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Steven felt himself shrinking under its blind vastness. The image of the galaxy came back to him. He was an atom on a microbe on a speck on a mote on a pinprick in the middle of nowhere. Moments before he’d been upright and strong and emanating heat. Now, just seconds later, he was a corpse-in-waiting adrift in space. Avery was right. It all meant nothing.

Steven’s eyes became superheated and—with no further warning—he started to cry. At first it was just his eyes but his body soon followed and he started to sob and bawl like an abandoned baby stretched out in the heather, his chest heaving and hitching, his stomach muscles tensing with effort, his white-cold hands curled into loose, upturned fists of hopelessness.

For a few minutes he lay there weeping, not understanding what this feeling was or where it had come from; his only coherent emotion was a vague, detached concern about whether he had gone mad.

His crying slowed and stopped and his hot eyes were cooled by the mizzle swirling soundlessly from the nothing-white sky. He blinked and found the effort almost beyond him. Tiredness seeped from his heart and through every part of him like lead, pressing him down onto the moor, and then there was nothing left for his body to do but lie there and await instructions.

Inside his complete physical stillness, Steven’s mind came back to him from a long way off, a bit at a time. At first he felt very sorry for himself; he wished his mother would come and find him and wrap him in a fluffy white towel and carry him home and feed him stew and chocolate pudding. A little after-sob escaped him at the knowledge that this wasn’t going to happen—not just now, but ever again. And another, colder stab in his heart told him that this memory-wish had probably never happened. He had no real recollection of fluffy towels, or of stew, or of his mother enveloping him in safe, warm arms when he was wet and cold. He had plenty of memories of her roughly stripping wet socks off his feet, of shouting about the filth in the laundry basket, of drying his hair too roughly with one of their mismatched, thinning towels that were hung up at night but were always still damp in the morning. That made him think of the stained bathroom carpet, which played host to big reddish fungal growths behind the toilet in winter, as if the outside was slowly seeping inside their house, filling it with cold and creeping things. Davey cried when he first saw the fungus, and wet the bed rather than go near it. But now, like all of them, he ignored it. Sometimes they even joked about the mushrooms and the mildew, but more often, when Steven came back from Lewis’s spotless house, the smell of the damp hit him as he opened the front door. He could not smell it on his own clothes but—from the fresh, flowery aqua blue washing powder scents of his classmates—he had an uncomfortable feeling that he carried that stench of poverty around on him like a yellow star.

He never felt clean. Not when he came off the moors covered in mud, not when he climbed out of the tepid baths he shared with Davey, not when he first arose from the bed they shared and pulled on yesterday’s school shirt.

What had happened to him? Steven felt his mind whirl with confusion. How had it happened? Where had he gone? Somewhere, somehow, the little boy who used to be him had disappeared and been replaced by the new him. The new Steven did not watch Match of the Day or queue in the Blue Dolphin for fifty pence worth of batter bits. He did not want Steven Gerrard in his Soccer Stars sticker book more than life itself. The new Steven was out here every afternoon until nightfall, sweating in dirt, eating moldy sandwiches, prodding feebly at the ground with a rusty spade, and seeking death.

For three years this had been his life. Three years! He felt like a man who’s just heard a sentence passed down. The thought of three wasted years stretching out behind him was as shocking as if they were still to come. What had happened to him? Where had he gone?

Hot on self-pity’s heels came an anger so intense that it struck Steven an almost physical blow. He threw up an arm as if he could ward it off. The anger was blinding. In a single violent motion Steven rolled onto his knees and tore at the heather and grass, ripping up great handfuls, gouging the soil with his fingernails, slapping the sodden turf. He beat and flailed and kicked and pounded as the heather flicked rain at him. A high whining sound in the back of his throat was punctuated by little mewling breaths that kept him alive for this one purpose—to assault the very planet.

When Steven next had a conscious thought he was kneeling with his forehead on the ground, prostrate before nature. There was scrub in his fists and in his mouth, as if he’d tried to chew through the Earth.