Still, Emma found herself looking down on Sally somewhat. Riding on her husband’s high-flying career, Sally had gotten used to a grander style of life than Emma had ever enjoyed, or wanted. Emma had often berated herself for sacrificing her own aspirations to follow her husband’s star, but it seemed to her that Sally had given up a lot more than she had ever been prepared to.

For the sake of good relations, she tried to keep such thoughts buried.

And Emma had to concede Sally’s inner toughness. She had after all lost her husband, brutally slain before her eyes. Once she was through the shock of that dreadful arrival, Sally had shown herself to be a survivor, in this situation where a lot of people would surely have folded quickly.

Besides, she had achieved a lot of things Emma had never done. Not least raising kids. Maxie was as happy and healthy and sane as any kid his age Emma had ever encountered. And there turned out to be a girl, Sarah, twelve years old, left at home in Boston for the sake of her schooling while her parents enjoyed their extended African adventure.

Now, of course, this kid Sarah was left effectively orphaned. Sally told Emma that she knew that even if she didn’t make it home her sister would take care of the girl, and that her husband’s will and insurance cover would provide for the rest of her education and beyond. But it clearly broke her up to think that she couldn’t tell Sarah what had become of her family.

It seemed odd to Emma to talk of wills and grieving relatives — as if they were corpses walking round up here on this unfamiliar Moon, too dumb to know they were dead — but she supposed the same thing must be happening in her family. Her will would have handed over all her assets to Malenfant, who must be dealing with her mother and sister and family, and her employers would probably by now be recruiting to fill an Emma-shaped hole in their personnel roster.

But somehow she never imagined Malenfant grieving for her. She pictured him working flat-out on some scheme, hare-brained or otherwise, to figure out what had happened to her, to send her a message, even get her home.

Don’t give up, Malenfant; I’m right here waiting for you. And it is, after all, your fault that I’m stuck here.

One day at around noon, with the sun high in the south, the group stopped at a water hole.

The three humans sat in the shade of a broad oak-like tree, while the Runners ate, drank, worked at tools, played, screwed, slept, all uncoordinated, all in their random way. Maxie was playing with one child, a bubbly little girl with a mess of pale brown hair and a cute, disturbingly chimp-like face.

All around the Runners, a fine snow of volcano ash fell, peppering their dark skins white and grey.

The woman called Wood approached Emma and Sally shyly, her hand on her lower belly. Emma had noticed she had some kind of injury just above her pubis. She would cover it with her hand, and at night curl up around it, mewling softly.

Emma sat up. “Do you think she wants us to help?” Maybe the Runners had taken notice of her treatment of the child with yaws after all.

“Even if she does, ignore her. We aren’t the Red Cross.”

Emma stood and approached the woman cautiously. Wood backed away, startled. Emma made soothing noises. She got hold of the woman’s arm, and, gently, pulled her hand away.

“Oh God,” she said softly.

She had exposed a raised, black mound of infection, as large as her palm. At its centre was a pit, deep enough for her to have put her fingertip inside, pink rimmed. As Wood breathed the sides of the pit moved slightly.

Sally came to stand by her. “That’s an open ulcer. She’s had it.”

Emma rummaged in their minuscule medical kit.

“Don’t do it,” Sally said. “We need that stuff.”

“We’re out of dressings,” Emma murmured.

“That’s because we already used them all up,” Sally said tightly.

Emma found a tube of Savlon. She got her penknife and cut off a strip of “chute fabric. The ulcer stank, like bad fish. She squeezed Savlon into the hole, and wrapped the strip of fabric around the woman’s waist.

Wood walked away, picking at the fabric, amazed, somehow pleased with herself. Emma found she had used up almost all the Savlon.

Sally glowered. “Listen to me. While you play medicine woman with these flat heads…” She made a visible effort to control her temper. “I don’t know how long I can keep this up. My feet are a bloody mass. Every joint aches.” She held up a wrist that protruded out of her grimy sleeve. “We must be covering fifteen, twenty miles a day. It was bad enough living off raw meat and insects while we stayed in one place. Now we’re burning ourselves up.”

Emma nodded. “I know. But I don’t see we have any choice. It’s obvious the Runners are fleeing something: the volcanism maybe. We have to assume they know, on some level anyhow, a lot more than we do.”

Sally glared at the hominids. “They killed my husband. Every day I wake up wondering if today is the day they will kill and butcher me, and my kid. Yes, we have to stick with these flat-heads. But I don’t have to be comfortable with it. I don’t have to like it.”

A Runner hunting party came striding across the plain. They brought chunks of some animal: limbs covered in orange hair, a bulky torso. Emma saw a paw on one of those limbs: not a paw, a hand, hairless, its skin pink and black, every bit as human as her own.

Nobody offered them a share of the meat, and she was grateful.

That night her sleep, out in the open, was disturbed by dreams of flashing teeth and the stink of raw red meat.

She thought she heard a soft padding, smelled a bloody breath. But when she opened her eyes she saw nothing but Fire’s small blaze, and the bodies of the Runners, huddled together close to the fire’s warmth.

She closed her eyes, cringing against the ground.

In the morning she was woken by a dreadful howl. She sat up, startled, her joints and muscles aching from the ground’s hardness.

One of the women ran this way and that, pawing at the rust-red dirt. She even chased some of the children; when she caught them she inspected their faces, as if longing to recognize them.

Sally said, “It was the little brown-haired kid. You remember? Yesterday she played with Maxie.”

“What about her?”

Sally pointed at the ground.

In the dust there were footprints, the marks of round feline paws, a few spots of blood. The scene of this silent crime was no more than yards from where Emma had slept.

After a time, in their disorganized way, the Runners prepared to resume their long march. The bereft mother walked with the others. But periodically she would run around among the people, searching, screaming, scrabbling at the ground. The others screeched back at her, or slapped and punched her.

This lasted three or four days. After that the woman’s displays of loss became more infrequent and subdued. She seemed immersed in a mere vague unhappiness; she had lost something, but what it was, and what it had meant to her, were slipping out of her head.

Only Emma and Sally (and, for now, Maxie) remembered who the child had been. For the others, it was as if she had never existed, gone into the dark that had swallowed up every human life before history began.

Reid Malenfant:

As soon as Malenfant had landed the T-38 and gotten out of his flight suit, here was Frank Paulis, running across the tarmac in the harsh Pacific sunlight, round and fat, his bald head gleaming with sweat.

Paulis enclosed Malenfant’s hand in two soft, moist palms. “I can’t tell you what a pleasure it is to meet you at last. It’s a great honour to have you here.”

Malenfant extracted his hand warily. Paulis looked thirty-five, maybe a little older. His eyes shone with what Malenfant had come to recognize as hero worship.