He’d screamed himself hoarse, calling for Zoe, Mal, his Gran … anyone to come and help him. Tears streamed down his temples into his hair, and thick moisture clogged his nostrils.

He was going to die. He knew that now. Alone, cold, and utterly terrified.

Memories of other tight places crashed heavily across his mind, from the cupboard that started his fear when he was barely in his teens, to the time during the war when he’d been buried under a rain of debris from a mortar that exploded too close for comfort. He’d been able to scrabble out after a while, coughing and spluttering, spitting dirt from his tongue, but it wasn’t going to be so simple this time.

He wondered briefly what they’d put on his tombstone, whether it would be the simple Here Lies Hank Mills – Beloved Husband and Father , or if Zoe might wax more poetical. Something that rhymed, perhaps. That is, if they found him. Found his mouldering, decaying corpse.

Not that it mattered. He wouldn’t be around to care. He’d be dead. Very, very dead. No, one ‘dead’ was enough. He didn’t have to oversell the permanency.

He tried to swallow, but while sweat still poured off him, his mouth was dry as a cracked bone. Fear still pounded through him his muscles no longer seemed to be capable of independent movement, and he lay still, the only signs of life being a trembling that ran through his body, and the frantic beating of his heart that should have been heard half a planet away.

A noise broke in on his misery, something scraping. For a moment he thought he was making the sound himself, his shuddering causing some portion of his anatomy to rub on the stone, but … no. Stone, yes, but on stone.

Again a swallow, this time the mucus from his nostrils rolling back into his throat; it felt disgusting but he was almost glad of it.

Reaching up with an unsteady hand, he touched the roof of his prison. No, it hadn’t shifted, wasn’t lowering down onto him as his imagination had suggested. As his fingernails scratched at