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Damn. Yeah. I did. A loopy smile creases my face and I realise the smoke is getting to me. That we’ve hit a wall of heat we can’t push through and we’ve run out of road.

We’re done here—a thought that completes as Edna hits a rut, throwing me hard against the side of the cab.

In the same instant, the wind changes. A savage gust rips over the land and a sheet of fire rolls through standing grass towards the John Deere behind me.

Towards Folk.

My brother.

“No!” I slam my brakes. Edna lurches to a halt and I spill out of her in time to see Folk’s tractor obscured by flames.

I hit the scorched ground.

Fierce heat bears down on me as I tear across the field, burning grass sparking beneath my boots.

Smoke swallows everything beyond twenty feet, but somehow I catch the glow of the John Deere’s work lights through the haze, ghostly and blurred, and an unholy shout rips from my lungs. “Folk!”

For an endless heartbeat there’s nothing. No movement, no shape. Just fire and flame. My brother is gone and the certainty that he’s dead grips me with such brutal force I lose my footing.

I stumble.

See myself on Folk’s doorstep, trying to find words big enough to tell Seth and Ivy he’s not coming home.

Because I didn’t get to him in time.

Then the wind shifts again. The smoke splits open for the briefest second, and through the gap in the smog, I see him.

Folk.

He’s half out of the cab, shielding his face as he jumps the last few feet to the ground.

I reach him in three strides. Grab his arms and drag him away, back to Edna, and haul him up to the seat.

My chest burns. Every breath tainted with smoke and ruin. I throw myself behind the wheel as Folk catches his balance at my side, and I gun Edna across the burning field to the gate.

We outrun the flames.

Keep driving until the air changes.

Until we can breathe without singeing our lungs and ripping our throats raw with every breath.

I roll Edna to a halt.

Folk and I climb down and I jog to a dry-stone wall to survey the fields we’ve left behind.

The John Deere is still standing.

Relief washes over me.

Then an explosion punches through the smoke in a brutal flare of orange and black, lifting the roof clean off the cab as glass bursts and metal warps. As tyres blow one after another and the tractor my dad towed here from Moondust Farm is lost to the flames.

Acrid smoke curls into the choking sky.

Folk stands beside me without speaking, observing the fire falter where our trenches carve dark scars into the land.

Will it be enough?

I don’t know.