Source A: When the moor changed colour

The passage below is an original non-fiction-style practice text, written for this question.

At the ranger station, a paramedic cut through my right bootlace because its plastic tip had melted into a black bead. I kept telling her that my feet were fine. What I could not explain was why I still heard the fire in the electric kettle, in the zip of a first-aid bag, in every small hiss in the room. On the table, my survey card had browned at one corner. The final square, where I should have recorded the cloud cover, remained empty.

An hour earlier, four of us had been crossing the moor in a loose line, recording the condition of the footpaths. Nothing hurried us. The grass leaned and recovered beneath the wind; larks rose almost vertically and seemed to pin their songs to the blue air. Mara was fifty metres to my left, occasionally lifting her clipboard to show that she had reached another marker post.

The first change was not something I saw. The air acquired a bitter, metallic taste. Then colour arrived in separate pieces. A patch of heather behind Mara flashed orange and disappeared beneath smoke. Farther ahead, another patch brightened. Between the two, the moor still looked green and ordinary. For a moment, my mind refused to join them together.

The wind did it for me.

Flame ran through the grass, not steadily but in leaps, stitching one burning patch to the next. The open landscape, which had seemed simple from the ridge, broke apart. Smoke rubbed out the marker posts. The distant wall vanished. Even the sun became a dull coin that appeared in the wrong part of the sky.

Our radios began speaking at once. A voice said “east track”; another cut across it with “vehicles”; someone repeated a name I did not recognise. The words arrived without sentences. I unfolded my map, although there was suddenly nothing around me that matched it.

Then the senior ranger pointed towards the wide gravel road below us and shouted one complete instruction.

“Run.”

We moved at different speeds but in the same direction. Clipboards fell. A water bottle rolled past me, absurdly bright against the dark grass. I remember counting my steps—seven, eight, nine—and then losing the numbers. Ash struck my cheeks like dry rain. To my right, the fire travelled beside us with a sound like heavy cloth being torn again and again.

Mara disappeared. A second later her hand closed around my sleeve from inside the smoke. We reached the road together and stumbled across it towards the ranger’s van. The side door was already open. Someone pushed from behind; someone else pulled from inside. The door slammed, turning the roar into a muffled thudding against the metal.

Through the window, the world changed from orange to brown and then, almost at once, to an ordinary grey. We were moving before I realised that the engine had started.

At the station, the paramedic placed my cut bootlace beside the damaged survey card. A thread of smoke lifted from the card’s corner and vanished. This time, when I heard the faint hiss, I knew exactly where it had come from.