How silly to be scared of a statue.

As far as he knew, Kentish Town was next to Camden. So maybe he hadn’t got as lost as he’d thought. All he needed to do was keep going downhill.

There was a cloud of black smoke filling the road ahead. A shop was on fire. He held his breath and zoomed through, screwing his face up. Luckily the road was clear on the other side. Grown-ups didn’t like fire. They would keep away.

And there was the back of Sainsbury’s, a funny-looking metal building on the canal, like something out of Star Wars. This was it. He’d made it. This was Camden. But with so many grown-ups out on the streets, he wondered where his friends might be. And Ella. He hoped she wasn’t too scared without him.

He remembered the feeling he’d had when he’d first seen the mob of grown-ups marching down Camden Road, like an army. He knew what his fear was now. That the grown-ups were ganging up to attack his friends. Maybe the kids had also had to take another route to be safe?

He pedaled harder and soon came to where several roads met near the tube station. He stopped at a traffic island in the middle. In the past there would have been cars and trucks and buses rushing past in all directions, and the sidewalks would have been filled with kids going to the market. Now it wasn’t like being in a city at all. The buildings might just as well have been rocks and cliffs. The abandoned, stationary cars were boulders. The road a dried-up riverbed.

There was even a sound, a rushing, swirling noise like water. He’d heard it before today. It wasn’t water. It was the sound of massed grown-ups. Breathing, sighing, hissing, their feet scuffing on the asphalt. But where was it coming from?

He looked around.

There. In the direction of Holloway, up the road that led past the front of Sainsbury’s. A great mob of grown-ups was moving toward him. Even from this distance he could smell them.

He would have to go faster.

Which way to go, though? Which route would the other kids have taken?

There were so many choices here. And now there were more grown-ups coming along the other roads. Maybe they were trying to see what was going on? The only clear route was the one heading back the way he had come, toward Kentish Town and the fire, which he could see now was spreading. The whole of the sky in that direction was hazy with a purple-gray smudge.

Come on. Which way was the center of London? The road signs were too confusing. They pointed to places whose names he didn’t know.

The most obvious route was down the high street. It was the widest road. There were a few grown-ups wandering about on it, but if he went fast enough he could get around them. He shunted the bike forward, put his full weight on one pedal, then the other, and soon his feet were a blur as the pedals spun around and the chain rattled over the sprockets. He passed a knot of grown-ups, who made a feeble lunge at him, but as he glanced back at them, his front wheel hit a hole in the road. The whole bike jarred. He lost control and flew over the handlebars, landing in a painful heap on the asphalt. For a few seconds he was too stunned to move. His pants were ripped and his elbows and knees were bleeding. Then he sensed someone coming near and shook himself awake. He looked up just as a skinny young mother with no hair and dribble streaming down her chin made a grab for him. He rolled away from her groping hands and kicked out. He got her in the knee and she went down face-first.