‘I’m fine,’ Robbie said and took a sip of water, his hand trembling slightly.

‘I wouldn’t mind getting out of here and grabbing some fresh air as well, actually,’ said Maxie.

‘All right,’ said Justin. ‘Don’t be too long.’

Maeve and Maxie walked downstairs and out into the sunshine.

‘It’s like doing exams or something,’ said Maxie.

‘Oh, don’t,’ said Maeve as they settled down on the steps. ‘There are some things about the old life I don’t miss one bit.’

The main road on the other side of the fence was empty. In fact, since clearing out the lower level, Maxie hadn’t seen a single grown-up. If it wasn’t for the weirdness of Samira disappearing it would have felt pretty safe and secure in the museum.

A group of kids was working on the vegetable patches, checking for weeds and pests. Maxie recognized some of them from the interviews.

‘But this new life,’ said Maeve, ‘it’s killing me, Maxie.’

‘We just have to make the museum safe.’ Maxie leant back and turned her face up to the sun.

‘It’ll never be safe,’ said Maeve. ‘It’ll never be safe as long as we stay in the city. We’ll never be anything more than scavengers, fighting among ourselves because there’s not enough to go round, scared and hiding from the grown-ups. We need to get out of town and into the countryside.’

‘It’s not that bad,’ said Maxie, who’d heard Maeve’s arguments about leaving town before. ‘There’s everything the dead left behind. We’ve done all right scavenging.’

‘We can’t just live like parasites,’ said Maeve. ‘In the countryside we could properly grow our own food. And there’ll be a lot less grown-ups around. We should have gone months ago.’

‘Yeah,’ said Maxie. ‘It’ll be paradise.’

‘Nowhere’s going to be paradise,’ said Maeve. ‘I’m not saying that. But we’ll never properly start to rebuild things if we stay here. It’s like when the Romans left Britain. The British people didn’t know what to do with the towns and cities. They were like us, like kids. They returned to the countryside, left the buildings to rot and went back to their farms.’

‘What do we know about being farmers?’ said Maxie. ‘It’s not like Farmville, you can’t just click on a few keys and have a load of cute cows filling up your fields.’

‘There’ll be other kids out there. They’ve had a year to set up farms.’

‘Oh yeah, and they’ll be well pleased when we tip up and want half their food.’

‘Anything’s better than this,’ said Maeve.

‘It’s gonna be all right,’ said Maxie.