Darkness. Nothing but darkness all around her, in every direction. But why? Where was she?

Ginger tried to step forward, but an icy cold metal wall blocked her way. When she tried to step back, she felt another wall behind her. To the left and right, walls. A little enclosed square barely large enough to breathe in, let alone stand or move.

She felt her stomach churn at the thought. "No, no, no," she muttered to herself as she ran her hands along the walls, searching for an imperfection that might hint at a hidden door. Her hands came away coated in gritty particles, and she rubbed them between her fingers - coal dust.

Am I back in the bunker?

"No," she said again, her voice breaking. "That's impossible...we escaped."

But saying so did not seem to make it true. The bunker walls still stood, blank and desolate as ever.

"We escaped, you hear me?" Ginger shouted as she slammed a fist against the metal. "It's over!"

And then the world began to shake. A faint rumbling from off in the distance grew louder and closer until it seemed like a whirling storm with Ginger trapped in its center. It was trying to deafen her, trying to shake her very bones apart with the force of its vibrations. She sagged against the wall, covering her ears in a vain attempt to block out the noise.

But that wasn't the worst of it. The worst of it was that Ginger knew that sound - it was the pie machine, back from the dead.

She was clawing at the walls now. I have to get out of here, she thought. I have to find the others before it's too late. Even though she knew in the bottom of her heart that it was too late already.

That was when the noise around her changed. Suddenly she could hear voices mixed into the sound of the churning gears and pistons. A flood of familiar voices all screaming out in terror, dropping off one by one as they were forced into the gaping maw of the machine.

"No!" Ginger screamed. She threw herself against the wall over and over again, not caring how badly it hurt. "You can't do this! I won't let you kill them!"

The darkness above her suddenly erupted into blinding light, as though someone had opened the lid of the bunker. She felt a giant, monstrous hand reach down and wrap around her neck, then lift her off the ground.

Gasping for air, she struggled and kicked, thinking she might be able to run if she could fall from her captor's grasp. But the hand's grip only grew tighter and tighter. Now it wasn't just choking her neck, it was closing in around her ribs and her lungs, as though it meant to crush the life out of her body. She felt herself go limp and numb, losing the strength to fight.

And through it all, she could still hear her friends screaming for help.

The hand slammed her down onto a hard surface and held her there. In the corner of her eye, she saw the glint of a sharpened axe blade coming toward her. The edge pressed against her neck, drawing a thin trickle of blood.

She screamed.

She woke up.

For a few horrible seconds, Ginger didn't realize what had happened. Her mind was still halfway inside the dream, and her surroundings didn't help: all she could see was a dark room, and the weight of a limb rested heavily on her torso. She froze, trying to clear her foggy mind and think of an escape plan as her heart kept thudding at top speed in her chest.

But her eyes adjusted to the soft moonlight streaming through the gaps in the window curtains, casting a pale glow along the floor of her small hut. Not the farm, she thought with a deep sigh of relief. The island. Home.

And the weight pinning her down, that was only Rocky's wing draped across her waist. He was still sound asleep, snoring faintly. Whatever noise she might have made hadn't been enough to disturb him.

Thank goodness for that, Ginger thought. They had woken each other with their nightmares before.

She lay still for a few minutes, staring at Rocky's face and listening to the rise and fall of his breath. Then she carefully moved his wing aside and slipped out of her bunk. The shawl she had received from Babs last autumn was draped over a nearby chair. Wrapping it around her shoulders, she stepped out into the night.

It wasn't quite spring, not yet. Scattered around the greenery were grayish-white patches of snow, and a light frost covered the grass blades. Ginger could feel the ice particles melt beneath her feet as she walked to the edge of the cliff overlooking the village.

Not a soul awake besides herself, of course. Even the fire in the pit had died down to a pile of embers. It was still a few more hours before sunrise, judging by the height of the moon. A few more hours of the peaceful stillness that came from sleeping safe and sound.

Well, on most nights it felt peaceful. Tonight it only seemed to chill Ginger even more than the late winter air.

"Everyone's fine," she whispered to herself, annoyed with her own chattering nerves. "You are fine."

Better to dream of captivity and wake up in freedom than the other way around, she supposed. But perhaps it would be nicer not to dream at all.

Ginger shivered again as a gust of cold air whipped around her. Taking one more look at the huts in the clearing, she walked away, returning to the warmth of her bunk and her mate.

Rocky unconsciously wrapped his wing around her again when she lay back down. She smiled and closed her eyes as she leaned into his embrace.

But she could not fall back asleep.

"You aren't quite yourself today, hen," said Mac.

Ginger blinked her tired eyes a few times before answering. "I don't know why that would be the case," she lied, taking another sip from her thimble full of tea.

Mac, of course, took that as asking for an explanation. "You've hardly said a word all morning. Now that would be unusual enough by itself, but paired with the fact that you nodded off three times during the meeting this morning…"

"I'm just a bit tired, that's all."

"She might have a point, actually," Bunty said. "You do seem even gloomier than usual."

"And you're often quite gloomy!" chirped Babs.

"Thank you very much for that…"

They were all sitting near the fire pit, having a spot of midday tea as they watched the rats and the hens play a game of badminton. Rocky was nearby trying to fix a radio, and Fowler strutted around the clearing in his usual fashion. Their little world was just as picturesque as always.

Almost too much so, Ginger suddenly thought, as though it could dissolve right before her eyes…

"I couldn't sleep last night," she finally said.

Mac nodded. "And?"

"And…" She traced the rim of her cup with one finger. "You won't think I'm being foolish if I tell you why, will you?"

The other three hens shook their heads, though Bunty shrugged a little before doing so.

"Do you...ever have bad dreams?"

"You mean like the sort where your teeth fall out?" Babs asked.

"I mean about the farm."

Babs's eyes widened. "Oh," she whispered, quickly looking away. Mac and Bunty said nothing at all.

"I can't stop wondering how it might have all gone wrong for us," Ginger continued, wanting to fill the sudden silence. "And sometimes I start to imagine that I've been dreaming all this time, and any minute now I'm going to wake up back in my old bunk. Alone." She looked down, into the swirling darkness of her tea. "It's like that fence in my head is still there. I can't explain it."

"Shell shock."

The hens looked up in surprise. Fowler was standing by them now, evidently having stopped his march when he caught a few of Ginger's words.

"Of course, they had stopped calling it that back in my day," he continued. "That was the Great War. But it's the same no matter what you call it." He sat down with the group, looking up at the sky. "I saw it once, you know. We had a fellow in our squadron named Tommy. Not a chicken, but a capital young man nonetheless. His plane went down during the Battle of Britain. All men aboard lost but for him."

"What happened to him then?" Ginger asked.

"The poor boy recovered well enough, or so we thought. He was never the same after that. Very quiet, kept to himself. Complained that he could hardly shut his eyes at night for fear of what he'd see in his dreams."

Ginger nodded along without realizing it.

"I don't know what became of him after the war," Fowler said. "No improvement to his condition, I suspect." He shook his head sadly. "And all that because of what happened on a single night. Why, it only makes sense that a prisoner trapped for years would have such a reaction."

There was another moment of silence among the group, and then Mac spoke up. "Aye, I understand, Ginger," she said. "Had a few of those thoughts myself."

"You too? Really?"

"Well, why wouldn't I? I can tell you every single way that crate ought to have broken down on us. Of course I wonder what might have happened."

"And I do have such terrible dreams as well," Babs added with a shudder. "Where I get taken to the chop, or covered in gravy and thrown in a pie!"

Bunty muttered something under her breath, then said "What are you lot staring at me for?" as the other four heads in the group turned to face her. "Oh, fine," she said after a moment. "I think about it too. I wonder if I could have given away more eggs. To...to help out the girls who were in trouble, you know. Edwina and Lucille and Peggy and all the others."

Ginger quickly looked down and wiped away the tears brimming in her eyes. When she spoke again, it was hard to raise her voice above a whisper. "Heaven knows I could have done more."

Fowler frowned at that. "My dear," he said in the tone he might have used to address a respected fellow soldier, "you did far more than what anyone ever asked of you. Let that be enough."

They looked out across the field, over to where Rocky was still fiddling with the guts of the radio. "I don't suppose your Yank would really understand what it's like," Fowler said, rolling his eyes.

"He does," said Ginger.

"Does he now? Hmmph. Shows it can happen to anyone, I suppose."

"It's a bit different for him, I think." She thought of what he had shared with her. The memories of cramped cages and blinding lights, the acrid stench of smoke and the deafening blast of the cannon. The dreams of racing back to find the farm empty and abandoned, of seeing her die in front of him again and again.

"I think you must do him a bit of good," Fowler said at last. "You make him easier to tolerate, at the very least."

"Fowler," she said, "there's something else I want to know. This feeling, the...the shock. How long does it last?"

The old rooster shook his head and shrugged. "I haven't the faintest idea. Nor does anyone else, I think. But perhaps it's more a matter of the individual." He took the cup of tea Babs poured for him and sipped from it. "At any rate, you're still young. Someday you'll have lived more of your life out here than you did in their little prison camp. Don't you forget that."

Ginger let his words sink in. "Yeah," she said as she smiled a bit, the first time she had done so that day. "Yeah, you're right."

"And that goes for the rest of you as well," Fowler added with an authoritative nod. "Well, perhaps not Bunty."

"Oh, naff off!"

The other hens laughed, and the grasp of the cold air and the colder memories became just a bit weaker.

"I've got an idea," Ginger said. "Let's have a toast." She raised her teacup. "To us. To our home. And to all the ones we couldn't take with us."

The others raised their cups with her, and they all drank together.

"Hey!" It was Rocky, calling and waving to them from across the field. "I think I finally got this thing going!" he said, a moment before he nudged the radio dial and yelped as a stream of garbled static poured out of the speaker.

Ginger stifled her laughter as she beckoned for him. "I told you to leave that for Mac, you know."

"Come on, it builds character. Or something." He looked at the others. "And what are you guys up to?"

Ginger smiled at him. "Oh, just talking about old friends. Will you have some tea?"

They spent the rest of the afternoon gathered around the fire pit, chattering and laughing as the hours slipped by. And at the end of it all, as the sun finally began to set, the world looked much different to Ginger than it had that morning. For the first time, she found herself really noticing the buds on the treetops and the delicate flowers poking through the remaining snow.

The seasons were finally changing. And this time it meant the village had survived its first winter, she noted with a swell of pride and relief.

Well, of course we did, she thought. After all we've survived already, what couldn't we do?