He is not mine, this boy. Not of my blood, at least. My sinewy arms cradle his round and tender form. The wind tries to pull him from me, but what can the wind do that even God cannot?

My foot catches on a gnarled root jutting out from the thicket hugging the motorway. I stumble, almost drop my boy into the blood-red earth beneath us. My dry lips crack when I grimace with the effort of holding him up. He looks up at me with sleepy concern, big brown eyes searching my face.

The drugs are wearing off. Finally. They seem so small until they need carrying. I exhale slowly with relief and scan the roots around us for signs of life. When none wriggle under my hawkish gaze, I’m assured that none of the trees will snatch my boy into one of their gore-tunnels. They’re hungry too, thirsty – but they can’t have him. He’s mine. Even if he is too heavy.

 Laura would have fussed and fretted to be dropped in such an unseemly place. My boy doesn’t struggle when I shift my grip and finally set him down. Blood returns to my fingertips. 

Keeping my eyes on the road beside us, I untie his arms and rub his little hands between mine. Even when his eyes fill with tears, nerves no doubt cramping and fizzing with renewed blood flow, he doesn’t make a sound. Once I’ve freed his legs from the trusses I heft him up, wincing at the sight of his bare toes wiggling in the coarse sand of the roadside. The grit will hurt him. More importantly, it will slow us both down. We don’t have time for a child’s soft feet.

Rain patters down, red droplets staining my boy’s white smock. I shrug off my anorak roughly and guide him into it. His nose wrinkles at the sour smell of my sweat, but he doesn’t resist when I push his arms into the sleeves and pull up the hood. The faded monstera print covers up his fountain spray of blonde hair. 

Once he’s disguised, I pull the tie out of my own, wirier brown hair. If it frames my face, I might blend in more. My pinched features never set me apart from others, even when I wanted them to. Growling in frustration, I lift my shirt to scrub at the ritual paint on my cheeks. Red ochre smears the fabric like old lipstick but it’s too oily to come off clean. 

It doesn’t matter anyway, the others will be here soon. Hair up, hair down, painted, hooded, anything – they’ll recognise me as surely as their own mother. Seeing me as family won’t stop them shooting me for what I did, if they catch me. Us.

I bend down and rub fistfuls of near-black dirt on my face and my boy stares quietly at me. At least this way I’ll look like a vagrant and not a clown smeared along a window. Another child might giggle at seeing a grown-up, willingly filthy, sweaty, visibly enraged, but not this one. He puts out a hand, seeking reassurance, and I take it. Like any eight-year-old’s, his hand is clammy, sticky. Hard not to drop it.

The Sun has finished its desultory hump of an arc across the Western horizon. Red-gold, like pissing blood. I turn my back on the hills we’re heading towards in order to stare behind us. The crumbling facility my cult calls home remains visible, a concrete bulge sat on the horizon like a pigeon’s severed wing. It’s an ugly thing, reclaimed from one of those artless, mid-70s shopping centres, but it’s home. Was home. The former nail parlour I claimed as my sacred domain, still with my toothbrush in it, my grandmother’s jewellery, and my other pair of shoes. All of that’s behind me now, because nobody will ever learn.

I can’t see the black flags of smoke from diesel engines, but I pull my boy away from the roadside and into the thicket separating it from the river anyway.

We start moving, and dry twigs crackle under my feet. The leaves are dust now, a red film over the blackened roots and thorns. Overhead the branches knit together but no longer block out the luridly glowing sky. When I glance behind us for the hundredth time, the Eastern sky is darkening. Brown-red, now, more like my piss. My bladder cramps but the sting of relieving it is worse. 

Dizzy, I unscrew the lid of my canteen and take a few sips before I give it to the boy. He takes a mouthful, then another. I have to take the canteen from his hands and return it to the carabiner on my belt.  I know any other kid would wrinkle with frustration, but not him.

I almost want to pinch him. Tug on his cheek until he wails, anything but this lamb-like, glassy stare – but it’s what I made him. And it keeps us alive, now, this unprotesting boy any mother would kill to have. I coax him along, the soft words coming only with difficulty. To my adult ears, my tone sounds sickly-sweet, insincere – because it is. But it’s enough to get him jogging now the drugs are no longer slowing him down. We’re making good time, even though his short legs could never outrun the women and men after us.

We always want quiet kids, obedient kids, we want that peace. But it isn’t natural. My boy walks faultlessly beside me, never distracted, never looking away from the narrow path through the trees. I turn to watch our backs and he catches me, putting out a small arm to keep me from tumbling over a root that slithers away when I glare at it. His doe-soft eyes meet mine, watchful. 

“Thanks,” I croak. I keep my voice quiet, though my ruined throat couldn’t shout if I wanted it to. His rosy cheeks dimple in a smile. I’ve sometimes wondered if it’s on purpose – the cuteness. It gets him what he wants from the grown-ups, after all, those hard people who stonewall tantrums and snotty cries for help.

A root cracks beneath my boot, loud as a gunshot. I freeze, holding my boy close. Another dry crack rattles between the tree trunks. A third, and the oak branch twenty feet to my right explodes into splinters.

They’ve brought the guns. They might have brought all four of them, because it’s me, because it’s him. All four rifles and all seventy-six bullets are more than enough to put down a runaway and her stolen kid.

I run, dragging my boy with me. Underneath his borrowed anorak his white robes catch on his legs as he sprints, trips, sprints,scrambling ahead of me, falling behind me. We weave through the trees erratically, twisting and turning like two tied hares in the crossfire. Our assailants aren’t visible through the trunks; they’re firing blindly. Gunfire cracks, hard to pinpoint as it echoes among the trees, but I can guess: to our left and our right, our pursuers about to close in on us. I grab my boy’s arm and pull him down a rocky slope. The world tilts and tumbles—up is down, down is pain. We stumble down and hit the bottom hard. I shove him flat against the ground and kneel beside him, our chests heaving, breath sharp against the cold air. 

The dull snap of the guns stops and we crouch. I press my finger to his lips, and he breathes through his nose, trying to be quiet. Our breath mists in the night air, lit only by the dull red of the night sky. 

They’ve lost us? All I did was throw us down a hillside. Without me, they are idiots, but are they really that stupid? Where did they –

“Give him back, Annie!” 

Laura’s voice cuts through the quiet, sharp and deliberate.

Her voice has a condescending, lilting edge, enunciating each half of my name separately. That girl is particularly irritating when she has the upper hand. She had the same tone when she was knee-high, smug because she’d made me mad. 

“Walk away,” I hiss. The whites of my boy’s eyes flash in his round face. “Go quietly but quickly. Go!” 

He reaches for me when I duck down and creep away with my knees bent, crawling back up the bluff towards the others. I put my finger to my lips for a second before crawling further away. Sparing a glance over my shoulder shows me his back disappearing into the scrubby undergrowth. The bottom of his white gown is a rabbit’s flashing cottontail. 

Laura wheedles, closer now, “A-nnie! You’re smarter than this. What are you trying to save him from?”

The dust on my hands is black with the dried rain. On all fours still, I creep forward until I am three trees away from my boy, at the top of the hillock. I stand and pin myself to the rough bark with a deep breath. 

It isn’t enough to slip into the night. They need to know why they’ve lost that boy. Lost me.

“It’s not worth it.” My desiccated voice breaks partway through the sentence.

Laura doesn’t reply. She knows where I am, and she thinks she’s got the better of my temper, like she used to. Heavy boots stomp through the forest towards me, hitting the dry earth between the roots like drums. If I were a better hero, I’d stay still until they find me, distract them to let my boy escape, but he’ll get nowhere if I die here. 

The dull red of the night sky gives me little light to work with. I have to walk hunched over, fingertips touching the ground to feel for rocks and roots. Torch beams wink in and out between the tree trunks. I put bushes between them and me, but the leaves have long since fallen from them, and crumbled to dust.

Somewhere in the forest, my boy runs away from us, and I can’t hear him, so he’s listened to me. I strain my ears for signs of my pursuers.

“Psst. Psst!”

A moonlike face appears, surrounded by the blonde mane which is now tangled with dried leaves and twigs. My boy, bent over to fit into a tunnel formed by the branches of a dense bush. I make a shooing motion, but he won’t move. The drums of my cult’s boots grow closer. Nobody is shooting yet.

“Do as you’re told,” I whisper. Do as I say, not as I do. Or, fuck off, kid. I glare at him as fiercely as I ever have and, while he shrinks into himself, he doesn’t turn away from me. If I did as I was told, he’d be dead now, and kids aren’t stupid. They’re mimics, not machines – even this one.

There’s only one way to make him move. I shrug off my backpack, drop onto my hands and knees and join him in the crawlspace, teeth gritted. Pushing my backpack ahead of me, I shuffle, push, shuffle, push again. Stones dig into my shins and twigs poke my shoulders, my thighs. It’s dark enough inside this bush that all I can see of him is his white-clad legs and his pale hands. My coat blends into the shadows along with his dirty hair.

He leads me through the thick undergrowth, guided by the same instinct as fawns and young boar. When we emerge into the red glow of a clearing I’m scratched, bruised and bleeding. The trees thin out at the edge of the thicket. Beyond is the river, the boat, and our only chance of slipping away before a bullet finds my back, taking with me any chance of that helpless child finding a new home. We sprint across the red dust towards a short escarpment. I run down, pell-mell, arms awkwardly held up. My boy plants himself on his arse and slides down as if on an imaginary sled, sending pebbles skittering towards the embankment below 

At the bottom, he stops, but my momentum almost pitches me forward into the red-black river Fye. Its metallic stink wafts upward. Blood, from the rain, washed down from the weeping mountains, putrefying as it flows.

“We’re almost there, kid.” I brush a cloud of dust off the front of my jeans. “You remember when Laura took you along the river? The boat? Yeah? You think you can run that far?” 

He nods in an exaggerated motion and takes off, legs and arms pumping with effort. After sprinting already, my dried up husk of a body has trouble keeping up with someone half my height on the level ground. My breath rattles and clicks in my throat. 

Crimson bathes the scene. The moon will be up now, with no trees to block our view of it. I shield my eyes with my hand and keep my gaze fixed on the concrete as we run.

“Don’t look up,” I bite out. My boy reaches up and pulls his hood forward without breaking his stride to block his vision of the sky. The sight behind us is drawing my attention too much to worry more about what’s above us. Men and women stepping out from the thicket, adjusting their caps to block the moonlight from their eyes. Red light glints from the barrels of their guns. 

I hold my ground, glaring at each of them in turn, but they duck their heads, caps hiding them from my view. I knew they were cowards, because the only thing worse than a child-killer is someone who can stand by and watch it happen to save their own skin.

The adults stir, their mass parting sheep-like to allow a smaller figure through. Laura. 

Two thin legs and a thick fur coat. Her sunglasses are large and dark on her face. She looks, from this distance, like a hunched fly. Fourteen years old, barely. All of them, from young James to stopped old Hatty, crowd around her. In my absence she’ll be their prophet now, the only wolf left among them. Her kitten heels click on the concrete beside the river as she strides toward me, leaving the others behind.

“God!” Laura calls the name with the same sharp condescension as she does mine. “God, can you hear me?”

My boy skids to a halt, hands covering his ears. He’s safe from what’s coming, but he’s still frightened. That’s something he’ll have to live with if he’s going to survive. The urge grows in my stomach, a pull at first quiet, then greater even than my thirst. My eyes crawl and itch and then my head snaps up, pulled like a string from my jaw. Small hands reach up and pat at my jaw, then pull my ears, my hair.

The moon. It hangs close, its coppery surface dominating a full quarter of the sky. Its intestines stream out from East to West, each loop as wide as my finger even at this great distance. Blood, scintillating scarlet, boils in the vacuum of space. Its light banishes the stars. 

I’m not used to it. Guts an entire country could squeeze through, spooled in the emptiness. My calves cramp, instinct telling me to flee back into the trees, into the darkness where the moon can’t see. But I’m pinned to the ground by an awareness that bubbles like a blister in the ruined sky.

The other adults, the ones with guns, will be craning upwards too. If he gets to the boat, I won’t have to drag him. We might stand a chance.

“Go to Laura’s boat,” I say, unable to look down. “Quickly.”

Tears fill my eyes, but I can’t blink. My boy scuffs his feet, moving slowly at first, then breaking into the rapid tap-tap-tap of a sprint. 

God’s chorister soon drowns it out, the voices of the children I gave Her resonating from the ruined moon that hangs in the atmosphere in Earth’s orbit. A bell, stretched taught, percussive growls, a chittering, warbling noise like a dial-up connection. Screams, cries of joy. Dropped jewellery. The hiss of sunlight and the wail of awe. She sings and sings in Her stolen voices as she approaches from the dark side of the moon. A bifurcated limb reaches forward in the reflected light from the moon’s boiling blood. Claws, shimmering sails of flesh pulsating with inner light the colour of a beloved memory, grasp the air, hungry for more gifts. The searchlight of Her eye sweeps over us rapaciously, roiling with all the galaxies She has seen. 

My stomach cramps around nothing. My mouth floods with saliva that my body has no liquid to spare for. I can’t lower my head to retch, and I swallow the burning bile with a twitch and a cough. My body wants to run to Her, leap towards Her through space. I’d be Hers, but the planet’s gravity won’t let me go. I am Hers, but my lower abdomen twists and gripes with the adrenaline filling my every cell. The same magnetism compelled us to throw every precious thing we had at Her. With my hands empty, my body wants to give Her my own ruined body.

 God emerges into the sunlight not blocked by the Earth. Radiance reflects from Her scales and into my eyes. Still I can’t look away. She demands our attention, even if we’re blinded by it. The pain lances from my pupils to the back of my skull in wet, heavy waves. The song beats against my hearing, the muscles in my ears spasm with a sound like an insect is caught against my eardrum.

If I touched Her, I’d burn up in an instant. Fear and love and searing, unthinkable light. 

“God,” Laura says. She’s next to me, clear as if the wrath of the entire world wasn’t vibrating through the air. It’s just God and Laura and the light in here, in my skull, in the whole of me. Laura’s hand slips under my arm, taking hold of it. She wraps her arms around my tricep like we’re on a shopping trip. Me, and Laura, beside this little string of a river, and God’s gaze as precise as a lepidopterist’s needle.

Laura says, “God, you know Annie. I know you never spoke directly, since she was too old when you came…”

The song softens and stills at her voice.

Oh God.

“You recognise her? Of course you do! She’s sent so many little singers to you. So many souls. You’re sounding so lovely. Isn’t she just the best, aren’t they good children? Always doing what they’re told, she made sure of it…”

No. They were all children, no matter what I did to them. All but this one, too young to remember a white sun, a white moon, a blue sky.

Laura’s manicured nails dig into my skin. “So I have to wonder… Why him? Why was it so easy the first ten, twenty times, and not now?”

Her nails pop through the top layer of skin. Her wet fingers slide on my arm and sink in again. “Why’s he special?”

God’s gaze floods my eyes. There’s black spots among the white, growing and coalescing.

“It was never easy. Enough is enough,” I wheeze. 

“This was your idea, you bitch!” Laura is stronger than my boy is. Her hands grab fistfuls of my hair and haul my head down. Laura’s face is a solar eclipse, a circle of tear-stained pink skin around the black in the centre of my vision. I reach blindly behind me, tucking the boy against my legs. The other adults are still pinned in place, and will be no threat to him. Laura, though, could shove him in the river out of spite if I don’t keep her attention on me.

I turn my head so Laura’s tight lips and flared nostrils are visible from the corner of my eye. 

“I’m doing this for you. You’ve got my genes, Laura, we’re early bloomers. Then God won’t listen any more. Don’t you understand? These people follow you because they think God showed you mercy.”

“She did show me mercy! When you offered me up, She spared me! I was more useful to Her here!” Laura stamps her foot, wooden heel clacking on the concrete.

 “You and I both know that’s not what happened.” God wants precious things, after all. It’s hard to spare something you didn’t even notice.

“Shut up.”

“It’s not worth it. None of this was ever worth it. It’s my fault you think that it is, but it’s not.”

The guts of the moon spill out, broken like the papier-mâché shell of the lamb Laura made for me when she was six. Up there, perched on the moon She broke, the pathetic woman-child whose skin glows with blinding radiance. She drinks in our adoration, our disgust, anything that means we are Hers.

I put my hands on Laura’s shoulders. Under her fur coat she is still so thin, as if by starving her body she can postpone her menarche, her adulthood in God’s eyes, and She will still listen to her when I didn’t. God loves children. God has no affection for children, but She loves them, the way I loved my clip-on earrings as a girl.

“Laura. In the whole time we’ve been giving Her these kids, did She ever thank us?”

“Of course not. It’s what She’s owed.”

“No, listen. When I had him on the altar I thought to myself… did this put the moon back? Did this stop the blood in the rain? Or do… literally anything?”

“Are you kidding me? It didn’t get any worse, did it? What else can we ask for?”

I wipe the tears off my face, blinking hard. “That’s a shit reason to kill children.”

A shit reason, but good enough. Telling Laura what I told myself, the words ring hollow, and I scoff. That boy isn’t special, except that he never remembered a white sun, a white moon, clear rain, pure water. He was just the last in a long line of mistakes.

God is listening. Her presence flutters as butterfly wings, like it did in those early days, when She noticed our songs. She lapped up the stories we told, to the radio waves leaking from our planet. Our life stories echoed in the caverns of Her chest. So She came. At first they thought she was a meteor, the kind that strikes the planet like a bell and rings out the end of an epoch. But She slowed in the void between Earth and Venus, and Her mind reached out to us.

“What choice do we have? You said it yourself,” Laura sneers.

“We can choose to let go.”

First it was the music, which became wedding rings, which became birth certificates. Then baby teeth, locks of hair. More: cribs, photographs vanishing from phones, laughter stolen from mouths. If it mattered to us, it mattered to God. We gave Her bric-a-brac and she gave us miracles. 

And in return for so much nothing, wonders. Auroras in the Sahara. Litters of piglets dozens strong, a real-life Jack and the Beanstalk bursting into the sky overnight and showering Liverpool with golden corn.

And what were we to do, when all of those ephemera, the objects we couldn’t bear to part with, took our memories with them? So what, if the drawer of keepsakes was empty, I still had my sister, in my heart. Until the tape recorder vanished, and I forgot the sound of her voice. 

More, God told us, turning the rivers red. Grow and grow and grow, a cellular explosion. Drunk and giddy on our sentiment, She clenched Her fists the size of mountains with all the petulance of a child.

When She perched on the moon expectantly that night, we had nothing left to give. 

The moon cracked. In the shower of its blood, I gave Her the first of the children, and She crept away, cradling his precious voice. 

Someone had to: it’s the trolley problem. A few kids were tied to one track. On the other, I saw every living thing on this planet in the path of that train. So I pulled the lever. They’d have died anyway, if the Earth cracked in half, or the Sun winked out, or any other fate God could have caused in a heartbeat.

They needed to be loved. I made those children impossible to deny. Adoration followed them like wolves. God practically drooled over it, the way the other adults cooed. She salivates now. 

Sobs burble in the wind. Laura pushes me away, stepping back to join the semi-circle of adults and elder teens who watch us uneasily.

I meet Laura’s eyes. She always had this way of showing me who I really was. It’s why I hated her. I’m not here for that boy, and she knows that. 

Laura, who wasn’t precious, wasn’t loved.  Whose little body, shaking on the altar, failed to inflame God’s avarice. The others feared the reckless daughter that God spared, not knowing the truth. She wasn’t special, wasn’t given a higher purpose. Her meagre frame wasn’t good enough, because I never cherished her. Rejection finally made her worthy, someone to be admired. And now her body is changing, and she’ll be that unloved girl again. The one I scorned.

She says, “It didn’t bother you before.”

“He’s the first one who didn’t try to run away. It made me realise what we’re sacrificing to drag this out.”

“He’s the first of a generation that will keep us alive without question.”

I wipe tears from my eyes. Not sadness. Mostly nausea. “Doesn’t that disturb you?”

“I don’t think it’s better if they fight for their lives. Do you? Is that what it’s about?” Laura sneers at me, but there’s a flicker of concern in her eyes: that what she’s chiding me with might be true.

I’m not here for the boy, or Laura. I’m not even here for myself. I’m here because those idiots gathered by the river need to face the truth. No world is worth it if it’s built on the blood of children. The only one here more stupid than them is me.

I’d have struggled. Always struggled. No matter what my mother did to me. 

So what have I done to that boy? I look down into the same lamb-like stare I’ve been meeting with contempt for eight years. Since those eyes were baby blue. 

We didn’t even name him. It made it easier to let go. God’s single eye opens wider, long neck snaking forward to fix us with Her stare. 

It doesn’t bode well for the rest of humanity. If someone else were alive, they’d surely have her attention, and not a catfight by a river. A catfight, and a little boy.

“Just look at him, Laura,” I say, tugging him forward. “Could you do it with your own hands?”

Laura sniffs. “I was never stupid enough to think letting you do it was any better. So what. Just give him here. I’ve got good aim.”

She swipes at us, but I laugh, a single croak, as an idea occurs to me. I know how to win this. “You want to fight me for him, Laura? You want to raise the next one, too? From a baby, of course. With all that entails.”

Laura steps back. “One of us isn’t a control freak. I’ll get help.”

“You trust them to?” 

Her mouth pinches. I say, “You and the next luckless little scamp. Look forward to that. You want him? There’s more where he came from. Trust me, they’re not born obedient. Mostly, they’re born hungry.”

“Just go,” Laura spits. I don’t insult her by asking her to come with me as I turn my back. I risk a peek skyward. For the second time, God peers down at Laura, and then away. God flicks all four of Her velvet wings and crawls away A collected moan of relief rises from the crowd. Murmurs. Eyes rubbed. I tense, pushing my boy behind me in case they raise their guns again.

Laura lifts her bluebottle glasses to wipe her tears, smudging red-black dirt across her face. She raises both her hands and turns away from me for the last time. 

There will be no more gunfire. Laura’s changed her mind for less, though. I grab my boy’s arm and break into a shambling run towards the boat. My daughter raises her voice, and talks about mercy, before the hiss of a wide, shallow waterfall drowns her out. My boots sink into the soft silt of the bar, deeper when I lift my boy up to keep him from sinking up to his thighs.

The boat. It’s still where we left it on our last fishing trip, its fibreglass hull picked out by last of the light reflecting from God’s scales. I trip over the edge of the tarpaulin, nearly flinging us both forward for the second time tonight.I set my boy down where the sand and silt are thick enough for a small body to stand on and catch my breath. 

“Let’s go.”

My boy wipes his nose on my coat. Its waterproof surface only succeeds in smearing his snot across his cheek. “So I won’t get to sing with God?”

“I – no, you won’t. But that’s okay. God is very very old, She can wait for you. Let me help you with the boat, and we can go to town.”

The answer is the thud of a small body belly flopping over the boat’s keel. I help my boy clear the edge and press my back to the boat’s edge. My boots slip in the silt twice before I gain purchase and succeed in shoving the boat, and my boy, into the water. Once it floats I splash artlessly alongside, heave one heavy thigh over, then the other. The oars are heavy in my hands. I manage two long pulls with them to get us into the current, and then slither bonelessly into the footwell. No half measures. I’m saving this kid, even if it is for the wrong reasons.

The current will take us. I splay my arms and stare upward, at the frothing eruption of blood, at the mauve nest of intestines that never led to a mouth. 

“Mama, where’s town?”

“Just… holler when we’re down the river a bit. There’ll be… you know… someone. I’m tired, kiddo, just… we’ll worry about it in the morning. Let me sleep.”

I unclasp my canteen from my belt and stick my arm out until he takes it from me. My arm drops to the bottom of the boat with a thud.

I take three deep breaths, and fall still. The silence pools, swells. Crying fills the air, high and mewling. Dozens of voices join together in mourning. The children at God’s side wail, echoing across the countryside, between my ears. Louder and louder they grow.

I remain still, watching the few stars strong enough to be seen through the red blow of the moon’s blood. The North Star fades first, and then her neighbours, and then their neighbours. Spite. She’s eating the stars. I lay where I fell, eyes on the moon as the last of the stars falter and fade. My breath mists in short bursts, so I hold it, focusing on the moon and waiting for a shadow.

It stays lit, ruddy and dull, but lit. On the other side of the Earth, the Sun still shines. It will rise tomorrow. It’s not over yet. There’s at least one more tomorrow for my boy after all. 

God’s wings billow in the dying night. But my boy is free, and the river, while red, will carry our boat to safety. Until She takes that last, shiny bauble out of the sky and freezes us to death.

There’s got to be somebody else left alive in Norfolk. 

I think.