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Eldest hung, wedged in the widening chimney, every muscle straining, feet pressed furiously against the brickwork on one side, shoulders against the other. Not far below her, Mother hissed and spluttered, showered by the debris dislodged by Eldest’s fall. High above them both, impossibly far away, a circle of daylight burned.

“Come to your mother.” Another bar tore free. An arm reached through, clawing at the air just beneath Eldest’s heels.

Straining every muscle, Eldest shifted herself by degrees, patting for holds in the brickwork, trying to move from horizontal to vertical without being snared.

“Sweetling, there’s no need to be shy…” Mother snatched at a dangling ankle, but her reach into the chimney breast was tentative, as if the old fires still burned there with furious heat.

The light! The light might save her. Eldest found the smallest of ledges, wedged her toes, shifted herself, and began to climb.

“Come down, sweet child,” the creature crooned. “Don’t go. We love you so.”

A yard, another yard, Eldest kept climbing for the light.

“Come down, bitch! I’ll skin you. Keep you in the oven till you’re ready to eat! Burn you with—”

A brick, dislodged by Eldest’s questing toes, cut off the tirade.

“Father! Father! I’m getting your father!” Mother’s voice faded.

Eldest climbed blind. Even though the light was growing in intensity with every yard she rose, it rapidly changed from too dark to see to too bright to see. As she gained height she felt the air change, growing colder, and with a hint of motion to it. She could see the circle of daylight through her eyelids now, growing closer. Every limb trembled with fatigue, her filthy fingers bled from torn and split nails, her hip ached, she hung by the thread of her own desire, just a heartbeat from a ruinous fall…but she was so very close.

She was going to make it. She could almost touch the day. They couldn’t stop her now. Not far, just a little—

The fist punched through plaster and paint and sent another brick tumbling. The hand, glimpsed through eyes screwed tight, groped empty air just inches from her stomach. She pressed her back to the chimney wall to put more space between Father’s clutching fingers and her belly.

While Father hissed at the sudden influx of light, Eldest scrambled upwards, loaned strength by this fresh terror. His hand scraped her foot but failed to find purchase. Howling at his miss, Father began to pound the wall, enlarging the hole he’d made.

The burst of panic brought Eldest up to the blinding circle of light. It had grown as she approached it, but now in the final few yards it had shrunk alarmingly. The square cross-section of the chimney, barely wide enough for a child, now became a circle defined by a cylinder of blackened clay. The chimney pot was longer than her arm and hardly wider than her head.

Falling bricks punctuated Father’s unintelligible roaring, her name the only thing she could pick out amid the froth of his rage.

Eldest’s strength, braced only by her feet against the flue’s walls, found no give in the chimney pot. Even at her prime she doubted she could have shifted it without tools and a secure perch.

“Eldest…” Mother’s voice insinuated through a gap in Father’s howls, reaching the length of the flue.

Desperation drove Eldest. With her hands together as if in prayer, she snaked up into the narrow tube, supported only by toenails clutching the gaps where mortar had fallen from between bricks. Serpentlike, she advanced up the earthenware cylinder, a feat that would have been impossible without her recent starvation.

With her shoulders practically driven into her eyes Eldest wedged herself so tight that she could release her footholds. She drove herself farther up. The end of her escape, trapped in the chimney pot, seemed inevitable.

She breathed soot into a constricted chest, saw nothing save her own tight-pressed limbs, and despaired, but somehow, she wormed her way up by fractions. When her fingertips found the chimney pot’s edge she advanced a swift hand’s length before running out of room to bend her elbows. She caught the breeze in her palms now, comically and tragically trapped but close enough to freedom to touch it.

Father’s demolition work below was muffled but constant. Eldest saw his twisted features in her mind’s eye and redoubled her efforts. Probably he’d send up one of her sisters to rope her ankles so he could pull her back down.

Her eyes passed the confining upper edge, having reached it so slowly that the light no longer burned away her vision. Even with her shoulders out it proved all but impossible to use her arms to help her, bent double as they needed to be to reach the rim beneath her armpits. The chimney pot chose this moment to start to wobble, beginning to work itself loose from the main shaft below.

Birds farther along the rooftop, perched on the chimneys rising from other rooms, took flight on black wings with raucous cries. Eldest wriggled furiously. Her imagination painted the very real scenario in which the chimney pot toppled with her inside it and rolled down the roof to dash itself on the ground three storeys below. Her struggles slowly ejected her as the wobbling grew more substantial, the cracking sounds louder.

“Traitor! Come back!” The voice of one of her sisters not far beneath her, too tight with effort for recognition. “Stop!”

Eldest intensified her efforts, imagination closing fingers around her heel at every moment.

“No! Don’t!” Somehow, she found the breath to shriek her fear.

Her final escape was swift, passing some tipping point where she could wriggle free, albeit at the cost of more skin. She dropped and would have fallen but for the neighbouring chimney pot, which she grabbed hold of. With her other hand she steadied the chimney pot she’d emerged from and heaved herself up to stand beside the smokestacks, five of them in a row. Glancing down the flue she’d escaped, she saw light reflecting in the upturned eyes of whichever sibling had been sent to retrieve her. Brighter in one than the other. Milk-Eye! Would the girl choose to escape too or, bound by fear, do their parents’ bidding?

Save for the wind’s cold moan and Milk-Eye’s grunting ascent it was suddenly quiet. The absence of Father’s roaring was worrying. She knew in that instant that he was heading for the street door to gain the roof from the outside.

Eldest tried to ignore the wide-open panorama of rooftops so that it wouldn’t overwhelm her with its half-remembered strangeness. Other buildings stood all around, closer than she had ever imagined. People on every side living normal lives almost within touching distance of the private hell she shared with her brothers and sisters. Close, but none close enough for there to be even a remote chance of jumping the gap.