‘You might find it helpful,’ Ms Calloway says, waving at her class to quieten down, ‘to work as a group?’ She casts her eyes between Kris’s shaking head and Alfie’s smirk.

April looks around. ‘Will? Alfie?’

‘Sure,’ Alfie mumbles.

Will is silent, his expression adjusted to appear that he’s thinking about it. But, behind the disguise, he’s beginning to panic. Sharing a room for an hour with these people has been exciting and he’ll long for the next lesson – he knows that. But to see them outside of school? A girl? And a guy like Alfie? It’s like finding a secret passage to having mates.

‘It’d be really cool to work with you,’ April says.

But it’s too much. Like jumping too many steps. The idea scares him. Briefly, an image of the three of them meeting up at a weekend plays in his head. He’s dressed all wrong, and his ideas are shit, and then he runs into the guys from Smugglers, who kick off again and show what a total coward he is, right in front of these people he’s so desperate to impress.

‘Maybe,’ he says.

‘’K,’ she says with a shrug, passing him back his camera.

And they leave separately for their lunch break, Will mumbling it to himself over and over. ‘Maybe. Maybe. Fucking maybe.’

But he knows, too, that it’s better this way.

I’ve got it.

I know why I’m here.

I understand what this is about.

I may not know who I am, but I see now what I must do.

Here I am, following you. The time we’ve covered together reaches out behind me. A few weeks of future are visible up ahead. It’s like scenery, only I’m seeing time stretching away from me, not distance.

But every now and then, without warning, something assaults me from nowhere. Like firing a camera flash into darkness. A horrific image. So many people. Twisted and dying. A picture of panic. I see it for an instant. I try to see the detail. But in the same moment it’s gone.

Perhaps you’d call it a premonition, but it feels like a memory, too. Like some sort of flashback to a life I can’t recall.

The vision is so real. Each time I see it, it brings with it an unmistakable certainty, awakening a truth that’s been buried in me from the start: this is coming.

When? I have no clue.

Where? Same.

But it’s coming. Something huge. Something devastating. A tragedy.

This is why we’re here, you and I, isn’t it? Why would I be seeing this awful thing, and be inescapably attached to you, if together we didn’t have a chance of stopping it?

What other reason could there possibly be?