Damn. He loved those heavy steel ball bearings.

His ankle was sore; he had landed wrong leaping over the turnstiles. They made a sorry bunch. Freak had been pretty badly mauled. He was covered with filth and there was blood on him, but as far as it was possible to tell, it didn’t look like his own blood. At least Achilleus looked unharmed. He swore that boy had iron underpants.

Achilleus wasn’t particularly a friend of Ollie’s. He was always having a go at him for being too rich, too clever, too quiet. But Ollie didn’t let it get to him. The two of them had a sort of grudging respect for each other. When it came down to it, Ollie valued Achilleus’s fighting skills, and Achilleus valued Ollie’s brains. They usually kept out of each other’s way. Ollie wasn’t used to being up front. It felt weird.

He remembered driving in the family car. Him and his mom and dad and three brothers. Ollie had always sat in the back, staring out of the side window, trying to keep out of their arguments and fights. He remembered the few occasions when it had been just him and his dad, and he’d gotten to ride up front in the passenger seat. How different it had felt, like they were equals. And how nice it had been to get his dad all to himself. His dad had been like Ollie. Quiet, distant, always thinking about something.

They were all dead now. All five of them.

His dad had been the first to go. One of the very first to die when the illness struck. He had even been on the news; the headline had said something like “Another Death from Mystery Illness Sweeping Europe.” Then there had been more and more deaths, and not just in Europe—all around the world. They’d stopped mentioning individuals;it had been whole streets, then whole towns. It had all happened so fast, people had been stunned and hadn’t really had time to panic. The whole world had sort of gone into shock. His mother had been frantic after Dad died. She’d packed the house up, ready to try to escape to the countryside and stay with Auntie Susan. But she’d fallen ill before they could get away. Then it was just Ollie and his brothers. They’d tried to leave London by themselves. His oldest brother, Dan, got sick next. He’d been eighteen. Then Will, sixteen.

His younger brother, Luke, hadn’t been old enough to get sick. He’d been killed in a riot up near Finsbury Park. That must have been over a year ago. It felt more like a century. By then, Ollie had had no more tears left to cry; the catastrophe had been so immense, so overwhelming, that he had just pushed it out of his mind and concentrated on trying to stay alive. He owed it to his family, as the last one left, not to die.

“We should have never gone into there in the first place,” said Achilleus. “Freak’s an idiot.”