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Evelyn didn’t know if she had slept or not. She had never been so thirsty. Her lips were dry and sticky and tore when she tried to open her mouth.

She heard voices coming from somewhere far beneath her. More than one, but so faint she could hardly distinguish them from the sound of her own pulse. Dream voices. Impossible voices. Definitely not the boy’s. She thought of coming home from a day in the garden and hearing Lily humming or muttering to herself in the kitchen. The voices were deeper than Lily’s, though, deeper than the boy’s, and Evelyn felt them as much as heard them. Like listening to her parents talking through the wall of their bedroom.

The sound of bodies moving carelessly. Someone careering through the house, on the floor below them. She tried to place exactly where the sound was coming from. She thought they were in the living room. Perhaps they had followed her footprints? She imagined them manhandling the books, the photographs. She imagined them finding the kitchen and helping themselves to the jars of honey, to the beetroot and onions that she had pickled only a few days before. And Lily. What would they do to Lily?

Evelyn stood up and felt as if she were floating slightly, all the weight of water gone from her body, leaving her dry and brittle. She drifted to the doorway and listened. Among the voices and the footsteps there was another sound, a continuous pure, low tone.

She picked up her sickle and her lamp and went out onto the landing. Something like a laugh drifted up the stairs, a terrifying sound in that tomb-silent house. She looked at her papa and thought to say something, but nothing came so she left him behind.

She went along the landing in the opposite direction to the one she had come from. Memory or imagination told her there was another door at the end of this floor that led to a different staircase. She found it and opened it. A set of back stairs, just as she’d thought. In a rush of delirium she thought maybe she had the power to imagine whatever she wanted, and it would simply appear. That she was, in fact, still in the larger dream of the garden and was free to create it exactly as she wished it to be. And what if this were true of the world outside as well?

She was on the second floor again in what seemed to be a different wing of the house. She could no longer hear voices but still felt the low vibration through the soles of her feet. The footprints of the boy led chaotically in all directions. She did not follow them. She might take a wrong turn and open a door and find herself back where she had been the previous day, looking into the eyes of the others who had entered the house. There was a mirror opposite the stairwell, and for a moment she thought she saw Mama in it and she looked away, frightened.

She took the stairs down to the ground floor, and found they went deeper still. Stone steps, here, worn and sunken in the middle, and cleaner than the rest of the house for some reason. A windowless cellar. Shelves, mostly empty apart from a few cans of paint, some pots and pans, some machines that she didn’t understand. A gigantic white chest pushed into one corner, like a sarcophagus, also empty.

She thought she might climb into it and hide. But then she might suffocate. So what if she did? No, that would make her a coward, like Papa.

Poor Papa. Poor boy.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said out loud.

She wondered if there was a way back to the kitchen from the cellar. She needed to drink something, anything. It hurt to swallow. The air in the cellar was damp, but the top of her nose still burned when she breathed. She’d drink the pickling vinegar if she could. She wondered again if the others had found her jars. Onions and beetroot, eggs from years back still plump and tangy.

She crawled into the corner and put her hand in something wet. She licked her fingers, not caring what it was. The water was grainy and tasted old but not rotten. Damp from the lake, or the spring that fed it. The puddle was too shallow to drink from properly, but she laid her hands in it again and again and sucked at her palms.

The water was quickly gone, and she sat and leaned against the white chest and watched the lamp wind down. She heard a single tremulous breath from the corner opposite her. The air seemed suddenly warmer than it should have been.

“They’re here,” she said.

There was another sharp, dry breath and the click of a mouth with no saliva. Evelyn spoke again.

“There are men in the house.”

“Don’t eat me,” said the boy.

The cellar was pitch-black. The boy’s words burned in the nothingness, colors and shapes as if she’d rubbed her eyes too hard.

“Do you still have the knife?” Evelyn asked eventually, her voice seeming to come from somewhere outside her head.

The boy’s clothes rustled.

“We might need it,” she said.

No reply again.

“You’re stronger than I am. You’ll have to kill them.”

“I don’t want to kill them,” said the boy. “I don’t want to eat them.”

“We’re not going to eat them,” she said. “We can’t eat them raw, anyway.”

The boy began to whimper.

“Be quiet,” snapped Evelyn.

“It was a person,” said the boy in a whisper.

“What was a person?”

“The meat.”

“It was a man,” Evelyn said. “From before.”

“So?”

“We had to. At the beginning. They were trying to take the garden from us. And we had no food.”

“It’s the worst thing you can do.”

“It’s definitely not the worst thing.”

He went quiet again. Evelyn listened for the others but heard nothing apart from throbbing silence. Perhaps the cellar was too deep, its walls too thick for her to hear. Perhaps she wouldn’t know they were coming until they were already upon her.

“Where is she?” said the boy.

“She’s dead,” said Evelyn. “You cracked her head open.”

The boy didn’t reply. After a moment or two she heard him crying.

“Stop that.” Mama’s voice again. “I need you to be strong for when the others get here.”

And she realized, after all this, that she did still need him.

“I can’t kill them,” he said.

“You had no trouble killing my sister.”

She waited for the boy to protest, to apologize, but he did neither. Evelyn sat in her silence, her grief. The boy repeated himself.

“I can’t kill them,” he said. “But I don’t want to go with them.”

“I don’t want to go with them either. So what do you suggest? That I outrun them?”

Evelyn wound up the lamp, and it spilled its light over the cellar floor. Even then, she couldn’t see the boy properly. She crawled forward and set the lamp in the center of the room, then crawled back again. He was sitting with his back to the wall and his knees under his chin. The pruning knife was on the floor beside him. He was covered in so much dust that he looked like some crouching gargoyle. His shirt twitched and she heard the sound of something being unscrewed, and she thought, with rising panic, that he was readying some kind of weapon; that this had been a ruse all along and she had made exactly the same mistake as before, foolishly thinking him harmless. But he just raised something to his lips and there was a slurping noise.

“What are you drinking?”

He stared at her in the lamplight, then slid something noisily across the flagstones. Evelyn stretched forward to pick it up. Their father’s hip flask. The same one she had taken to him when he had been imprisoned in the icehouse.

She unscrewed it and sniffed the top. It smelled of the lake, and of tarnished metal, with the slightest hint of Lily’s potato wine. She drank. Just water.

“Your private supply?” she said.

He must have filled it when he went to collect the buckets.

“Do you have food as well?”

He nodded. She slid the canteen back across the floor, but it didn’t reach him. He stared at it for a moment, then at Evelyn, as if expecting a trap. Then he snatched it back, shook it to see how much was left. He rummaged beneath his shirt again and threw her a small piece of stale bread.

Evelyn nibbled one corner. Her teeth met grit, and her mouth was too dry to swallow it. She put the remainder in her front pocket.

“If they find us, what will they do to us?” Evelyn asked.

“They’ll take us back,” he said.

“Back where?”

“Where I came from.”

“The other garden.”

“It’s not a garden. But yes.”

“Why?”

“Because they want to help you.”

“We don’t need helping.” She paused. “We didn’t need help…”

“They think it’s better if everyone’s together. They’re still finding people. Not as many as before. But they’re still looking.”

“What’s there? In your garden?”

“It’s not a garden,” he said again. “It’s more like a city.”

It took a moment for Evelyn to master the visions that this word brought with it.

“And what you said to Lily. You have all those things?”

“Yes.”

“So it’s just like before.”

The boy frowned. “Before what?”

Evelyn didn’t know what to say. She found she was trembling.

“Are your mother and father there?”

“I don’t know.”

“How do you not know?”

“I just don’t.”

Evelyn thought of Lily and wondered, briefly, if they could have had lives after all in such a place.

“Why did you leave?”

“Because I wanted to. There are better places. I know there are.”

“Like our garden.”

“Yes.”

“You knew we were here?”

The question had never been answered. It had drifted away from them in the chaos, but she would have the truth now, she thought. Even if it meant nothing in the circumstances.

“I found you. By accident. I don’t know what else to say.”

“What about the telephone? Someone was asking you if you’d found us. Was that them? The people in the city?”

She hated to say it. The word itself seemed to have a thin and bitter taste.

The boy opened his mouth to speak and held it like that for some time. He closed it, rasped his dry tongue over his lips, and started again.

“It wasn’t you she was asking about.”

“She?”

“My friend. She gave me the phone when she left and I said I’d catch her up.”

“Why didn’t you leave together?”

“It’s difficult. You have to do it in secret. They don’t want anyone to leave. They want to keep everyone together and they want everyone to work.”

Evelyn thought of Lily again. She’d been right. It seemed work was all there was, wherever you went.

“There’s somewhere else, though. A town somewhere near the coast. I mean, I don’t know if it’s a town. A gathering. She went months ago, with her parents, but she gave me a map and that old phone so she could tell me where to go.”

“I saw the map. She told you to come here.”

“She told me not to. She told me to avoid it. Every year one or two people try to get to where she is. They all say to avoid this place.”

The boy looked at her and did not elaborate. He did not need to. How funny, Evelyn thought, that her mama’s legacy should reach so far beyond the garden walls. Evelyn was not sure if she felt pride or shame or anything at all.

“I got lost, anyway,” the boy said. “I just walked and walked. And then suddenly the house was here. You were here. I would have died if I’d stayed outside, so I made a choice.”

“I don’t know if I believe you.”

“It doesn’t really matter anymore, does it?”

“I saw the message. It said: Have you found them? ”

“She didn’t mean you. She sent that before I even got here. She was talking about some way-markers. Some trees or something. I told you, I got lost. I had to turn off the phone because they’d already nearly caught me once before.” He listened for the others in the house. “I suppose she didn’t know that they could do that when she gave me the phone. Didn’t know they could follow the signal, or whatever they do.”

“You should have just kept going,” Evelyn said. “Eaten your fill and gone on your way.”

“I didn’t want to.”

“Why not?”

“I liked it here.” He paused. “I liked you.”

He gave no indication whether this was still the case. Evelyn suspected not.

“You wanted to bring her here, then? Your friend.”

“Maybe. I thought about it.”

She pictured this. A teenage mama and papa, inheriting the house and the garden from their elderly children. It might even have worked out. How hopeful she’d been when she’d first seen him in the icehouse, long-limbed, straight-backed.

“Well,” she said, “too late now.”