‘Ssh,’ she told her, cuddling her against her chest.

Still squatting, Xellpher waddled over towards the car’s doors, taking his communicator out of his pocket as he did so.

All the windows burst at once, spraying them with glass. The car shuddered.

She heard herself scream, clutching the child to her and falling down to the floor of the car. She bit the scream off. The car shook as more shots slammed into it. In the sudden silence, Xellpher muttered something; then there was a series of sharp concussions. She looked up to see Xellpher firing his hand gun out the shattered window towards the cliff. More shots cracked into the car, blasting splinters of wood into the air and puffing dust and little bits of foam from the hide seat coverings.

Xellpher ducked, then jumped up, firing back for a moment then diving to the floor and changing the clip in his gun. Shots tore into the car, smacking the metal and making it hum. She could taste the odour produced by Xellpher’s gun, acrid and burnt at the back of her throat. She glanced down at the child, wide eyed but unharmed beneath her.

‘Code zero, repeat, code zero,’ Xellpher said into the communicator during a brief lull in the firing. He slipped the machine back into his pocket. ‘I’ll open the door on the lee side,’ he told her loudly but calmly over the noise of puncturing metal and whining ricochets. ‘The drop is only ten metres onto snow. It might be safer to jump than stay here.’ The firing thrummed against the car, juddering it. Xellpher grimaced and lowered his head as a cloud of wood fragments sprayed off the wall by one smashed window. ‘When I open the door,’ he told her, ‘throw the child out first, then drop yourself. Do you understand?’

She nodded, afraid to try speaking. The taste at the back of her throat was not the smoke from his gun; it was fear.

He pushed himself back across the wooden slats to the door; the firing went on, sporadic gusts of furious noise and vibration. Xellpher smashed something, reached and pulled; the door swung in and along the wall. She could see their skis in their bins on the outside of the car, chopped off at window level by the gunfire. Xellpher looked out.