The Golden Hour

Millie smelled the lake before she saw it through the trees. Something damp and almost peaty cut through the resinous smell of pine and spruce — a distant, olfactory memory of algae, earth after rain, and an aquarium. Then she heard it: not the murmur of a stream or a river, but a rhythmic, liquid sound as small waves driven by the wind struck the rocks along the shore. And then the path turned sharply, and they came out directly onto the lake. The pine thicket parted all at once, as if a curtain had been drawn aside, and Millie had to shield her eyes with her palm against the full force of the evening sun. Hazel scrub on either side of the path gave way to low, spreading bushes with glossy leaves, and underfoot the dry pine needles turned to sand — first coarse and threaded with roots, then finer, paler. The air changed in an instant: resin and dry bark vanished, replaced by something fishy, with an undertow of algae and wet feathers. The lake was golden, the colour of honey, its small waves like fish scales. The reeds along the bank stood almost still, the wind not reaching here. Only the surface moved, steadily, as if something beneath it were breathing. The water shimmered at their feet, shifting between gold, black, and an intense blue. She stopped.

‘Come on,’ said Nina, ahead of her, without turning her head.

‘Just a moment,’ said Millie.

She had not stopped to admire the view, though the view was genuinely beautiful, and in other circumstances she might have appreciated it more. She had stopped because her legs were heavy as stone and her heart was beating too fast. It was that particular fluttering she knew well by now — not fear, just physical exhaustion. Her body saying, Enough. She breathed through her nose, slowly, the way she’d been taught to breathe when physical effort became troublesome. Sweat had stuck her shirt to her back. That blue top in thin cotton, which had looked so good in the changing room, was after six hours of walking nothing but a wet rag clinging to everything.

Millie took a deep breath and adjusted the shoulder straps of her rucksack.

Nina had stopped a few paces ahead, at the boundary between forest and shore, looking left, then right, with that focused expression Millie had known for three years, which always meant her friend was analysing the situation. Nina behaved as though she was always and everywhere analysing everything before she spoke. Well, perhaps not always, not everything — but her sharp eyes were forever jumping from one thing to another, and she could fall into silences of several minutes, thinking something through intensely. She was wearing a dark blue short-sleeved shirt that was not the least bit sweaty, not even under her arms; dark shorts above the knee that apparently were not chafing her thighs at all; and walking boots that looked as if they had not covered many kilometres of trail. Nina was somehow different.

Both of them had large rucksacks, stuffed to bursting, with which they had set out from camp that morning. Sleeping bags and sleeping mats rolled on top, inside their clothing and tins of food in such quantities that Millie had protested when shouldering hers that morning. Now, at the end of a day spent marching with only one break, she felt that carrying all of it ought to count as an act of heroism. Nina behaved as though she had no equally loaded rucksack on her back and their march through the forest had been a stroll in a city park. Strapped to the side of hers was a small two-person tent.

‘We’ll camp here,’ said Nina, when Millie came down to the water’s edge and stood beside her.

The bank here was sandy and flat, overgrown with reeds on the waterside and with low, spreading bushes with glossy leaves on the forest side. A little further off grew willows and a few solitary birches. Behind them the ground rose gently, forming a kind of natural shelter — a bank of old pine roots, at its foot something like a flat clearing, covered in pine needles, dry and soft as a carpet.

‘It’s a good spot,’ Millie agreed.

‘Yes.’ Nina was already taking off her rucksack. A moment later she had found three large stones somewhere and arranged them a little back from the shore. She gathered up an armful of brushwood and dropped it between them.

‘I’ll help,’ offered Millie, but the other girl just waved her hand. Yes, that was another difference between them. Millie, a year younger and barely twelve, was short and round. She ran less well and tired more quickly. Nina, thirteen, was tall, wiry, devastatingly capable, and equally sharp. In the field, she could hold her own against the boys and had shamed more than a few of them — older ones included — with her knowledge and skills. Now, having gathered a small stock of wood beside the prepared fire ring, she was covering the beach at the lake’s edge in quick, short strides, as if assessing the situation and forming a mental plan of everything.

Millie watched her for a moment, then looked away and began pulling off her walking boots. Her socks were quite wet. Her toes were white from the damp, though mercifully unblistered. She dug her feet into the sand — it was still warm from the sun, and it was so good, so unexpectedly pleasant, that she immediately felt better, as if some tightly knotted thing inside her tired body had finally let go.

‘Is your sleeping bag dry?’ Nina asked briskly, stopping beside her. ‘That rain at noon — brief, but it was driving hard.’

‘It’s dry,’ Millie murmured, giving herself over to the sand under her feet and the warmth of the setting sun. The lake was golden, the colour of honey, its small waves like fish scales. The golden hour, the girl thought, gazing into the shimmering spectacle. That was probably what it was called. That time of day photographers loved.

‘You know,’ said Nina, as if reading her thoughts, ‘the golden hour never lasts a full hour, anywhere in the world. The further north you go, the shorter it is. What about your feet?’

‘What about them?’ The younger guide stretched out on the sand and half-closed her eyes. Typical Nina — she reads your thoughts, offers some piece of information no one else would know, and then is piercingly practical, organised, and far-sighted.

‘You haven’t blistered, have you? This evening you truly must wash them, dry them thoroughly, and I’ll give you some powder.’ Millie was sometimes alarmed by how matter-of-fact and competent Nina was. Of course, it was thoroughly useful, which was why they had done everything together for a third camp running. Partly also because Millie valued Nina’s spine-tingling competence, while others seemed a little afraid of it and disguised this under a show of contempt. So they had paired up: their duties, cooking, badges, outings. This year, too — they had gone out to make their wilderness shelters together. They had spent the night in the forest, beside a small fire, eating slightly stale bread and mushrooms that Nina was one hundred percent certain were edible — which was hardly an achievement, since any girl guide can recognise chanterelles. What bothered Millie was the lack of signal; she noted with some surprise that, even in this decade, there were places the all-powerful arm of mobile telephony could not reach. They had slept through to dawn, gathered their things, and returned to camp, where a surprise awaited them. Firstly, the phones still had no signal, and secondly…

‘Will you put up the tent? I’ll get the fire going and heat something up.’ Nina’s voice broke into her thoughts.

‘Do I have to?’

‘Do you want to sleep another night under just your sleeping bag? We’re no longer doing this to get a badge.’ Something in Nina’s voice, for the first time since morning, made plain that she too was at least a little shaken by the whole situation — more than she had shown up to that point.

Typical Nina — delegating tasks, even though she wasn’t even a patrol leader. When she spoke, it often sounded like orders. On the other hand, it suited Millie. Someone else could make the decisions when she herself had not much head for it. She unclipped the tent bag from Nina’s rucksack and pulled everything out onto the sand. A small igloo, two-person, but one of the smallest kind. They had found it in the patrol leader’s tent when they had searched the camp that morning on returning from the shelters. Nina had decided the tent would certainly come in useful, as they didn’t know where they might end up sleeping. She had apparently been right. She was right with remarkable frequency and had a reliable sense of what needed doing and how. As though she were constantly thinking everything through, analysing everything.

The set contained an outer flysheet, an inner groundsheet, and two fibreglass poles in sections connected by elastic. Millie hated this. She would have preferred to put up a traditional tent, with a proper mast and guy ropes, rather than wrestle with these sections that fell apart in your hands and sprang back at you. She sighed heavily. She was hot, her back was sweaty, and everything itched. She managed the first flexible pole reasonably well; the second gave her somewhat more trouble. The sections fell apart until she had connected them all — then the tension of the structure finally stabilised it.

She began feeding the first folded rod into the tunnel sewn into the top of the flysheet, and immediately one of the sections caught its metal tip on the edge of the tunnel, and the entire pole fell apart into several pieces.

‘A girl guide does not swear,’ Millie said, almost soundlessly. She glanced over her shoulder. Nina was crouching beside the small fire; two opened tins stood on the stones and were beginning to sizzle. She caught the smell of warming fat. She turned back to the work, methodically pushed the first rod through, and laid the tent flat. Then she began manoeuvring the second. It went well enough to the halfway point, but when she reached the crossing of the poles, everything started to separate and tangle again. By the time the second support had made it in one piece through its channel, she was on the edge of tears.

She pushed the metal ends into the plastic eyelets sewn into the tent floor. One, then another; at the third, the previous two pins slipped from theirs. Millie swallowed the urge to cry and tried again, this time alternating them. After the struggle with the second, the third went in cleanly. The tent stuck up in the air, a disorderly mound of waterproof fabric. She wrestled briefly with the last pin. The poles tensed and curved like the ribs of a dome, and the shell of the small igloo took its proper shape. Millie looked around, then took the pegs and drove them into the corners. She crawled inside and was arranging the inner groundsheet when she heard her companion’s voice.

‘Clear the ground properly, so we’re not sleeping on fir cones and stones.’

She sighed inwardly. She was miserable. The morning’s surprise had already taken a toll on her mood. The long march, her aching calves, sweat running down her back, and a body that refused to cooperate, had added their contribution. And now, naturally, this. She quickly fastened the inner tent in the correct places, backed out on hands and knees, and secured the middle to the end. Then she pulled out the pegs, lifted the whole thing, and moved it. She collected a few fir cones and small twigs, scuffed away with her foot the pine needles that had accumulated above the line of sand, and set the little two-person tent back in place. Then she drove the pegs in again.

‘Food’s ready,’ said Nina.

Millie nodded. She was a little proud, a little furious, and a little past caring because she was simply tired. They sat by the fire and ate the potted meat with their mess tins. It was nothing special in flavour, but it was warm and nourishing and gave energy, and after a moment the younger guide felt warmth spreading through her entire body. She reached down and undid the button on her shorts. The sweat-soaked shirt had gone cold because the sun was now finishing its daily journey across the sky, and it was beginning to darken, and with the fading light, the temperature was slowly dropping. They ate quickly, without appetite but with satisfaction. After a while, they were both lying on their backs on the sand, Nina with her knees drawn up, Millie with her bare feet trailing in the water.

Night was coming from the lake. First the far shore darkened, then the water, then the forest on either side, and only the sky held on to some colour — a very deep pink above the tree line, and then black, in which the stars appeared one by one.

Millie looked up instinctively for something she could identify. Orion — no, it’s a summer sky; Orion is sleeping. The Great Bear — yes, there it is, it’s always there, someone always sees it. The Plough, the handle, the stars pointing to the Polaris — she found it. Nina had once said that the Pole Star is actually quite faint, and people always imagine it brighter than it is. And it’s not actually one star. Millie had checked afterwards, and it was true — she had expected something spectacular, and she got an ordinary star, a little brighter than its neighbours, nothing more. But that was enough. You always know where you are, Nina had said, if you know where it is.

The fire was dying down a little. Nina added one more log and sat back down.

‘Shall we sleep?’ Millie said at last. ‘I could put my head down and sleep till morning.’

‘Well, yes, but not like that,’ said Nina, matter-of-factly.

‘Not like what?’ Millie sat up, curious.

‘We need to wash, after a whole day of walking.’

‘Oh.’ The response was not particularly enthusiastic. ‘But it’ll be cold water.’

‘Actually, not quite.’ Nina stood up and looked at the lake. She pulled a towel from her rucksack. ‘In the evening, the water actually seems warmer because there’s less difference in temperature between it and the air.’

Millie watched, spellbound, as Nina pulled off her shorts and shirt, folded them very carefully, and laid them on the sand beside the fire. Her athletic, capable body stood out sharply against the horizon. Millie felt the first prick of envy as she glanced at her own protruding tummy. Nina was wearing sports underwear, branded, bought in a specialist shop no doubt. Millie wore cotton sets from the supermarket. Before the holidays she had wanted to ask her mother for a proper bra but hadn’t had the nerve. That was the second prick.

Then Nina took off her underwear, and Millie looked away because it’s rude to stare. She turned her back to the shore, undressed quickly herself, and waded in. The water was cool — not as cold as she had expected, but submerging her hips was, as always, a certain challenge. When the water reached her navel, she simply threw herself forward and ducked under.

‘Give it a moment, don’t surface yet, you’ll be fine,’ she heard Nina’s voice when she came up. For a while, they swam near the bank, at the limit of the shallows. Millie felt the water remove the layers of the whole day off her. Grime and dust from the road, sweat, physical tiredness, the tension of the march, and the fear from that morning when they had returned to find the camp empty — a fear which until this very moment had sat deep inside her because she had been afraid to touch it.

Millie dived again. The world disappeared for a moment — there was only the dark, cold weight of water and the rush of her blood in her ears. She surfaced, wiped her face, and found that the cold had indeed passed, or at least had stopped being a problem and had become something else. Something alive and bracing. A misty evening vapour hung over the lake; more stars were breaking through the dark blue sky.

They swam for a while in silence, close to the shore.

‘Listen,’ Millie said at last. ‘What did you mean this morning? That these weren’t shelters anymore?’

Nina was quiet for a moment, looking at the sky.

‘You know what I meant.’

Millie did. The game was over; this was real now. She was silent a moment, listening to the frogs and the lap of water. Two girl guides against the whole world. And no telling whether they’d get any badges for it.

‘So what do we do?’

‘We wash and sleep,’ said Nina. ‘And tomorrow we’ll see.’

They shared a single travel wash. Soapy streaks floated on the surface, shimmering with a thin iridescence. They waded out, shook off the water, and dried themselves. The fire still glowed by the tent, casting an orange ring onto the sand. Here, in the open, in the forest above the lake, their nakedness was something different — not like under the showers or at the pool, hedged about with rules and shame and other people’s eyes. She glanced at Nina. She envied Nina her body. Lithe, gymnast-lean, capable. She looked at her own. Round thighs, a soft tummy. Then back at her companion. In the flickering firelight, she caught a dark patch of hair and looked away, feeling as if she were doing something unseemly.

Then she felt a shiver run down her back — partly from the cold and partly from something else. A presentiment, perhaps. Fear of how this would all end. She pulled on dry pants and a T-shirt quickly, rinsed her underwear in the lake, and hung it on one of the tent poles. Nina, without a word, took it down and hung both their sets further off, on a tree. She pushed both rucksacks inside, leaving only the boots, unlaced and with the tongues pulled out, under the flysheet, in case of rain.

The lake’s surface darkened, reflecting the night sky. Only small waves glinted here and there, quicksilver with moonlight. A little while later they were both in the tent, zipped into their sleeping bags.

‘You pitched it well,’ said Nina. Nobody in the whole patrol, the whole troop, the whole district, the whole of the Polish Scouting Association, could offer praise so casually and so uncommittedly. And to praise in such a way that it could take your breath away. From the reeds, the frogs began. Not one or two — an entire chorus, all at once, as if someone had turned a knob and activated them all simultaneously. A deep, self-satisfied sound rising from the undergrowth, rhythmic and unbroken. A damp affirmation of life, which has no need of people whatsoever.

Each dreamt her own dream; by morning, neither could remember it. Millie woke first. Beyond the tent wall, the lake was quiet; the forest was still asleep. Nina was breathing steadily on her side of the igloo.

She wriggled out of her sleeping bag and went outside; she walked barefoot among the trees. She crouched down. She thought that in the forest, all of it was simple — you just crouch down and get on with it. Just as in the evening you take off your clothes and walk into the water; just as you sleep without a pillow and eat half-cold tinned food straight from the tin. Things that required rituals at home just happened here because the forest had no requirements and did not judge. And it did not look at round thighs and a soft tummy with that expression which said you fell short of some standard.

She went to the water’s edge and rinsed her hands. The lake was different at this hour — quieter, as if it belonged to someone other than the person who had owned it the evening before. A chill came off it. She sat on the sand and waited for Nina to wake. She did not have to wait long. After a few minutes, the tent rustled and Nina emerged, ready to take on the world — dressed in shorts and shirt, hair tied back, ready to go, as if the forest were simply another item to be ticked off; she stood beside her, looked at the lake, then at Millie.

‘Did you sleep well?’ she asked.

‘Yes,’ Millie lied.

Nina nodded and went among the trees. Millie looked at the lake. Mist hung low over the water, in long, thin wisps that would vanish in a little while when the sun climbed higher. Somewhere in the reeds, a single duck was calling — it quacked several times, then fell silent, then quacked again. From far away came the cry of terns.

They ate a cold breakfast — they still had some sliced bread from the camp kitchen. They took down the tent quickly, without speaking because there was nothing to speak about. They strapped the sleeping bags and mats to the rucksacks. Millie shouldered hers and felt at once that her back already ached — in advance, before they had even set off.

‘Ready?’ asked Nina.

‘Ready,’ Millie answered, and this time she was not lying. Somewhere on the surface of the lake, a large fish jumped.

They set off along the path from the lake, entered the trees, where a green, trembling shade enclosed them. The surrounding forest had changed imperceptibly — the pines taller, less frequently interspersed with birches, the understory lower and more open. The alders and willows that had grown along the bank had gone. Underfoot, instead of damp sand, they had dry pine needles that rustled at every step. The air smelled different from at the lakeside — less peaty, more resinous, with that barely perceptible scent of warm bark that appears only in a July pine forest when the sun stands high enough to reach the ground through the canopy. Shafts of light cut diagonally through the trees, long and bright, and in each of them something near-invisible danced and turned in the air — spores, pollen, tiny insects. Somewhere high up a jay was screeching, loudly, derisively, as if reproaching someone for some unknown offence.

The path wound a little between the trees, faintly marked in places, used at most by fishermen. After a good hour’s walking, it began to climb. At first only slightly, a barely perceptible rise in the ground, which nevertheless made itself felt with every step. Millie felt her calves tighten. She still had all yesterday’s kilometers in her legs. They didn’t exactly hurt, but going uphill, even a gentle one like this, made each step feel somehow heavier.

‘Nina, are we going the right way?’ Millie checked. The other girl waved the folded map she was holding, as if that were sufficient answer.

Then things got worse because the path began to climb in earnest. On top of that, the trees had thinned out, and they got the sun directly in their faces. Millie tried to remember what had happened to her cap, which she was absolutely certain she had packed. The thought of the camp sent a chill through her. She looked ahead and thought she could see again, behind the silhouette of Nina, the empty assembly ground with the flag hanging limp from its lanyard.

Nothing had suggested the previous day would be different. They had gone out to their wilderness shelters — their Survival badge — two days ago, around midday. The two of them had simply walked off into the forest. Usually patrols went, but Millie had decided she would attempt the Woodcraft badge. To this the troop leader had refused to agree, saying twelve was too young and she wouldn’t let her. Then Nina had proposed they could do ‘something in between,’ and they were given permission. It was one of Nina’s atypical ideas, which Millie loved. So they had gone a few kilometres into the forest, lit a fire, eaten the chanterelles they had found, not much bothered by the fact that somewhere along the way they had lost signal on their phones. It was odd, yes, but they hadn’t really needed them for anything. They had slept, woken moderately damp from the morning dew, and returned to camp as though nothing had happened.

The assembly ground was empty; the flag hung sadly from its lanyard, not raised on the mast. No one was there. Some of the tents had their sides rolled up; they were empty, though most of the belongings were in place — sleeping bags laid out, rucksacks, clothes, boots in disarray under the camp beds. The same in every tent, including those belonging to the leaders. The activity hall was empty too.

‘Perhaps they’re in the dining shelter?’ Millie had suggested. Nina nodded, looking around. She had no better idea, so they set off through the camp. The other two sub-camps looked the same — as if everyone had simply stood up and walked away somewhere. With every step, both girl guides became increasingly aware that the destination of this mass exodus had not been the dining shelter. The forest was quiet — not quiet in the manner of horror films, for they could hear birds, the rustle of trees, the crack of branches, the whisper of leaves and grass. But in a camp with three scout troops, the forest is forever alive with human voices: laughter, shouts, the sound of leaders’ whistles. You hear conversations, songs, the cheerful cries of swimmers; somewhere a radio plays. None of that was here.

The dining shelter was quiet and empty. Wind blew under the canopy between the long, oilcloth-covered tables. They went into the kitchen. Knives lay spread out on the table, being dried. The industrial dishwasher was loaded but not running. The refrigerators were not working either. Everything was still with a ghostly silence. It was not the silence of an empty house — the kind that meets you when you come home from school and your parents are not back yet. It was a silence like when the electricity fails, and you can hear only yourself, your own body, your own thoughts. Similar, but much worse because in a town there are always other sounds, of people and civilisation. Here there was only forest and an abandoned camp. The whole site had vanished. Without a word, without a trace, without a single clue.

They made certain of it. They checked the leaders’ tents, the patrol leader’s lodge, every conceivable place. The radio did not work; there was no electricity; they still had no signal; even the tap water was not running. The older of the two guides dismissed all of this with a shrug — that much was clear: no power, technology doesn’t work. The phones were harder to explain, but ultimately the masts needed power too; perhaps it was a massive outage. The absence of people she could not explain at all. Millie sat down on the bench under the dining shelter canopy, and the tears ran down her cheeks. Nina stood there, as if she weren’t quite sure how to behave. She looked away to one side.

‘We need to move. Showers first, we’re straight from the forest. Then we’ll walk to the nearest town — it’s not far,’ she said after a moment. This was true, but in the sense of motorised travel. On foot, everything takes ten times as long — though she did not say this aloud, as Millie was yet to discover.

‘On foot?!’ she had asked, sniffling.

‘On foot and with rucksacks. These aren’t shelters any more.’ Millie had not understood that statement at the time.

The next half hour they spent walking through the site again. Nina issued instructions, matter-of-fact and specific, pointing to what to take and what to leave. A change of underwear, socks, something warmer. A sleeping mat, a sleeping bag, the small tent found in the troop leader’s things. Tins from the kitchen stores, which Nina spent a long time carefully arranging in their rucksacks, as if they were required to meet some specification for placement. Then sliced bread, bottled water. Then a quick raid on the sanitary block. Water purification tablets, some medicines Millie did not recognise at all, which the older girl did not see fit to explain. They barely spoke to each other because if they spoke, the most important and most frightening question might accidentally be asked.

And then, equipped with an old map from the patrol leader’s lodge, they had set out on the journey that had brought them, after several hours of walking, to the lake at nightfall.

‘Come on, it’ll be flat now.’ Nina’s voice pulled Millie from her reverie. She drew level with her friend and saw that they had emerged onto a tarmac road.

‘And hot,’ she murmured, feeling the warmth rising off the asphalt and seeing in the distance the shimmering heat haze above its surface. It was approaching noon.

‘It won’t be long — from the map, it looks like there’s a village a kilometre from here. We can rest properly there. Can you manage?’ she asked, seeing the younger girl’s expression.

‘I can,’ said Millie briefly, adjusting her rucksack and breathing through her nose. A tin badly placed at the bottom was pressing into her back, but the prospect of stopping — and above all the prospect of being among people again — gave her a lift.

They walked along the edge of the road, beside the ditch, at the bottom of which stood greenish water from which frogs occasionally called. The sun was now a little to their side, but still in their faces. The forest kept them company beyond the ditch, on the right. On the other side of the road stretched fields of rye; still-green ears swayed in the sporadic gusts of wind. Beyond the fields lay another forest, and hills were visible. On the horizon stood a telephone mast, and a power line ran across the sky. The road was covered in fine, ashen dust. Walking was more comfortable than on the root-crossed forest path, but there was none of the shade the trees provided in the wood. Millie pulled a plastic bottle with the last of her water from the side pocket and drained it. Then she wiped her mouth with the back of her hand because dust had gathered on her lips. She pulled her phone from the other pocket.

‘No point — still no signal,’ said Nina, who was walking a few paces ahead and hadn’t even turned around. ‘I checked when we came out of the forest. There’s a mast, but this one apparently isn’t working either.’

‘Nina.’ Millie stopped. ‘Nina! Listen — do you think—’

‘I’m not thinking anything,’ the other cut her off quickly, as if afraid of the question about to be asked. ‘We’ll get to the village and find out everything. Yes?’ She looked at her companion with great intensity.

‘Yes…’

They saw the houses when the road curved in an arc around a small pond. Millie had had enough of tarmac. The shirt on her back, under the rucksack straps, was soaked through again. Her calves were tight. And her knee was beginning to ache. The sight of buildings lifted her spirits. Here was the end of their strange journey, the end of the road they had been forced to travel without knowing why. The first house was a modern one, set back from the road. Two storeys, a large terrace, exotic trees. Beyond it stood ordinary twentieth-century village houses. Brick, sometimes with concrete render, sometimes re-clad after thermal renovation. A classic old village in the provinces. Metal welded fences painted with oil paint, wooden palings gone grey in sun and rain, wire netting with a film of rust. Houses facing the road, farm buildings in the depths of the yard behind. Barns, cowsheds, dog kennels.

They had expected barking, but the village was silent. Now Millie realised that in the hour since they had been walking along the road, not one car had passed them. No person on a bicycle. Nobody in the fields — no machinery, no workers. A hen appeared from around the corner of a house they were passing. Then another. They walked steadily, calmly, pecking at the ground with that complete indifference to everything except what they might peck up. On the barn roof sat pigeons — Millie only saw them now because they hadn’t moved at all and were the same grey-brown colour as the boarding. There were a few of them. Ten, perhaps.

Hens and pigeons.

Not one woman, child, or man. Not one dog. No cars — only a green tractor in someone’s yard. And an all-encompassing silence. The human voices were missing, the barking, the blare of a television through an open window, the radio playing in the workshop behind a house. Exactly as at their camp. The village was deserted. The word dead rattled around in Millie’s head, but she was afraid of it and tried to push it away. She sat down on a concrete post by the road and began to cry. Silently, without a word of complaint; simply, as in the camp, the tears ran down her cheeks. Nina stopped a few paces on, turned around, and stood there as if she weren’t quite sure how to behave. Emotions were not something you could plan or manage. It was visible that she was at a loss, and so Millie simply raised her palm in a calming gesture, as if asking for a moment to collect herself before continuing to fight the entire world.

Because now they both knew they were up against something much larger than one empty summer scout camp.

Millie dropped her rucksack on the ground and sat there, blowing her nose loudly. Then she pulled a paper tissue from her pocket, blew it properly, and stood up.

‘What now?’ she asked simply.

‘We’ll go through the houses. We might find something.’

‘No! We were supposed to find people in this village! But it’s the same as our camp! What do we do now?’ The younger guide was gesturing vigorously as she said it.

‘Now we go through the houses — there are almost certainly tins. We’ll carry on. To the town.’

‘And if there’s nobody in the town either?’

‘There must be someone somewhere. After all, we’re here.’ Nina spoke calmly, but her voice was full of tension. Millie let her hands drop, picked up her rucksack, and nodded with resignation.

They spent an hour in the village. At first, they were afraid to go inside the houses. It was not so much a fear of finding something terrible as a sense of indecency. After all, they were violating someone’s privacy — they were not breaking in, but their journey from farmstead to farmstead was not far from it. The hardest thing was taking the tins. They had taken them from the camp kitchen as if they were their own; those supplies had been intended for the campers, they had done nothing wrong. Now, searching through pantries in this deserted village, they felt like thieves. The Scout Law had to be pocketed for the moment.

They were leaving the last house in the village when Nina paused. She picked up a newspaper lying on a bench, held down by a mug of cold tea.

‘What have you got?’ asked Millie. Nina showed her the front page, with a large headline spanning the full width of the column: Escalation of Conflict in the Middle East. Below it, in somewhat smaller but red letters: 20,000 Dead After Rocket Attack on Tel Aviv.

The older girl guide turned the paper over and began reading aloud.

‘Tuesday’s scheduled talks on negotiations between US President Isabel Torres and Israeli Prime Minister Noam Ben-Ari with Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Reza Khudaini have been cancelled. The reason was yesterday’s rocket attack on Tel Aviv. The rockets broke through the Iron Dome, killing an estimated twenty thousand people, the majority of them civilians. The number of wounded has not yet been counted—’

‘Stop,’ said Millie. Nina read on, but to herself now, not aloud. She got quickly to the end of the page, turned it, and finished the article. She looked at her companion.

‘It won’t tell us anything more. That war was going on when we came to camp. That war has been going on there for fifty years. It might have had nothing to do with—’ She paused for a moment. Before each successive sentence, she made a short stop, as if checking something against some inner list. ‘With our situation.’

‘Are you even afraid, Nina? Does none of this overwhelm you?’

For a moment, the other girl looked away somewhere to the side, avoiding eye contact. She did it constantly. Then she shrugged.

‘I don’t know. I suppose I ought to be, but I don’t know.’

She folded the newspaper in half and slid it under the flap of her rucksack. Then she waved the map, and they set off along the road out of the village. The hens pecked at the ground; the pigeons rose and circled for a moment above the buildings. They had the sun at their backs now, and Millie felt its burning rays on the back of her neck and knew she would feel them more acutely by evening. She stopped a moment, dug a T-shirt out of her rucksack, and simply draped it over her head and neck. Then, with some effort, she caught up with Nina. She struggled briefly with breathlessness, but soon they were both walking again at that steady, quick-but-not-too-quick Nina pace she had learned earlier but had tested on herself as never before in the last two days.

They walked several kilometres along the tarmac, then turned off into a forest ride. Under the trees it was easier going, and the return to packed earth was pleasant and kind to their feet. The shade of the leaves brought relief to her hot, sweat-soaked body. It was late afternoon. Millie walked, breathing hard, keeping up with Nina with growing difficulty; Nina seemed altogether unacquainted with the concept of exhaustion. The older guide simply took step by step, checked the map every so often, and glanced occasionally over her shoulder to see that her companion was still there. The younger, meanwhile, had a definite stitch in her side, her calves ached and so did her feet, and she could feel her thighs had been chafed raw by her shorts. And then she felt it. Damp, peat, algae, fish.

‘Nina!’ she called, stopping. She bent forward, hands on her knees. ‘Nina! Is there a lake on that map of yours?’

Nina stopped and turned to face her, unfolded the map, and refolded it at a different place.

‘It’s beyond those trees.’ She pointed. ‘Do you… do you want to — shall we call it a day here?’

‘Very much so.’

They found the lake quickly, came out above the bank — fairly high, with a bluff overgrown with dwarf willows and a way down over a small sandy slip. They found a patch of grass free of scrub and dropped their rucksacks there.

‘Shall we swim?’ asked Nina. They wanted to. Very much wanted to. Millie began looking in her rucksack for her swimming costume, then remembered the previous evening and looked across to where Nina was already pulling off her sports underwear. A few moments later, they were both in the lake. The cool water brought relief, calmed the skin on her arms and the back of her neck that had been burning from the sun, soothed her chafed thighs, eased her aching feet. It had an intense smell — mud, reeds, something else — but it was wonderful. Millie turned onto her back and let the water carry her. She needed nothing more for happiness at that moment.

Then they came back to the bank, and Nina looked at her in a way that made her cover herself with her hand, embarrassed. The older girl simply looked away, pulled some ointment from her rucksack — from the raided first aid supplies — and handed it to her, advising a thorough application to her thighs.

They changed, spread out their sleeping bags, and Nina lit a fire. They lay side by side, watching the sky darken as more stars came out. Millie fell asleep and did not dream that night.

She woke with a cramp in her calf. She felt the morning chill on her face, the dew in her hair. The ground under the sleeping mat was hard. The sky over the lake was already light. Nina was sitting by the cold ash of the fire, studying the map.

‘Morning,’ Millie murmured, sitting up. Something clicked in her neck.

‘It’s another twenty-two kilometres to the town.’ Nina did not lift her eyes from the map.

Millie looked at her for a moment, trying to work out how long that meant. It came out as not all that much.

‘Right, and?’

‘And nothing.’ Nina folded the map. ‘I think we won’t go today.’

She stood up and looked at her companion. Millie felt something release inside her, some tension, as if someone had let go of a spring — so suddenly and distinctly that she had to breathe deeper.

‘Why?’ she asked involuntarily, immediately afraid Nina might change her mind.

‘Because there’s a lake here, and we have tins.’ The older guide brushed off her shorts. ‘And your thighs are chafed, and your feet are sore, aren’t they?’

Millie wanted to protest — to say she could manage the walk, that she would be brave, that they would get there and find out everything — but Nina had already turned toward the water.

‘I’ll build the fire, and we’ll have something hot,’ she said. ‘That’s decided — we’re not going anywhere today. We’ll stay here until tomorrow, and then… we’ll see.’

They ate a proper breakfast, something warm, with beans in sauce found in the pantry of one of the houses in the deserted village. Millie thought of it precisely that way: found. It was safer like that. And it was not really a lie. Then they lay in the grass for a long while, until it grew hot. They shed their clothes and swam, making nothing of their shared nakedness. Then they put up the tent, cooked lunch, making a game and a pleasure of it. They did their laundry and aired the sleeping bags. The boots, abandoned in the grass, were not granted a single look all day. Then they swam again and sunbathed, lying on the small bluff above the lake. Nina had salvaged sunscreen from the raided supplies, and they rubbed it in all over.

They lay now on a blanket spread out on the bluff, tired from swimming and the heat, languid, drifting in and out of brief dozes.

‘Nina,’ said Millie.

‘Mm.’

‘Do you think people could really have disappeared?’

Nina opened her eyes. She looked at the lake for a while before answering.

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘It seems improbable to me — that all people simply dissolved into thin air at once. They must be somewhere.’

‘But if they really have disappeared,’ Millie went on. ‘If everyone, or nearly everyone… Would that be… bad?’

Nina was not looking at her when she answered. She was looking at the water.

‘Bad for whom?’ she asked, in a tone that carried genuine curiosity.

Millie thought for a moment.

‘For the planet,’ she said at last.

‘For the planet…’ Nina turned her gaze back to the lake. ‘The planet would find no difference in it. The planet existed without humans for billions of years. It managed perfectly well.’

‘And would manage again?’

‘Probably better than we imagine.’

Millie looked at the water. The surface of the lake was golden now from the sun, with that trembling of small waves that gives the impression of something alive underneath — something endlessly in motion, though what it is you cannot see.

‘And for us?’ said Millie. ‘Would it be bad for us? We’re sitting here. We’re not doing anything wrong. We don’t have to obey anyone. There’s no one to… to look at us and tell us there’s something wrong with us. With you, with me…’

‘No,’ said Nina. ‘No civilisation, no imposed rules.’

Millie sat with that for a moment.

‘And it isn’t worse,’ she said.

‘It isn’t.’

The forest murmured behind them. Somewhere in the reeds to the left something splashed — a fish, a bird, a frog, perhaps. The sky above the lake was now entirely blue, without a single cloud, without a blemish, without a trace of contrails; vast and beautiful and indifferent.

Millie felt herself smiling, a little for no reason and a little for a very specific reason.

‘I would like,’ she began, ‘for it always to be like this. For us always to be sitting here and not having to go, and for there to be no empty village, no town, no camp. For no one to look at us and tell us what to do.’

‘I know,’ said Nina.

‘And if there’s no one in the town?’ Millie asked. ‘If it turns out all the people really have gone?’

‘If there’s no one in the town, we’ll take tins and come back here. We’ll live here the whole summer. Then we’ll find a cosy house. And when the tins run out, we’ll learn to hunt.’ Nina paused. ‘I could do the hunting.’

‘I’ll be a vegetarian.’

‘I can hunt on my own.’

‘You can, but I think I’ll be a vegetarian all the same.’

Nina laughed. Properly, warmly — in a way she had never laughed in Millie’s presence before. That was new. That was good. Millie found it very much to her liking.

‘Nina?’ she whispered.

‘Yes?’

‘You know… if the world has ended… I’m glad I’m here with you, in its final hour.’

Halmstad, May 2026