Chapter 1

According to her late grandmother’s stories, Annie should have been able to wipe every last March fly from the face of the planet with a simple word or two. Pity no one had ever been able to teach her the right words. Every time she’d asked, her grandmother had assured her that the words were already inside her bones, sleeping until they were needed. With those words, she had the authority to move mountains. Power limited only by need. Her mother, in turn, had nodded, with a look that warned Annie not to disrespect the older woman by challenging the truth of her stories. Not that her grandmother had been losing her mind, or lying, just that her stories tended to contain a lot of allegories designed to teach moral lessons.When you face your biggest challenge, you will unlock your hidden strength, was a common tag line to those tales.

When yet another needle of pain jabbed into Annie’s shoulder blade, her reflexive smack dislodged the March fly, but also sent her book spinning from her lap.

‘Stupid feral torture beasts,’ she complained to her best friend. ‘Why do they even exist?’

Kelly ignored her, humming her favourite Hunters& Collectors song as she continued to squint at the surfers out past the breakers. Annie wished she’d pick another tune. ‘When The River Runs Dry’ had made her cry ever since its release two years earlier, and she could never get the words out to explain to Kelly why.

A fat black March fly hovered above Kelly’s elbow, and Annie seriously considered using it as an excuse to slap her friend to stop her humming.Land. Go on. I dare you, she challenged. The insect flew towards her, hovering right in front of her face, as if it was preparing to fight back.

Her grandmother had insisted that all she needed to do to wake the sleeping words was to believe the right excuse. Cunning critters. They probably had a hive mentality. Controlled by a super-intelligent Queen Fly. With a plan. A diabolical strategy to sneak into the Garden of Eden and annoy the people there so much that they lost their temper and … Okay, no. Not even March flies could ever make that happen, but surely there had to besome way to justify wiping the creatures out. They weren’t that important to the ecological balance, were they? She bared her teeth at the blood-sucker, and it flew off.

‘Bloody things!’ Annie smacked at a second fly that had started to feed on her foot while its colleague had distracted her.

Kelly spread her auburn hair around her shoulders like a silken fly-proof cape. ‘You could always go for a swim if the flies bother you,’ she suggested. Annie raised an eyebrow at her. ‘At least stop swearing. It doesn’t sound right coming from you.’

‘I wouldn’t swe