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grazing his cold hands as he held the phone out, promising it they would find a way out.
    Running now, he splashed through the water, barely aware it was rapidly becoming deeper until his legs were chopped away in the brutal cold and he was bobbing like a cork, his arm aloft and the
phone in his fingers. He shouted at it, telling it not to die, but he could hardly hear himself above the roar of the fast current spinning him, the phone’s light whirling shadows round the
walls. When he saw that the water ahead was backcombed into a white, frothy curd, he knew there was a drop coming. It was the last thing he saw before the phone died, its after-image still there as
he was swept towards it.
    The dark was filled with the roar of water as Daniel was washed over the edge, bellyflopping into clean air and falling weightless into a void that took his breath away, the phone snatched clean
from his fingers.

8
    He crashed through a pane of cold water that lay below.
    He did not know which way was up, his breath bubbling all around him, until he broke through the surface into a cold black he inhaled greedily. He steadied himself, fanning his arms and
listening to the sound of the waterfall. Keeping it behind him, he floated forward and cried out when his freezing fingers crumpled against stone. Feeling around it, his hands told him it was a
rock jutting above the surface of the water.
    It was too cold to keep swimming so Daniel hauled himself up and lay shivering, his teeth chattering.
    ‘I don’t want to die,’ he whispered. ‘I don’t. If there’s someone there – anyone?’ With the noise of the waterfall ringing round him, he imagined
he must be in some large cavern. ‘I don’t want to die!’ he shouted as loudly as he could. But he was all alone.
    The darkness was so all–embracing, he could not tell if his eyes were open or shut. The feeling made him giddy. Scared of falling back into the water, he held on tight to the rock,
whispering to it. He told it how he wished to live a normal life and have a family and grow up to be a person. Anyone. Maybe even
someone
. His wet clothes creaked. The cold felt strong
enough to split his fingers. When he started shivering less, the parts of him he knew as being Daniel began retreating further into his body, looking for warmth.
    Loose stones skittered over the rock and fell into the water as he moved. He managed to pick one up with death-cold fingers and scrawled a word beside him, seeing each letter in his mind’s
eye.
     
    HELP
    He did not know if anyone was watching him. Or, if they were, whether they cared. But he needed to ask one last time, to be sure.
    ‘Please.’
    A moment later, Daniel thought he was falling off the rock, as if the cold had finally prised him loose. But it was the dark that had shifted, lifting and retreating, and in bone-coloured light
he started to glimpse the stone chamber around him, its walls gathered like grey wool.
    He was beached on a large boulder adjoining the shoreline, with the black water lapping round him, having fallen over the lip of the waterfall like he had done. And, painted across the dark
pool, a white stripe, wimpling as the water rippled.
    It was moonlight.
    Daniel looked up and saw a gently sloping tunnel bored through the rock wall on the other side of the water. And right in its centre was a full moon.
    It was a hole in the rock to the world above. A way out, his cold brain slowly told him, that he had missed because it was now night outside.

9
    The moon was already disappearing behind another veil of cloud and the chamber was darkening again.
    Daniel lurched forward and managed to sit up, his cold arms like stumps because he could no longer feel his hands. When he wobbled forward and slid down on to the shoreline, his knees clicked
and his arms flailed as he tried to stand up. But he was too weak to keep his balance.
    In the last dregs of moonlight, he plotted a route over the pale, rocky rim round the