The old phone Wolf used as a flashlight and dictionary had quite a good music collection on it. He put his headphones on and listened to the same Borders hip-hop album again and again. Most old phones were beginning to die now, almost six years after the worldquake. After this one ran out, Wolf would have to get a Walkman like everyone else and either play antique tapes or spend tons of money on new ones.

The bus eventually reached a village about twenty miles south of the Old Town and came to a halt. The driver killed the engine.

“All change,” he said, dinging his bell. “All change!”

This wasn’t exactly what the timetable had said. Or was it? Wolf wasn’t sure.

By now, he was the only person left on the bus. When had everyone else got off? The only other person he actually remembered seeing in the past hour was a girl of about his age who had been running across a bridge over a river in the opposite direction from the bus. She’d been dressed almost exactly the same way as Wolf, but seemed to have a large cross around her neck and was wearing a black headscarf. She wasn’t the kind of person you usually saw from a bus window, which was probably why he’d noticed her.

“Hey, you lad,” said the driver.

“Me?” said Wolf.

“Yes. I hear you might be needing this.”

The bus driver gave Wolf a small yellow device. It was a piece of old-fashioned technology attached to a carabiner clip, and was just the right size and shape to fit in the palm of his hand.

“What is it?” said Wolf. He turned the yellow plastic device over a couple of times, to get the feel of it. It seemed quite durable, probably even waterproof. It had a little off/on button and a case at the back for batteries. On the front was a small dot-matrix screen. Wolf pressed the ON button and it winked slowly into life. A small pixelated triangle soon appeared, like a little arrow. Was this some sort of GPS unit?

Wolf must have been tired. Perhaps he’d dropped off for a second. When he looked up to ask the bus driver again what he’d just given him, the man, and the bus, and indeed the whole village, were gone. He was completely alone in the rugged, endless countryside.

He looked down at the GPS again and realized that the triangle was him. And the completely empty gray area around the triangle was where he was now, completely alone.

8

COME ON!” SAID MARCEL Bottle, knocking on Lexy’s door yet again. “Why is everyone so slow this morning?”