Daisy Hildyard’s book-length essay The Second Body (2017) as well as her novel Emergency (2022) are concerned with interconnection, boundaries, and leakage between bodies on scales ranging from the individual to the planetary. Climate change looms large in The Second Body, which ranges from the Earthrise images to molecular biology, and from butcheries to floods. The titular ‘second body’ – each physical body’s uncanny embeddedness in a global ecosystem of consumption and emissions – encompasses more than an individual ecological footprint, and here the concept is used to read the dark pastoral sketched in Emergency. In the novel, the overwhelming production of interconnections not only threatens to dissolve individuals but also to fill the seemingly empty spaces of the represented countryside to overflowing. This proliferation of interconnections, however, shows little of the exuberance often used to describe entanglement, and instead both the recalled pastoral setting and the pandemic present of Emergency are shown to be overdetermined through interconnection.