‘Come on, Ollie, be a man. Oh no, wait a minute, that’s what’s scaring you … Listen, it doesn’t make any difference to me. As I said, I’m already fifteen. We both know what you’re talking about. You’re nearly fifteen, you’ve got a birthday coming up and you’re scared of what’s going to happen to you.’

‘No.’

‘Oh please …’

‘I’ve just had my birthday actually.’

‘There you go. Well … Happy birthday. Do you feel any different?’

‘No.’

‘Exactly. The thing is, you need to look at it like this. We all talk about the disease only affecting people over the age of fourteen because, when it struck, that’s what happened. But it wasn’t a hard and fast rule, was it, if you think about it? It wasn’t like an exact line was drawn through the calendar. It was just a rough divide. A convenient way of looking at what was happening. And, of course, since then we’ve all been growing older, and since then we’ve seen no evidence of kids getting the disease.’

‘That’s a relief.’

‘It doesn’t mean that kids definitely won’t develop the disease in the future, though.’

‘Great. You had me feeling good for about, oh, I don’t know, three milliseconds.’

‘Science can’t give hard answers, only theories,’ said Einstein. ‘That’s how it works. We observe what we can and make judgements based on that. And, as I say, so far we haven’t observed anyone getting sick as they get older. Until we really understand the way the disease works we won’t know what caused it and what might happen in the future. Are we immune? Are we incubating the disease? Did whatever was causing the disease stop doing what it was doing at a certain date? Did something happen fifteen years ago?’

‘Or stop happening.’

‘You got it. Exactly. And that’s what I’m trying to find out. Are we immune? Or are we all carrying the disease, all slowly getting ill? We just don’t know. That’s the point of this expedition, to find what we need to carry on our research.’

‘So we’re fetching chemicals?’

‘Chemicals, drugs, medicine, anything like that. I’m hoping the Promithios warehouse will have all we need. Unless it got burned down or cleaned out.’

‘And that’s what the trolleys are for?’

‘Yeah. I know they’ll slow us down, but we need to pick up a lot of gear.’

Ollie blew out his breath and rubbed the back of his neck. ‘I never thought, when we were battling our way across London from Holloway, that it was to go on a shopping trip.’

‘Weren’t you all living in a supermarket?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Then maybe it’s your destiny.’

Chapter 22

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