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and a scrabbling scream as someone realises that they survived alone. And there, right at the back, in amongst a knot of people coated in bruises and blood, there she was.
    He should have run to her. Should have called out to her at least.
    But she looked up anyway, as if she already knew. And her body began to move, a half-turn, as if it still wasn’t too late, as if she could still run if she really tried. Then she stopped, and she looked at him. orn pushed through the survivors, towards his waiting fe, and tried to not to see her look of despair.

Chapter 8
    Freya - Thursday, 15th March - 10.19pm
    They had left the television on. Hadn’t been able to bring themselves to turn it off, not whilst helicopters circled above leaping flames, orange sprinkled with flashes of blue. Freya watched it, couldn’t seem to pull her eyes away from it. Without thinking she sipped the tea, so sweet that her teeth stung, sinuses humming. It scalded her lips.
    They were waiting. After all, what was there left to do but wait? Freya had called the airline, once, twice, her fingernails dredging into the phone as it chirped, engaged, again and again. Her mother was at the table now, slumped into the chair like all the bones had simply vanished from her body, her head resting on her hands, a puddle of tears gathering on the table top beneath the shadow of her hair. Richard beside her, so close it seemed that he would crawl into her lap if only she would allow him. He hadn’t spoken. Not since the television flared to life, the screen lighting up with fire and snow. He just stared.
    “It’s stopped snowing.” Freya’s grandmother was drying dishes, rubbing a tea towel around and around and around the outside of a mixing bowl that had once reached the stage of dry and was now on its way back to wet. Her brow furrowed, as if in concentration, eyes red rimmed. “Well, for now. They say we’ll be like this for days yet. So much for Spring. My flowers have had it.”
    It could not have been more than moments after the world had changed that her grandparents arrived. She remembered that it was before her mother sank into the chair, a puppet whose strings have been cut. Before Richard began to cry. They had been hanging there, in that world between the past and the future, when the front door had swung open. And their breath had caught, and even though none of them said it, they were all thinking the same thing. That they were wrong and he was home.
    Then her grandparents, sweeping in like a breath of Siberian air, the argument that they had been having about something she couldn’t possibly remember now still fresh on their lips. Halting in the doorway, as if the fear hit them head on, buffeting them so that they had forgotten the latest affront to their patience, the snow and the long car ride. Their gazes trickling towards the television. Faces changing with the knowing.
    Freya’s grandfather sat beside her, hands folded. Ignoring his own mug of over-stewed tea.
    “You know they still haven’t gritted our road. I’m going to write a letter. Ridiculous. Someone’ll have to die…”
    She stopped, stumbling on the word so that it came out as little more than a squeak. A deep breath. “…before they get around to it. Then they’ll be gritting it in the middle of August.” Her grandmother pulled out a chair, tea towel clutched tight between her fingers. Her lips were trembling now.
    “Betty.” Her grandfather’s voice was thick, dense with years of smoking rolls up. He’d given up, years ago now, but still when Freya thought of him, it was that smell that she thought of.
    “What?”
    “This tea tastes like battery acid.”
    Freya’s grandmother rolled her eyes, lips pursing like she wanted to say something but, just this once, would refrain. Freya bit her lip, pushing down a flush of anger. Wanted to tell them to shut up. Wanted to shout. Look at the television. Don’t you understand what’s happening here? But she drank her tea