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The cellar was silent again, but Evelyn had the strangest sensation that she was still talking to the boy. The same feeling that she used to get with Lily, that words were not necessary. A shared consciousness, mingling in the middle of the cellar. Evelyn ate her hard corner of bread. It made the roof of her mouth bleed. They passed Papa’s hip flask between them, taking smaller and smaller sips.

“You finish it,” said Evelyn when it was down to the dregs. She threw it back to him and he dropped it. It clanged like a bell. They both froze in the diminishing echo and waited for someone to come, but nobody did.

They slept on and off. Evelyn’s tongue and lips were quickly parched again. She felt light-headed and light-bodied, as if caught in some dry, fierce updraft.

“We’ll need to go back to the kitchen,” she said finally.

“We can’t,” said the boy, his voice hardly there. “They’ll see us.”

“I haven’t heard anything. We’ve been here for hours. Maybe days. They might have left.”

“No.”

“How do you know?”

“They’ll be packing up the house. They’ll take everything back with them. They always do.”

“We’ll die down here if we don’t move,” said Evelyn. “We need water.”

“And then what?”

“And then we wait for them to leave. Or we kill them.”

He paused, neither agreeing nor disagreeing. “And after that?”

She thought for moment. Pessimism was a luxury she could no longer afford. She was the only one left, and she would have to speak for Lily, and Mama, too.

“We’ll dig it out.”

“We can’t. You saw. It’s ten feet deep.”

“Doesn’t matter. I’m staying with the garden. I’ll dig it out by myself if I have to. Never been afraid of a bit of hard work.”

Although, she admitted to herself now, it wasn’t just about the work. Work was all she could offer the garden, but Mama had been able to offer something else. Something like the Magic she read about in the book. The line that always came to her: He just whispers things out o’ th’ ground. She thought Lily had it, too, the Magic, though she was work-shy. The garden had come about through the combination of both of those things, and she could only do one of them. She could work. Work had to be enough. But she was tired, so wretchedly tired.

She crawled to the door of the cellar and a little way up the steps. It was silent on the floor above.

“You should go,” she said.

“I don’t want to,” said the boy.

“You stand a better chance than I do. I can’t fight them or run away from them.”

“Neither can I.”

“You’re good at creeping around. You’ve hidden in the house before. Remember how long it was before we found you?”

“I think we should stay here.”

“Then I’ll go,” she said. “We need water.”

“Please stay,” he murmured.

“Make up your mind,” said Evelyn. “You thought I was going to eat you not so long ago.”

He didn’t say anything to that. Evelyn pulled herself up and felt the blood returning to her legs and feet, thick as treacle. It was some time before she was steady enough to take the three or four steps over to where the boy was sitting.

“Give me the knife,” she said.

He felt beside him and handed it to her blade first. She took it gingerly. It wasn’t particularly sharp, but it was at least smaller and lighter than the sickle. The kitchen knife would have been better, but that was back on the kitchen table.

“Flask, too,” she said. “I’m not bringing back the whole bucket.”

He gave it to her. She wrapped the lamp in the folds of her smock and began climbing the steps. The boy was whispering something behind her, but she did not stay to listen.

At the top of the steps she shone the lamp around quickly, then covered it again. She was in the same hallway she had entered when she first left the kitchen. She tried to remember the route she had taken through the house but found herself disorientated. She thought she was somewhere toward the front of the house—or the back, as she and Lily would have called it—where the windows looked out over the lake, but she couldn’t be totally sure.

She kept to the right-hand side of the hallway, feeling her way along the bulges and wrinkles in the wall. Nowhere to hide, if someone saw her.

“Ridiculous,” she said again, under her breath.

She came across shelves piled with bags and suitcases, all tattered and deflated. The remains of stickers, names and places that no longer existed. Fairy-tale places: Brighton, Paris, Cairo. She looked for India, which she knew from the book, but couldn’t find it. There was a sealed door between the shelves, which she remembered, quite suddenly, had been called the luggage entrance.

She turned a corner in the hall, and the air became charged with the voices again. There was a dim pool of light to the left, where the grand staircase led up to the second floor. Footsteps, back and forth, back and forth, the same route over and over, and that low, dread resonance of something outside of her experience.

Her heart felt unhinged. A fizzing down her left arm. She waited and waited.

It seemed no one had come down to the ground floor yet. She stared at the grayness around the foot of the stairs and thought she saw only one set of prints, her own, from when she had followed the boy however many days previously. She shuffled forward, plowing dementedly through the dust. The voices were clearer than ever, like nothing she had heard before—loud, brutal syllables falling through the stairwell.

Evelyn passed by the foot of the staircase, the door to the playroom, and the table with its bowl of keys and piles of paper; then she ducked under the boards into the kitchen.

Everything was as she had left it. The meat was still on the table, fingers languidly uncurled, with the pile of garden tools next to it and the buckets of water that the boy had collected underneath. She went to the table and drank quietly and greedily, water dripping from her chin. She looked at Lily under her shroud. After a few moments she went over and pulled the blanket back and looked upon her sister’s face. She was amazed at how little it resembled Lily’s now; a strange, distorted effigy.

She heard more thumping, but not overhead this time. Somewhere at the other end of the hallway, on the stairs, coming down to the kitchen. The voices were insistent but indistinct, and accompanied by the low drone she’d heard before. Behind it all, the quiet slither of sand and dust falling from a great height.

Evelyn’s arm trembled and sang. Her chest hurt, and her jaw, too. Her lungs were like two flattened bags. She had to close her eyes from the pain. She covered Lily’s face again and piled more blankets on top of her, then crept into the corner of the kitchen behind the stove and crouched there, waiting.

She heard two of them come blundering into the kitchen. She couldn’t believe how loud their breathing was. A gurgle that reminded her of Lily snoring. They spoke a few words to each other, but they seemed as distant and distorted as they had been on the stairs.

A fierce white light, bleaching the floor, the edges of the table, the upturned fingers of the man’s arm. Colossal shadows. Then the men themselves, so large they seemed to hunch under the ceiling. They wore clothes like her mother’s overalls and had their own sunglasses, though these were much larger and were attached by an elastic strap around the backs of their heads. They wore masks over their mouths with tubes that looped under each arm to something they carried on their back. Lights were affixed to the center of their head, like a single sleepless eye.

One of them went to the kitchen table. He picked up the arm, studied the end where the elbow had been severed, murmured something, then put it back. The other was standing at the dresser, going through the crockery and cutlery with gigantic gloved hands. He circled the table and went over to the window. It was fractured like a spider’s web now, but still held back the weight of the sand. The man peered at it, then saw the bundle of blankets reflected in the glass. He came back and crouched a few feet from Evelyn. The other one was hefting the garden tools from one hand to the other.

“One here,” said the figure squatting by the blankets, and the voice was deep and cracked but unmistakably a woman’s voice. She peeled back the layers covering Lily’s face.

“The boy?” said the one by the table. This one was a man.

“Someone else.”

The woman pulled all the blankets off Lily and began to examine her like she had the other items in the kitchen. She took off her thick rubber gloves and replaced them with a more forgiving pair. She lifted one of Lily’s earrings on her fingertips and looked for a way to detach it.

The man went out and came back with a transparent plastic box. He went from surface to surface collecting bowls, plates, saucepans, and placing them carefully inside. He picked up Lily’s eggcup.

“Look,” he said.

The woman looked up, and he held it in the beam of his head torch, turning it slowly in his finger and thumb.

“You seen one of these before?”

She shook her head.

“It’s beautiful.”

Evelyn’s heart felt like a tiny hot coal. There were spasms firing all down the left side of her body. She murmured into her lap. She could not stop herself. A fraction of a breath, but the woman looked up from where she was peering into Lily’s half-open mouth and her glass eyes met Evelyn’s and the coal beneath Evelyn’s ribs flared and the pain was enough to blind her.

“There’s another one here,” said the woman. “She’s alive.”

The pruning knife was in Evelyn’s left hand, but she couldn’t feel the weight of it. She tried to lunge at the woman, but there was that white heat again and she gasped and fell forward onto the floor.

“You’re all right,” said the woman. She thrust her hands under Evelyn’s side and tried to roll her over. Evelyn was aware of nothing but each agonized heartbeat, and each fearful lull in between.

The woman said something to the man, and he went to the door and shouted. The loudness of his voice was unbearable, abominable.

“You’re all right,” said the woman again. “We’ve got you.”

The man came back, and Evelyn felt a prick like a bee sting somewhere on her body, she could not say where, followed by a lush and delirious coolness. She lay on the floor next to her sister and found that her vision had returned. She looked at the dangling flex of the electric light, without its bulb, and found it new and fascinating. Her heart ached dully but had stopped writhing. It seemed not to beat at all.

“We’ve got you,” the woman kept saying, over and over. “We’ve got you.”

They lifted her onto something like a tarpaulin. Evelyn felt herself being lifted from the floor and carried from the kitchen. No, she did not want this. Even in the disarming bliss of whatever they had put in her veins, she knew that. She groaned and rolled over.

“We’ve got you,” said the woman again.

Evelyn shuffled on the stretcher. She felt tiny in the company of the huge man and woman. A tired child, being carried up to bed. She maneuvered her face next to the woman’s hand and opened her mouth and sank her teeth into her wrist.

“No, no,” said the woman, and gently nudged her away. “Come on. You’re safe. We’ve got you.”

The woman and the man passed her clumsily through the doorway, which was still half boarded up. They carried her down the length of the hallway, past the playroom. The door was open, and Evelyn could see someone had disturbed the toys she had so carefully arranged, and she hated them for it.

There were a few moments of discussion at the foot of the stairs. Twice more Evelyn attempted to get up from the stretcher. The woman pushed her firmly back down the first time; then the man did, without interrupting their conversation. She did not try a third time. Her breathing was shallow and her pulse was weak. The sharp pain in her chest was gone, but her skin prickled and she felt nauseated. She turned slowly on the tarpaulin again to see her surroundings and then looked up the stairwell. There was another huge head looking down over the banisters above. Only three of them? She thought she’d heard more. Perhaps someone had already gone to the cellar.

The man above called to them and they started up the stairs. Evelyn again had the distant sensation of the house pitching and yawing like a boat. When they reached the turn in the staircase, the man overhead shouted more urgently. He was pointing and seemed to be agitated, and deep beneath the waves of whatever medicine they had given her Evelyn registered this but did not feel agitated herself. She watched as he ran to the other end of the landing, felt the stairs ahead of her give way, slowly at first and then all of a sudden, and the man who was carrying the front of her stretcher disappeared through them and let go of her and her head lolled over the ragged hole where the staircase had collapsed. There was a great cloud of dust and more shouting, and beneath her the man now howled in pain.

The woman who had been at her feet abandoned the stretcher and went down to help her injured colleague. Evelyn lay curled on the hard angles of the staircase, as if she had fallen there from a great height. She could not see the second man anymore. Beneath her the injured man continued to cry out, and the woman sifted through the debris and heaved the timbers aside.

Evelyn was aware of something tugging at her feet. The stretcher slid to the foot of the stairs, and on each step it felt as if a different part of her came loose. When she reached the ground, she continued to slide, apparently of her own accord, back into the darkness of the hallway.

The boy appeared. He knelt beside her and poured water from the hip flask over Evelyn’s face, then let her drink some. She couldn’t feel herself swallowing. She couldn’t feel anything. She saw and she heard but thought little and moved less; in the world, but not of it.

The boy gathered the top end of the stretcher in his pale fists and began to haul it slowly across the carpet. He pulled Evelyn back to the kitchen, whispering to her all the way, and though she could make no sense of his words, he seemed to be trying to reassure her.

The house drifted past her, the open doors, the furniture, the wallpaper, and she felt nothing now, a mere witness to it all.