In a rented garage in Bethnal Green, ten minutes from the Tube station and five from the best Thai restaurant in east London, Emily Wilson closed her computer. Mike was finishing up with the incubators that housed flasks containing the proteins of brain cells, and he’d already locked the two sterile cabinets containing their most dangerous compounds. From the inside, they could have been in a maximum-security laboratory in a slick facility in Washington, under top-secret instructions from the White House to find a cure for all pathogens. As it was, the lab was home-made from top to bottom, and no one apart from four people knew it existed.

The four scientists had worked in the industry for a total of over a hundred years. They knew what they were doing.

But that was the point. And that was why they’d told no one. They were close to finalising eleven years of research.

George was on holiday, and Alexandros had left early to call his mother in Cyprus. Alex was thirty-nine years old, but his mother treated him like he was still ten. She checked that he’d eaten, that he’d slept well, and that he’d booked his flights home for the summer. Today she’d texted him to say that the family cat, Aphrodite, had finally passed away peacefully after eighteen years of idleness and luxury. She had been distraught. Alex had made his apologies before he left, and Mike and Emily had poked fun at him, pretending to be offended. But it had been a good day, and they were going out to celebrate later that evening. George was on his way back, and was due to join them in the Thai restaurant. He had told them that he had some exciting news to share with them.

They all felt an excitement that they hadn’t felt for a long time, something akin to the birth of a new baby, or a daughter getting married, or, they assumed, winning the lottery. George was the father figure to them all; the project had been his idea, and his conception. His whole life’s work was invested in this little lab in the middle of a council estate near the Regent’s Canal, where they’d worked like moles in the dark for years, testing, retesting, dedicating hours after a full-time shift at their day jobs to come here and look at one more slide, observe one more alteration, discard one more compound. Often they worked into the night, but it had all been worth it. George’s condition was showing signs of coming under control, and sometimes they couldn’t quite believe what they were on the verge of achieving. Emily and Mike both had families to attend to, but they still committed way more time than they should, and George was grateful.