He didn’t know what was on the other side of the trees. They had been here before, many times, but that didn’t mean they knew every bush, every rise and hollow of the landscape.
‘Something’s happened here!’ Sunday called, just out of sight. ‘The rain’s washed this whole slope away, like an avalanche! There’s something sticking out!’
‘Be careful,’ Geoffrey cried.
‘It’s some kind of machine,’ she shouted back. ‘I think the boy must be stuck inside.’
Geoffrey steeled himself and soldiered on. Trees fretted the sky with languidly moving branches, chips of kingfisher blue spangling through the gaps. Something slithered away under dry leaves a metre or two to his left. Thickening undergrowth clawed at his trousers, inflicting a rip. He stared in jaded wonderment as the two edges of torn fabric sutured themselves back together.
‘Here,’ Sunday said. ‘Come quickly, brother!’
He could see her now. They’d emerged at the edge of a bowl-shaped depression in the ground, hemmed in by dense stands of mixed trees. An arc of the bowl’s interior had collapsed away, leaving a steep rain-washed slope.
Something poked through the tawny ground. It was metal and as big as an airpod.
Geoffrey glanced up at the sky again.
‘What is it?’ he asked, although he had a dreadful sense that he already knew. He had seen something like this in one of his books. He recognised it by its many small wheels, too many of them along the visible side for this to be a car or truck. And the tracks that the wheels fitted into, with their hinged metal plates, one after the other like the segments of a worm.
‘You mean you don’t know?’ Sunday asked.
‘It’s a tank,’ he said, suddenly remembering the word. And for all that he was frightened, for all that he wanted to be anywhere but here, there was something amazing about finding this thing, vomited up by the earth.
‘What else could it be? The little boy must have got inside, and now he can’t get out.’
‘There’s no door.’
‘It must have moved,’ Sunday said. ‘That’s why he can’t get out – the door’s covered up again.’ She was on the edge of the slope now, still on grass, but working her way around the bowl to the top of the area where the land had given way. She crouched and steadied herself, fingertips to the ground. Her hat bobbed on her shoulders.
‘How can you hear him, if he’s inside?’ Geoffrey asked. ‘We’re close now, and I still can’t hear anything! It must be in your head, to do with the machines.’
‘That’s not how it works, brother. You don’t just
Seeing no other option, Geoffrey began to follow.
‘We should call someone. They always say we shouldn’t touch old stuff.’
‘They say we shouldn’t do lots of things,’ Sunday said.
She continued her descent, slipping once then recovering, her boots gouging impressive furrows in the exposed earth. Her hands were dirt-caked. As she looked down, twisting her head to peer over her right shoulder, her expression was one of intense tongue-biting concentration.
‘This is not good,’ Geoffrey said, starting down from the same point, following her hand- and foot-marks as best he could.
‘We’re here!’ Sunday called suddenly, just before she planted a foot on the tank’s sloping side. ‘We’ve come to rescue you!’
‘What’s he saying?’
For the first time she appeared to take him seriously. ‘You still can’t hear him?’
‘I’m not pretending, sister.’
‘He says, “Come quickly, please. I need your help.” ’
A sensible question occurred to Geoffrey. ‘In Swahili?’
‘Yes,’ Sunday said, but almost as quickly she added, ‘I think. Why wouldn’t he say it in Swahili?’
She had both feet on the tank now. She took a step to the right, placing her feet with a tightrope-walker’s deliberation. Geoffrey aborted his descent, hardly daring to breathe in case he disturbed the slope and sent the tank, and the mud, and the two of them sliding to the bottom of the hole.
‘Is he still saying it?’
‘Yes,’ Sunday said.
‘He should have heard you by now, you’re so close.’
Sunday spread both arms and lowered to her knees. She knuckled the tank’s armour, once, twice. Geoffrey drew a steadying breath and resumed his anxious progress, still holding the wooden aeroplane in one hand, high over his head.
‘He’s not answering. Just saying the same thing.’ Sunday reached up with one hand and drew her hat onto her head. ‘I have a headache. It’s too hot.’ She tapped the tank again, harder now. ‘Hello!’
‘Look,’ Geoffrey said.
Something odd was happening to the tank, where Sunday had tapped it. Ripples of colour raced away from that
