Two thousand people walked into the river, and Alex Walker walked with them.
The Greywater came up to his knees, then his waist. It was so cold that his teeth wanted to chatter, and he couldn't let them, because nobody else's teeth were chattering. The girl in front of him was shorter than him. The water came up to her chest. She didn't gasp.
'Don't gasp. Don't gasp. You're a sheep. Sheep don't gasp.'
'Sheep make quite a lot of noise, actually.'
'Not THESE sheep, Luna.'
On his left, Zinnia was walking with her chin up and her eyes fixed on the far bank, and her lips were blue. On his right, the freckled boy walked into a rock, bounced off it, and kept going.
They came up out of the water on the far side, and the road was waiting for them.
**********
The road went west through flat brown country with nothing on it. There were fields that hadn't been cut, and fences that had fallen down, and every so often a farmhouse with its door standing open.
