The family had been scanning the floor for the hidden tunnel their earlier scans had revealed. They all ran to the body, Serif shoving the others aside to bend quickly to the child, putting a gloved hand on either side of her face. ‘If there’s a chance, any neural activity at all⁠—’ His expression froze and he let out a long hiss. ‘No…’ His white teeth clenched and he closed his eyes. ‘She is dead.’

‘Why didn’t she put up her field?’ Greeneye howled. ‘Kill them all, every single one of them.’

‘Close the doors,’ August told Hoff. ‘Put a field across it. Prepare a fusion bomb. This building will be her memorial. Now, quick as we can, let’s be about the ceremony.’

Steaming tears were dropping from Serif’s eyes, hissing as they fell on to Aphasia’s dress. ‘This one who was our mother and daughter, flesh of ours, let her be our flesh again.’

‘Let her be our flesh again,’ the others chorused.

Together, they bent to the body to feed.

The old wooden door gave way after a couple of shoves. Benny looked around the cellar. ‘Yes, that makes sense.’

There were casks of beer, racks of bottles and metal pipes all around. ‘It’s a secret route to the pub. The Lord of the Manor must have told the missus that he was studying.’

The boys filled the cellar and closed the door after them.

‘Fascinating,’ Joan said to Alexander. ‘I’ve never been in a pub.’

‘It gets better,’ he told her, ‘the higher up you get.’ Smith hopped up a flight of stone steps and listened to the door at the top of them. Suddenly he took a step backwards and waved at the others to get down.

The door opened.

A surprised-looking landlord stared down at them.

‘Thirty-eight lemonades, please,’ Smith told him.

‘And a pint of bitter,’ Benny added.

They marched out into the beer garden with their drinks. It was getting dark now and the storm was passing. The regulars had stared at the parade of schoolboys filing up out of the cellar. ‘School outing,’ Smith had explained as he paid for the round. It turned out that the landlord was quite aware of the passageway, and that the bursar had been an occasional customer through it.

Several of the locals muttered about the noise from the OTC being loud today, and one who claimed he was a Boer War veteran who’d ‘drunk his fill of Bovril’ cornered Smith and tried to row with him about it until the little teacher wriggled out.

‘Well, what happens now?’ Benny asked once they were in the garden. She’d had the awful feeling that she had been getting disapproving looks from locals who remembered her fleeing from Greeneye. ‘We can’t stay here long.’

‘No, you can’t.’

‘You?’

‘I’ve got to go back and let the others know there’s a way out.’