‘Oh dear, James,’ said Dr Jones. ‘You got a few wrong here. I’ll go over them with you again.’

‘I don’t think I have,’ said James. ‘Some of your sums were difficult to see, so I might have made some mistakes because of that. This number is a 10, isn’t it?’

‘Ah, no,’ said Dr Jones. ‘It’s an 8.’

‘It’s definitely an 8, James,’ added Lana. ‘I can give you some help with them, if you want?’ She smiled at him generously.

When Dr Jones took James away for help with his maths, the rest of us returned to our work, making sure we really were finished. I like maths and English. One of the good things about life since the world ended, the people on the Jellyfish like to tell us, is at least educational standards have improved. I think this is probably a pretty extreme case of looking on the bright side, but it’s true that class sizes are small. Then again, that is because most of the students who were our age have been eaten. So, yeah . . .

Actually, we do normally work really hard in lessons. We have good incentives, to be honest. The main one is that we’re so bored it feels good to learn things. The other reason is because it gets us out of gutting fish or following Soldier John’s rigorous training regime. And anything’s better than that.

Behind us, I could hear Soldier John shouting. There was a large group of people who were doing what he wanted, which seemed to involve jogging back and forth across the centre of the Jellyfish, so that every couple of minutes the creature swayed slightly while it adjusted to the weight of everybody shifting around. But as usual, there were also a few people sitting around on the edges, either staring at the world, or fishing and chatting. It was business as normal on board.

‘What’s that on the shore?’ asked Kate, pointing to a spot near the white house and the church. It took me a few minutes to work out what she was showing us. There’s always movement on the coast: waving trees, curtains ballooning out of windows, packs of sidling dogs. But we were always hoping for other humans. Signs of survivors. Especially now, when it’d been so long.

‘How many are there?’ asked Lana.

There were shouts from Soldier John’s crew now. Others had spotted them too.

‘There’s about ten,’ said Kate. ‘I think.’

I shuffled round to get a better look. It was hard to tell.

‘People,’ said Lana. ‘They’ve got to be people.’

‘It would be really nice if they were,’ said Kate.

We sat, watching, and squinting through the patches of spray breaking between us and the coast. I didn’t want to miss seeing any moment of the people, and we all scanned the town eagerly.