He’d finished, but it was too much for them to take in and this time there was no cheering. A fortified newsroom in Berkshire? For how long? And their families? But the Editor had no more to tell them. He went back to his office, and they parted for him. His staff felt somehow out of sync. The scene was already historic, its significance too large to grasp in the living of it.

Then someone began to yell from one of the doors, and everything went back to normal. It was the Editor of the Impartial, who’d apparently seen the Beast’s first edition on ClipShare. A slight, foppish, middle-aged man in a delicately tailored, midnight-blue suit, he was being grappled by two boys from BeastOnline and kept jumping almost out of their grasp as he shouted: ‘What if it had been tonight? What if it had been tonight, you fucking fruitcake? I’ll have you prosecuted for this, you hear me, Brython? I’ll see you in jail for this.’

But the Editor had no interest in hearing; he was already back in his office, informing the police of the planned bombing. And the Beast loped on. Corrections and developments had to be dressed into the second edition. There were body counts to be updated, new denials to append. An online version of the splash had to be okayed for publication overnight. The details of the retreat to Berkshire had to be worked out and disseminated. No freelancers would be required; only staff whom the Beast could fully call its own. The Berkshire Beast would be leaner than usual, and the freelancers would just have to find somewhere else.

As their duties came to an end, the reporters began to disperse, to pack, and to wonder. The second edition went in another, less intense, frenzy of shouting and rushing and page-killing. Then the subs, too, started to pull their bags and satchels out from under their desks and lift their coats from the pegs on which they’d hung them at lunchtime.

Will left the building euphoric with self-importance. He’d saved the paper from embarrassing itself in the splash and been noticed by the Editor. He was sure Rosie had seen it. And not only that, but as he strolled through the atrium he found it swarming with stressed and terrified hacks from the Impartial and the Trumpet, trying to get the story for themselves. Lost-looking security guards in black suits were vainly attempting to corral them; and beefy policemen, still in their motorbike leathers, kept asking who was in charge. Will moved through them as one long in the know.