Then there is Thomas. He is being sick. Every morning, like clockwork, a full hour before the bell is rung. The sound travels, the toilet bowl amplifying his retching like a trumpet, sending it down the corridor to where Charlie crouches, waiting for him, a handkerchief at the ready.

“Are you all right?” Charlie asks him in what has fast become a ritual.

“Right as rain,” Thomas always responds. “Something I ate.”

They laugh, as the ritual demands. Gallows humour, one calls it. Only now that they have seen a gallows, the phrase is not one they use.

And every day, at four o’clock sharp, when the others sit down for study hall in the upper assembly room, Thomas goes to visit Renfrew. It’s part of his punishment for fighting Julius. Thomas does not seem to mind these sessions. No, that’s not quite true. He dreads them and seems eager to go, all at the same time.

Charlie asks him about what happens at these meetings. There is too much between them — too much respect, for one thing; too much trust; too many hours spent exchanging confidences — for Thomas to button up entirely. But Charlie sees him guard his words.

“What does he do to you?” Charlie asks. “Renfrew.”

Thomas shrugs. “He asks questions. I answer.”

“Do you show?”

“Very little.” Thomas seems surprised by this himself.

“What does he ask about?”

“This and that. Family, a lot of the time. My mother and father.” His face darkens, grows pensive.

“It’s the way Renfrew asks,” he continues. “In earnest. Like he really wants to know. Sometimes I almost trust him. Sitting there on his inquisitor’s chair.”

Thomas looks up, forces a smile through the tension on his face.

“He’s an arsehole, of course, a gaping arsehole. But there are worse.”

ф

There are other, confusing aspects to life after the Trip. For all the darkness they brought back with them, a new spirit has taken hold of the upper school, a sort of pride. It takes Charlie a while to understand it is the afterlife of Renfrew’s words, his demand that they return to London when they come of age. Students can be found standing in huddles discussing “politics.” It is time, some say, to join the movement for “reform.” Parents are criticised, not individually but as a generation, and slogans are bandied about. These are seductive and evade concrete meaning. “The return to the cities” is one of them. “Scientific theology” is another. “Meritocracy.” “Rationalism.” “Regeneration.” Even (more quietly, with guarded smiles): “Revolution.” On occasion one of these impromptu speeches results in a belch of fine, light Smoke. The boys so chastised by the emission of their bodies observe this Smoke with genuine shame. It is, they say, a judgement on the purity of their motives. They invent punishments that they impose on themselves long before Renfrew has had the opportunity to study their Soot.