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Lily and the boy watched the storm while Evelyn was busy taking an inventory of the food stores. Lily clicked her tongue and sighed.

“It’s not so big, this one,” she said, face to the glass.

The boy did not reply.

“It’ll be over before we know it.”

The boy came over and stood awkwardly behind Evelyn for a moment. She waited for him to speak.

“What can I do?” he said.

He’d been at great pains to be helpful ever since he’d dragged Evelyn from the lake, and despite her lingering suspicions Evelyn found it hard to remain ill-disposed toward him.

“Well,” she said. “Let’s see, shall we?”

She got up and joined Lily by the window. The storm was well upon them now, and the sky was dark and fulminous. Sometimes a cloud of dust rolled past the window that obliterated the garden completely, and each time Evelyn wondered if the cloud would move on, or if she had seen the last of the lawn and the pond and the flower beds.

“We should cover what we can of the beds,” she said.

“Is there any point?” said Lily.

“What do you mean?” said Evelyn. “Of course there’s a point.” But she could not elaborate beyond that.

Lily didn’t reply but went to the door and put a coat on over her dress and changed her ballet shoes for Wellingtons.

The wind outside was not yet so fierce that they couldn’t walk, but all three of them were forced to stoop and cover their noses and mouths with scarves. Evelyn suggested they wear the sunglasses, too, and was surprised when her sister agreed.

They staggered to the toolshed, which offered them some shelter. Motes of dust tumbled in neat lines between the gaps in the roof.

“These are what we need,” said Evelyn, pointing to the colossal rolls of canvas that had been stored in the rafters for decades.

The boy hauled them down onto the dry earth. Lily tried to lift the end of one of them, but it was too heavy. The boy took the whole thing by himself, lugging it as if it contained a body.

“Vegetable beds first,” shouted Evelyn over the wind. She wasn’t sure if the boy had heard her, but he went in the right direction anyway.

When they reached the winter beds, she helped the boy stake out the canvas over the soil. The furrows he had dug not so long ago now looked as if they were filled with ash. Evelyn managed to make one corner secure, but it seemed to take hours, and by the time she had secured the stake in the ground, the boy had gone back to the toolshed with Lily to fetch another roll.

They covered the vegetable patches and the herb garden and one corner of the wheat field, where the soil was best. They covered their mama’s grave. Evelyn watched the boy struggle with the sheet as it bucked and writhed in the gale. When she looked up, her sister was staring into nothingness. What if Lily was right? What if there was no point? How many more years did she and Lily have, even if they survived this storm, even if they weren’t discovered by the others? And then another, inevitable thought: Had there ever been any point? We could have had lives , Lily had said. The words came back to her, over and over. Had this not been a worthwhile life?

Evelyn found herself fighting a desperate, scrappy fight against the conclusion that no, it had not. That there was nothing intrinsically good or bad in the garden but only what she and her mother had projected onto it; that they had been trying to preserve not the garden but themselves, and their own internal worlds, and that was an impossibility. She was overtaken by a fatigue so bottomless and terrifying she thought she would never manage the thirty paces back to the house.

The boy tugged at her arm several times. She couldn’t hear him over the wind.

“The chickens,” he shouted.

They herded their three hens into the coops. The cockerel had taken shelter elsewhere. The wind blew stronger still, and the clouds descended until they seemed close enough to touch. It was now almost too dark to see. They found their way back to the kitchen door having barely spoken a word since they’d left it. Evelyn coughed and wheezed like a hag.

“We’ll need more water,” she said to the boy on the doorstep.

“And some meat,” said Lily.

Evelyn looked in the direction of the icehouse but could not see it through the storm.

“I’ll get them,” the boy said.

Evelyn turned back to him. He was blinking furiously, his eyelashes turned blond from the dust that clung to them.

“Don’t worry about the meat. Do you think you can get to the lake before it gets too dark?”

He nodded.

“All right. Be quick. Then we can lock the door and be done with it.”

Evelyn went inside and got the lamp. She wound it until it was as bright as it would go and brought it back to him.

“Four buckets should be enough.”

The boy nodded again and disappeared around the side of the house, his dark curls whipping in the wind.

Lily sat down at one end of the kitchen table and began shuffling their cards.

—

The boy came and went with the buckets of water and the lamp, illuminating their world briefly before disappearing for a fifth time.

“Where’s he off to now?” Evelyn said.

Lily didn’t reply. Evelyn watched her sister thumbing the cards in the twilight and realized how long it had been since they had sat, just the two of them, at the kitchen table. Eons had passed since the boy had entered the garden. She could hardly remember their life without him, just as she could hardly remember their life with Mama. She had fallen out of practice speaking with her sister even before Lily had gone beyond the wall; now they sat opposite each other as strangers.

“Well. At least you don’t need to worry about anyone else coming to the garden,” Lily said.

The boy’s head floated past the kitchen window. He shouldered the door, which Evelyn had shut to keep the dust out of the house. He was holding two joints of cured meat, one under each arm. He heaved them onto the table and set the lamp down beside them. He sat down and took off his sunglasses and coughed and rubbed his eyes. Lily looked up from her cards and saw what he had brought.

“Oh, good boy!” she said.

“I said we didn’t need those,” said Evelyn.

“It’s all right. I had time.”

“Well, we’re not eating any of it yet.”

“Oh, come on, Evie,” said Lily. “In the circumstances, I think we’re due a treat.”

“It’s not meant to be a treat. We’ll need to save it in case we’re trapped here for any length of time.”

Lily sulked and seemed to be in no mood to make dinner, so Evelyn reheated some porridge while her sister and the boy sat in silence at the table. Evelyn set the pan between them. They ate little, listening to the world howling outside the house.

“Are we going to play cards, then?” said Lily.

“I don’t feel like it,” said Evelyn. “Sorry.”

“Suit yourself,” said Lily.

Evelyn gazed out at the storm. The dust was blowing horizontally across the window. Lily was probably right. No one could reach them through this. And even if they could, she wouldn’t see them until they were on the doorstep. She checked both dead bolts anyway, then went back to her spot at the window.

“What about you then, beast of burden?” she heard Lily say. “Cards?”

She could not hear the boy’s answer, but the sound of the cards snapping on the table suggested he had agreed. Or perhaps Lily had decided to play a game with herself.

“Are you scared?” Lily asked.

The boy nodded or shook his head; Evelyn could not see.

“Did you get storms like this in the other place?”

“Yes,” said the boy. “All the time.”

“You hear that, Evie? Sounds like wherever we go, we’ll end up digging ourselves out.”

Evelyn raised her eyebrows, the closest thing to a laugh she could manage. She heard the purr of Lily shuffling the deck.

“Did you really dig it out? After the first storm?” the boy asked.

“We did. I can’t remember how long it took us. It was Mama who worked hardest. But me and Evie did our bit, didn’t we?”

“We did,” Evelyn agreed.

“You didn’t get hungry?” said the boy.

“Oh goodness, yes,” said Lily. “Nearly starved. We just had to ration everything. Papa went and got lots of tins and such. Do you remember that, Evelyn? Fruit and vegetables. I used to guzzle the juice straight from the can. Gosh, yes, I loved it. It’s a shame we don’t have any this time round. I suppose we can make do with what’s in the cupboard.”

“Yes,” said Evelyn. “We can make do.”

She tried to sound upbeat, though Lily did not know the findings of the inventory she had taken, and Evelyn did not care to enlighten her. She looked at the joints of meat on the table and considered hiding them somewhere, for emergencies only, before Lily could get her teeth into them.