Pig Island
“Joe?”
    “What?”
    “I can’t wait to get to the mainland. I think I’m going to love it.”
     
     
    I stopped at Blake’s cottage—still no sign of a posse ponying up and coming for me—and got my rucksack, shoving in my camera and some water. The wire-cutters were still at the bottom, but we didn’t need them to get through the gate—Sovereign used a key she’d stolen months ago. She was in a good mood, light-hearted, and the trip was much easier than it had been the night before. Even with white fingers of mist sidewinding through the trees the path up to the gorge was smooth and unchallenging. We passed the first gargoyle.
    “Mum’s idea,” said Sovereign, giving it a dirty look. She skirted it like it might bite. “You see them and think they’re sane parents, but trust me, they’ve got secret freak bones a mile long. Sorry, but you can’t take Mum seriously. I mean, all that stuff about the devil and mine shafts—I ask you.”
    There’re things she can’t understand,“ I said, keeping my voice low, I don’t know why. I didn’t want to discuss this on our way to Malachi’s land. That’s what ninety per cent of my work is about, thinking about things people can’t explain.”
    “There are things she needs to drama-queen off about, more like.”
    We came out on to the ledge and suddenly the misty drizzle of the forest vanished, leaving the sky above the gorge hot, dry and cloudless. The land below looked parched, the light so bright you had to squint. Sovereign wasn’t interested in the view, Malachi’s escarpment, wavering in the heat. She took a right along the ledge and walked fast, breathing hard, waving her hands as she talked. “That’s why I put the pentagram on the pig. Never thought everyone would fall for it.”
    I stopped in my tracks. “What?”
    She turned back to me. “Don’t look at me like that—I know I made things a whole ton worse, but I just had this, like, uncontrollable itch to freak her out.”
    “And the pig?”
    “Nope.” She shrugged, turning and starting up the slope again. “That really did happen. Found it in the mantrap. And the stuff about the camera too—Malachi really did rip it down.”
    “Is that why he got a restraining order on the village?”
    “It wasn’t just me, it was everyone coming over here and bugging him. But I think the trap was the worst. Think of it: I might have caught him wearing his strap-on tail.”
    We went almost half a mile, dwarfed by the huge red letters at our side, until we reached a dried-up streambed cutting into the escarpment. “Blake was lying when he said there was no way down,” she said. “He just doesn’t want you going across there and getting caught on Malachi’s video.”
    We half climbed, half slithered down the streambed, sending sprays of pebbles ahead of us. At the bottom you could feel how big the place was—the land seemed to go on for ever, chemical drums grouped in piles all over the place, rusting and falling apart, the yellow decals with their skull and crossbones flashing in the sun. Underfoot, the ground felt dead rubbery, like you might sink into it at any moment, and the few trees dotted around were dead and dried up, their naked branches fingering the sky like scorched scarecrows, one or two rattly dead brown leaves clinging to them.
    Every now and then Sovereign paused and stared up at the video cameras on the far slope, her hand shading her eyes from the intense white light. “I swear, Joe, if we get caught on camera Blake’s going to kill us.” She kept stopping and starting, changing her mind and heading off at an angle, or even reversing her footsteps. It was so hot I had to keep wiping my face with the bottom of my T-shirt. But at last, when my watch told me two hours had passed, we slipped under the range of the video cameras and began to scale the opposite slope.
    The fence glinted from between the trees above, the pigs’ heads like strange, luminescent patches against

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