve of broken glass.

Voices. Whispered, urgent. Happy. Sad. No, don't moveme. From a sort of warmth to definite cold. He felt himself being lifted. He could do nothing about it. Something hard and edged and cold beneath him. He slithered into it. A sense of movement.

The scratch of a needle in his arm. The sound of water. A smell of wood burning. They will scald me first. It will help them to pluck the hair out. Will they kill me before they cook me? A warm blanket. A cool flannel.

He was tensed to the slash of a hunting knife at his throat. He kept waiting for the rage of a smoking griddle to tiger his skin. The spit and crackle of his own fat. The rending of open mouths unable to wait for the meat to cook through. These things were inevitable, but they never came.

Instead, by degrees, he felt the fire in his chest dampened. The pulses and jolts in his head evened out. The irritation in his lungs disappeared so swiftly it was as if someone had reached into his windpipe and plucked it free. He looked down at his fist, opened it. Stared at the thing within.

'The tent fall on top of you while you were sleeping?'

He turned to see Aidan looking at him. He held a toy in his hands. A plastic figure disfigured by heat. Aidan's plaster cast was dark grey, fraying at the end.

'It must have done,' Jane said rustily, unable to keep the wobble from his voice. 'What you got there?'

'General Grievous,' Aidan said. 'He's in Star Wars. The third film. My dad won't let me watch it because he says it's too scary. He's got a cough nearly as bad as yours.'

'Your dad?'

Aidan rolled his eyes. 'No. General.'

'It's really good to see you again,' Jane said.

'Do you want a hug?'

'I'd love a hug.'

Aidan came to him and put his good arm around Jane's neck. Jane was unable to stop himself from sobbing. He closed his eyes as the tears came and Aidan patted him gently.

'You might want to keep that cast away from me. I don't want to catch anything nasty.'

'Lick it,' Aidan said, pushing the bandage into Jane's face. They were wrestling happily together when Jane realised they were being watched.

'You need to rest,' Becky said. She was smiling. He smiled too.

'Where are we?'

'Sunny York,' she said. 'You've been asleep for nearly twenty hours.'

'I feel better.'

'You had a chest infection. You were so hot. The sweat was flying off you. It was really worrying.'

'I didn't mean to alarm you.'

'I pumped you with antibiotics. Good that you did this now, while they were still effective.'

'How do you mean?'

'Drugs have a use-by date, just like food. Their efficacy wears off after a while.'

Jane sat in silence, digesting the significance of this. Aidan quietly swapping his attention from one to the other, a trait Jane noticed he fell back on when he was unsure of a situation, or how it might develop.

'I'm moving on,' Jane said. 'I can't stay here.'

'We'll all go,' Becky said. 'No more Scooby-Doo shit, right?'

11. HIBAKUSHI

They talked while the tarmac disappeared beneath their feet. Sometimes when Aidan grew tired Jane would give him a piggyback, or they took it in turns to push him in the wheelbarrow Jane himself had been carried in when he'd been found. Aidan was in there now, asleep, his arms over his head as if he were playing hide-and-seek.

'Where did you find me?' Jane asked Becky.

'We were looking for you. You said you'd stick to the A1. It was Aidan who saw you. Lying on a bench in the Shambles. I thought you were . . . God, this is awful to say . . . just another dead body. But he recognised you even though you'd been . . . swaddled.'

'Swaddled?'

'Wrapped head to toe in blankets. You looked like something parcelled up. Or an offering.'

He didn't like the sound of that.

'After we were attacked . . . after you got away,' he said, 'did you see—'