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think about the Harsh I get worried they’ll come after me for killing their king.” Owen stared moodily out into the snow.
    “They were there, Owen.”
    “I believe you.”
    He made tea and found some biscuits in a tin under the table. They were a little bit stale but Cati and Owen ate them anyway. Then they sat in silence, listening to the wind outside.
    “Owen?” Cati’s voice seemed to come from under the sleeping bag.
    “Yes?”
    “Do you know a terrible thing?”
    “What?”
    “Even though the Harsh are coming, I’m kind of glad.”
    “Glad? About the Harsh?”
    “But it means that there’ll be a few people about the place—we’ll have to wake the Resisters. There’ll be things happening. Do you ever get lonely?”
    “Lonely? I kind of like being on my own, but it’s not like being the Watcher. Besides, I’m at school, and there’s my mother.…”
    Owen suddenly realized just how solitary Cati’s life as the Watcher must be—looking after the sleeping Resisters and the Workhouse on her own day after day.
    “Tell me what you’ve been doing all year,” he said hesitantly. And she started to tell him about the patrols, and the long nights when she stood guard on the Workhouse battlements because something had told her there was danger nearby. How she would wake fearful in the night and hold conversations in her head with the Sub-Commandant, her father, pretending that he was alive again. He had been the Watcher before her.
    Owen didn’t interrupt. It was rare for Cati to admit to fear and loneliness. Since her father had been lost following the Harsh’s first attack, she had been more and more driven by her sense of duty. She talked on while the snow fell on the perspex over their heads and the stove hissed gently. Owen found himself talking about the years after his own father had gone missing and his mother had been in a fog, so he’d had to look after her. How he’d been treated as an outsider at school and had always felt different.
    Afterward they would both think of that evening, the storm raging outside and darkness falling, two friends poised on the cusp of great events, sharing simple things until, at the last, the candles guttered and went out and they fell asleep, Cati in the sleeping bag and Owen with his head on her knee.
    Owen woke before Cati. The first thing he noticed was the silence. The storm had passed. Somehow during the night he had pulled a blanket over himself, but he was still cold. He was sure that something else had wokenhim. Slipping out from under the blanket, he went to the entrance and stepped out.
    The world had been transformed. Stars glittered, hard and cold, in a black sky, and moonlight fell on a landscape turned white, trees and walls outlined in snow, with wind-sculpted drifts piled against banks and hedges. He breathed in and the air seared his lungs. And as he looked up toward the distant mountains he saw great bands of color, shimmering and eerie, high in the northern sky. The northern lights!
    Then he heard a voice, carrying across the snowy fields in the clear still air—his mother calling him. He felt a pang of guilt. He could hear the anxiety in her voice. He felt a movement beside him. Cati had come out of the Den.
    “She must be worried sick,” Cati said. “We’d better go to her.”
    “We?” Owen said.
    “The time for hiding in the shadows has passed, I think,” Cati said, “if the Harsh are back. Besides, your mother is from Hadima. I don’t think anyone could get mad at me for consulting her.”
    “Consulting her?”
    “On whether I should wake the Resisters immediately and get the Workhouse ready for war.”
    It was as if the lonely, uncertain girl of the previous night had never been. Cati set off determinedly through the snow. Owen ducked back into the Den. When he emerged the Mortmain and his grandfather’s maps were tucked safely in his jacket.
    The snow was deep and powdery and hard to walk in. It had drifted chest high in