He watched the kids as they got into formation. There was an excited, slightly dizzy atmosphere, like at the start of a school trip. The little kids in particular were in very high spirits. They hated being cooped up indoors all day and were happily getting to know each other. The older kids were a little more wary. Some of them had fought each other in the past. Arran and Blue had been working hard to make sure nobody started fighting again. A shared goal and a shared enemy were helping, and the mood was positive for the time being, but Arran knew that if anything went wrong it would quickly lead to arguments and infighting.

“Come on, then,” he said, throwing one last quick glance back toward Waitrose. “Let’s go.”

He raised an arm, held it above his head until he was sure that everyone had seen it, and then let it drop toward the center of town.

A cheer went up. Arran started walking. The rest of the kids fell in behind him.

They were marching to a new life.

Small Sam was curled up in a ball. He had made himself as teeny as he could. He was inside an empty water tank in the attic of a house somewhere near Finsbury Park. He was sharing the space with several dead and rotting pigeons. They gave off a choking smell that caught in his throat and made his eyes sting, but he hoped the smell would hide his own smell. Hoped it would keep the grown-ups away. So far it was working. He had been here all night. Waiting. Listening. It was almost like being back in the sack again.

The last few hours had been a blur, and he was exhausted. He’d been chased down the stairs at the stadium by three grown-ups. Two of them had been on fire. They hadn’t made it to the bottom of the stairs, and Sam had managed to lose the third one in the maze of concrete corridors and walkways behind the stands. But he had also got lost himself. At one point he found himself running across the field, with several bewildered grown-ups watching from the seats.

Eventually, though, he had found a way out, and as he ran off he’d looked back to see the whole of the top of the stadium on fire. A tower of flames reached up into the night sky.

He wondered how many of the grown-ups would burn, and it made him happy. His happiness had been short-lived, however, because he realized that he didn’t really know where he was or how to get back to Holloway Road. He had wandered the streets for ages and had somehow ended up in Finsbury Park. He had heard the older kids talking about Finsbury Park. They never came up this way. It was too dangerous. There were too many grown-ups, and lots of the buildings had been damaged by fire. He had an idea that the Seven Sisters Road would take him back to Holloway, but he wasn’t sure which way he should go.