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only make things worse for Tod. He got up from the table and, deliberately not looking at Aunt Mitza, gave Tod a strained smile. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” he said.
    Aunt Mitza burst out laughing as though Oskar had made a joke. “Say goodbye, Oskar Sarn,” she said. “Say goodbye .”
    Despondently, Oskar climbed down the ladder. The wind was blowing in from the sea strongly now, whisking sharp grains of sand off the dunes and sending them flicking across his skin. Oskar pulled his night cloak around him against the sand. His mother had insisted that Jerra came to meet him and walk home with him after supper, but his brother was not due for almost two hours, and there was no way Oskar was going to hang around waiting. His head down against the wind, Oskar set off quickly, following the track back along the sandspit.
    As he trudged on, accompanied by the mournful rattle of the hollow dune grasses, all he could think about was the expression on Tod’s face when she had waved him goodbye. She had looked so … Oskar tried to find the right word. The nearest he could come up with was “alone”, but that didn’t explain everything. No, he thought, there was something else – something new. Underneath it all, Tod had looked scared.

In the Dunes
    Oskar, unlike Tod, still had both his parents – and until recently his home had been a happy place. But one dark night, a month after Dan Moon’s fishing boat had floated back without him, Oskar and his little brother, Torr, with whom he shared his room, had been woken by their mother’s screams. Oskar’s twin sister, Ferdie, was gone . When he closed his eyes Oskar could still see Ferdie’s bedroom window wide open and the soft summer rain blowing in on to her empty bed. All night Oskar and Jerra – along with his parents and their neighbours – had searched for her. They had found huge animal tracks in the sand outside Ferdie’s window, which had led on to the main boardwalk, but after, nothing. The next day Oskar went out alone. Oskar was a skilled tracker, and despite the night’s rain, he saw a few tracks going into the Far. An expedition set off but the trail disappeared. Ferdie was indeed gone.
    But now, as Oskar pushed home against the rising wind, his mind was taken up not with Ferdie, but Tod. He remembered the scared look in her eyes, and Oskar had a feeling that, try as he might, he could not shake off: something really bad was about to happen to Tod .
    Oskar needed time to think, time to work out what to do. He knew that as soon as he got home, any thoughts about Tod would be eaten up by his parents’ sadness. He had plenty of time to walk home the long way by the salt marsh – a dried-up lake just beyond the village. He knew he could easily be home before Jerra left. Oskar loved the feeling of peace that the ancient PathFinder ghosts who wandered the marshes gave him. Maybe he would find some tonight; maybe he could even ask them what to do. Surely an ancient ghost would know?
    It was the dark of the moon, a night when the PathFinders traditionally left lights in their windows until morning. As Oskar followed the boarded path, which weaved its way between the tree-trunk stilts of the houses, he felt as though he were walking through a mystical woodland, while above him the candle flames flickered like tiny stars falling to earth. It was beautiful, but it was also eerily empty. Since Ferdie had been taken, people did not go out much at night and all the ladders were drawn up so there were none of the easy comings and goings between the houses that had once happened.
    With the quiet buzz of conversation in lilting PathFinder voices drifting down, Oskar headed along the track between the straggle of outlying houses. The wind was behind him and sent him quickly along. Soon he was leaving the lights and houses behind and following a narrow path as it dipped down into the cool darkness between the dunes. Even now, Oskar did not mind the dark; he knew the