Even as he spoke, Albert could see the patrol, close to half a dozen lawbots in all, gliding past the street behind Ollie. They waited as the patrol passed, then a few minutes more. Ollie turned to them, ‘Coast’s clear, ladies and gentlemen. Time to get this show on the road. We’ll be circling round the back of this quadrant. It’s the long way, but best stay far away from the local generator station. They’ve always got some of their boys there. Then we cut back across.’

He chuckled, but this time there was something intimidating, almost menacing, about it. And although his face was obscured by shadows, Albert knew that, somehow, even while he had been talking to them, Ollie had undergone another one of his dramatic personality switches. He could feel the sense of power—of naked, barely controlled intent—that seemed to radiate from him.

The fat man turned away, rubbing his hands together, seeming downright gleeful at the prospect of the journey ahead. ‘All right, then,’ he said, more to himself than anybody else. ‘Let’s play.’

They followed him out into the night.

Later, Albert barely remembered anything of that dark, silent journey. They went from shadow to shadow, sometimes walking, sometimes crouching—rats scurrying from hole to hole. The streets all looked the same—silent, desolate and stark—the artificial lighting way overhead bathing everything in a sickly, pale glow. Ten minutes after they had started out, Albert no longer knew where they were. Not so Ollie. The fat man moved swiftly and surely, sometimes one way, sometimes another, but always seeming to know exactly where to go, leading them down side streets and alleyways Albert could have sworn weren’t on the city plans.

Finally, what seemed like hours after, they stood on the side of the road, the stately towers of the Employment Department looming ahead of them.

‘This way,’ Ollie said, leading them towards an open lot, the same one through which Albert had attempted to take that fateful shortcut a day ago—had it been just a day? They made their way through the lot, through the winding paths amidst the towers and mounds of rubble for what seemed like another hour.

Finally, Ollie stopped, holding a hand up to let them know they should follow suit. ‘All right, children,’ he said, ‘we’re here.’

Albert looked around. They stood at the mouth of a clearing in debris, indistinguishable from the dozens of others they had passed through on the way here. Everywhere around them was more debris, some plastic, some metal, all of it piled around, almost walling in the space they stood in. Far across, a profusion of gigantic jumbled corrugated pipes—the remnants of an ancient and long abandoned sewage system—jutted out from a wall of debris.