There was little point in going home, since Mother was working in the castle. Piri’s parents were working too. They played on the beach for a while, skimming stones, running through the shallows to splash each other, and turning over rocks to examine the tiny creatures underneath. After a long battle flinging ribbons of smelly weed, they walked out on the pier and ate their lunches with their legs dangling.

‘School was boring anyway,’ said Piri. She dropped a crust of bread into the lake and they waited to see if any fish would nibble it.

‘Mucking around is more fun,’ Doncia said, ‘but I want to learn stuff.’

‘What stuff?’

‘Technologics. How to make things.’

‘What things?’

Doncia took out her pocketwatch. She opened it up and looked at the time. It was nearly noon.

‘You’re always playing with that thing,’ Piri said.

Doncia snapped the watch closed and squeezed it between her palms. She felt the ticking of the second hand, the whirring of the internal cogs, and the minute reverberations in the timber of the pier. She closed her eyes and searched deeper, felt the infinite echoey chamber of the lake water, and somewhere in the deep the confident motion of a large fish. It was coming for the breadcrumb. She opened her eyes.

‘Watch the bread,’ she said.

A toothy mouth slurped open and popped closed on the bread crust. A flick of tail broke the surface of the water, and a flash of silver shimmered into the green depths.

‘How did you know?’ Piri asked.

‘Saw it coming.’ Doncia slipped the pocketwatch back into its pocket. ‘Come on,’ she said, and grabbed her satchel.

Doncia led Piri through the docklands and up the road toward the Mount. The footpaths narrowed and they dodged across the road between trailers towed by chugging motor-trucks, with mounds of coal headed to the Delgarde factories. Sooty footmen scurried behind with chocks for the wheels in case a motor failed on the steep climb.

‘Do you believe in demons?’ she asked as they caught their breath under the grimy canopy at the front of a workshop.

‘Course not,’ said Piri, staring at Doncia through the pale strands of her hair.

‘I’ve seen one,’ Doncia said. ‘Just last night.’ She stepped back onto the road quickly before Piri could respond. She wished she hadn’t said it, and hoped running off made it seem a boast or a joke, instead of like she might be crazy. She dodged behind a huge flatbed truck, loaded high with dusty pink pig iron, and crossed the road.

‘Wait!’

‘Come on,’ Doncia said, ‘I want to get back.’ She felt suddenly exposed.

‘We’ve got all day.’

Doncia couldn’t tell Piri how she felt. She couldn’t tell her about the things she saw that she couldn’t believe, like blood red walls, like the demon. Piri wouldn’t believe her; she would think she was crazy. Piri had always supported Doncia, and she didn’t want to do anything to lose that.

‘Come on. Through the railway reserve,’ Doncia said.

Piri flashed a smile. She was tall, pale, and blonde, with a dusting of freckles and a broad nose. Her smiles lit up her icy blue eyes. Doncia was sometimes jealous of how Piri looked—she was the complete opposite with average height, dark hair, brown eyes, and a high-bridged nose Mother said was good and strong.

The railway was in a cutting and the street crossed over a brick arch. Doncia stopped in the middle and leaned over to admire the shiny tracks. She picked up a tiny pebble and flicked it over the edge. It hit a sleeper and ricocheted into a steel track with a satisfying ping.

‘Come on!’

She ran across the bridge and down the sloping street to where it curved back around toward the track, with Piri close behind. They stopped for a moment to check there was no one about before sneaking into a yard, racing past a little house, and hurling themselves up and over the timber fence into the railway reserve.

On the other side Doncia felt like laughing, so she did, and Piri did too.

Doncia felt a rumble through the soles of her boots. A train swung into view round the bend and approached, puffing and chugging, tar-black smoke billowing. She crouched down in the long grass to hide, Piri beside her. The streamlined engine hurtled smugly past, followed by flat cars loaded with metal ingots for the factories.

Doncia loved to count carriages off as they passed.

‘One. Two...’

Piri mouthed the numbers beside her, hair blown across her face.

There were five flat cars, followed by five closed wagons. Then there were passenger carriages, each full of weary, bandaged soldiers returning from the war. Some were slack-faced, mouths and eyes open wide, but staring at nothing. Doncia’s hand slipped into her pocket and closed on her pocketwatch. Carriage after carriage trundled past, all the faces the same.

‘Sixteen, seventeen, eighteen,’ Piri was saying.

Eighteen was empty except for a grey cloud of nothingness pressing at the windows. It escaped through the gaps to swirl behind in oily streamers which curled around the remaining carriages, as if prying for a way in.

The pocketwatch’s ticking seemed to slow. Time stretched.

Nineteen and twenty had big red crosses on the sides, and closed curtains. Twenty-one had no windows at all.

‘Twenty-two.’ The last. A tiny guards-van. Someone watched them from inside.

Doncia felt like running, but when she jumped up her legs were a little wobbly from crouching. Piri steadied her.

‘Let’s go home now,’ Piri said.

Doncia nodded. She kept seeing the slack-faced soldiers.

They continued along the trackside, following cables that controlled the signals and switches. A little cabin with wide smudgy windows and flaking chalky-blue paint commanded a view up and down the reserve. Tens of control levers spiked out of a panel, variously positioned up or down. A brass spider robot scurried past on its springy legs, and entered the cabin. A single arm, designed for the task, pushed one lever down and another up.

They slipped through a gap in the palings to the backyard of a warehouse, staying out of view behind stacks of rusty junk and parked trolleys. Their cover ran out and they gathered the courage to make a run for it.

‘Go!’ Piri whispered.

They hurtled across the loading apron, darted behind a reversing lift truck, and continued out to the road.

‘I know this road,’ said Piri. ‘This way!’

Doncia followed, grinning. Piri led them across the cobbles into a lane between high fences.

‘There’s the old aqueduct.’

They continued under the arches, and Doncia craned her neck to look up. Something was odd.

‘Someone is watching us,’ she said. She squeezed her pocketwatch, but it was strangely dormant, slowing like it had when the train passed.

Piri looked at her doubtfully, then laughed. ‘You worry me.’

‘There,’ Doncia said, and pointed surreptitiously at a shadowy figure back beside the aqueduct column. It was just a boy, but his head was bald. He wore a long, heavy, purplish-black woollen coat. He stepped out of the shadows.

The pocketwatch stopped ticking entirely. Doncia squeezed it harder but felt nothing. Her hands began to shake, and fear crept over her with a thousand fingers.

The boy’s eyes were wide and almond shaped with dark irises. His nose was stubby and his cheeks were broad. His lips were full and rosy. For a boy, he was a bit too girly looking, and with no hair he certainly was odd.

Doncia took a step back, grabbing Piri and tugging her. The pocketwatch began ticking again.

‘Do you see him?’

‘Course,’ said Piri.

‘He is a demon, I think.’

‘It—It’s the beautiful boy,’ Piri whispered.

The beautiful boy stood still. He pressed his palms together before his chest, and nodded, never taking his giant eyes off them. Doncia’s fear was gone.

He disappeared.

‘Now you’ve seen a demon too,’ said Doncia.