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She would have thought night had fallen were it not for the thin, disturbed strip of light at the top of the window frame. In that strip she could see the dust motes buzzing like thousands of trapped insects. She got up, and the act seemed to take another lifetime. She saw that Lily and the boy were still awake and sitting at the table, but neither was speaking. They hadn’t bothered to turn on the lamp. They looked like a pair of ghosts.

The dust was seven or eight feet deep, piled up against the window with such weight that there were filament-thin cracks running across the glass panes. The gap letting in the light was no more than two inches wide. The storm was still blowing, distant and muted.

Evelyn went to the sink and splashed her face with cold water and barely felt it. She returned to her blankets with her skin still dripping. The three of them watched the gap in the window slowly filling until the kitchen was in complete darkness.

“We’ll have to go to the floor above,” Lily said.

“No,” said Evelyn.

“Those windows won’t hold much longer. We’ll have to get out of here at some point.”

“No,” said Evelyn. “It’s dangerous.”

“I know you don’t want to think about it,” said Lily, “but the boy’s been up there. Many times. And he came back with all his teeth and hair. Unmolested by rats. Or monsters.”

“I didn’t go everywhere,” he said quietly, as if still expecting to be punished for it. “But I think it’s fine.”

Evelyn couldn’t bear the thought of it even now. She struggled with that familiar nausea. “I’m staying here.”

“Do you want to stay here?” Lily said to the boy.

He shook his head.

“Then that’s two against one,” Lily said. “Come on. Let’s see if we can’t get one of these doors open.”

“Lily,” said Evelyn.

“What?”

“I don’t want to see the rest of the house. I’ll go mad.”

“You’ll go mad if you stay down here. And when the window breaks, you’ll suffocate.”

“But all those things. I don’t want to remember any of those things. And remember Mama said—”

“Mama is dead, Evelyn.”

“What difference does that make?”

Lily gave her a look of such pity that Evelyn had to bury her face in the blankets.

She called the boy to heel, and they began to rummage through the pile of garden tools, then opened drawers and cupboards. There was the sound of heavy metal objects being placed on the work surface, then a little gasp of satisfaction from Lily before their footsteps receded to the back of the kitchen. Evelyn heard furniture scraping across the tiles and dared to raise her head.

The boy had hauled the wardrobe to one side. Behind it six sturdy planks of wood had been nailed across the doorframe. Lily held the lamp to the boards, and she and the boy studied them closely, their shadows stretching toward Evelyn, distorted and grotesque. Lily tutted and ran her fingers over the edges of the wood.

“Here,” she said to the boy. “Try here.”

Lily had taken the poker from the fireplace to try to prize the wood apart. The boy had a claw hammer. Evelyn watched as the boy set to work hacking and levering, dismantling the remaining pieces of her world. Twice the hammer slipped and he caught his fingers, and Lily rubbed them better, whether he wanted her to or not. When it was clear that he was making little progress, Lily returned to the pile of gardening tools and crowed in triumph when she found a screwdriver. Behind them the window clicked and another crack appeared in the glass.

An hour or more passed before they successfully tore the first of the boards from the wall. They had gouged at the nails until the board was loose enough to slip the poker between it and the plaster, and the boy had leaned on it with all his weight and yelped when it finally sprang free. Evelyn caught a glimpse of the dark paneling of the door beyond and shuddered. She half hoped that the sand would come flooding in and suffocate them all there and then, before the door was opened.

“Let’s have a little rest, shall we?” said Lily, and seesawed back to the kitchen table. “A rest and something to eat. Can’t work on an empty stomach.”

The boy followed her, sucking on his thumb and looking back at the fruits of their labors.

Evelyn watched her sister thump a loaf of bread onto the table and cut it slowly into slices. The boy was twitching like a bird again, turning his head toward the door, then the window, then the boards at the back of the kitchen. Lily placed a piece of bread in front of him and then took the good knife to the nearest joint of meat, and with a little fiddling stripped back the outer layer of gauze. She unwound the rest of the material, rolling the meat across the table as she went. Evelyn watched and did not move. She saw the yellow gleam of the severed bone, the dull blueish-red of the preserved muscle. Then the last loops of gauze slipped from its hand, and the fingers slowly opened in the lamplight like the petals of a flower.

The boy cried out and leaped backward, tipping his chair onto the tiles.

“Oh,” said Lily. She seemed unsurprised.

The boy had clasped his head in both hands and made a noise that was almost gibbering. Lily tried to set his chair upright and he flinched.

“Come on, silly thing,” she said. “It’s not still alive.”

He took one uncertain step toward the garden tools. Evelyn gave him a stern look. She wondered if it was the same expression her mama had made, when Evelyn had been in the boy’s position. Either she was not stern enough, or the boy was not so easily cowed, because he took another step forward and snatched a pruning knife from the pile of tools. He waved it in front of his face as if shooing flies and backed off toward the dresser. Of course it would come to this, Evelyn thought. How could it not.

Lily looked at the man’s arm for a moment longer, then came around the table, shushing the boy as if he were an animal. The fingers on the end of the meat brushed against her hips as she passed. She went toward the boy, and the boy swung the pruning knife wildly at her. Evelyn felt something stir in her. She steadied herself and slowly got to her feet.

“Hey,” she said, “that’s enough.”

“It’s all right, boy,” said Lily, but Evelyn could hear the fear in her voice. “They’re from a long time ago. They’re not like you and me. These ones deserved it.”

She knew , thought Evelyn. She had always known. Just as she had known everything else.

The boy swung his knife again and ran toward the door that led into the buried garden. Dust had crept through the gaps at the top and the bottom. He began rattling the dead bolts.

“Don’t be an idiot,” said Lily. “You can’t open that now.” She turned to Evelyn. “Stop him, Sissie, before he does something stupid.”

Evelyn grasped the sickle from the table while the boy sobbed and fumbled with the bolt.

“Stop that!” said Lily, and moved as fast as Evelyn had ever seen her move. There was the grinding of grit and metal. Lily grabbed at the boy and tore his sleeve, but the boy flung his arm behind him and shoved Lily backward. Evelyn watched as her sister fell, her body weirdly loose and disconnected, just bones in a bag. She hit the ground hard, and her head bounced against the tiles before coming to rest.

The boy undid the locks on the door, and there was a long, loud hush as the sand and dust poured through the crack. The weight of it forced the door wide open and nearly crushed the boy against the wall, against the coats and hats and sticks that were bundled there. The sand spread over the floor like water until it reached Lily’s heels. The boy slid and swam and scrambled over the slope of it, every breath a moan, and kept climbing until, somehow, he had wriggled underneath the lintel of the door and made his way up and out, to his freedom or to his death.

Evelyn looked down at her sister. The lamplight cast her cracked and ancient face in ghastly relief, and the shadows of her fingers curled and uncurled very slowly over the tiles. Lily sighed, but there was no pain in that sigh at all. Tiredness, and perhaps remorse for something; the same kind of sigh she used to make when she curled up in the blankets beside Evelyn after a day’s work.

It took Evelyn a long time to get down onto the floor. Too long. By the time she had Lily’s head in her lap, there was no breath left in her sister’s lungs and the blood in her plaited hair was already cold to the touch.