Ollie looked around the church. Everyone had broken up into their separate groups. Waitrose kids on one side, Blue and Big Mick and the other Morrisons kids on the other. The museum kids were in the middle, clustered round where Caspar was lying on the mattress. About half of them were holding on to each other and crying.

The dead body of the girl, Gabby, was wrapped tightly in some dust sheets they’d found and lying on the altar. Ollie could see that a reddish brown stain had seeped through the white material.

Lettis, in her funny robes, was sitting at the other end of the pew, scribbling away in her big book by the light of a candle. She was very dedicated, keeping up with her journal entries. She had a serious expression on her face and her tongue was sticking out between her teeth.

‘Look at them all,’ said Einstein. ‘Children. That’s all they are.’

As far as Ollie could see, he and Einstein were the only two kids who were mixing it up right now and he was going to take the opportunity to get some more stuff straightened out in his mind.

‘Can I ask you something else?’ he said, and Einstein grunted.

‘You want to ask me some more about whether you’re going to die?’

‘Not really, no. Don’t want to think about that too much.’

‘What then? You’ve got a lot of questions. Why now? Why me?’

‘Because you might have some answers. You think about stuff.’

‘Don’t you?’

‘Yeah.’ Ollie winced as he discovered another bruise, this time on his leg. ‘You’ve seen what the others are like,’ he said. ‘Achilleus isn’t exactly a deep thinker. And Blue … I don’t know him well enough, to tell you the truth.’

‘I thought you were all friends,’ said Einstein. ‘A gang.’

‘No. I’ve only really known him for a couple of weeks. Before that we kept to ourselves. They had one camp. We had another. Didn’t mix. We were all fighting over the same things, with food running out everywhere. Didn’t trust each other.’

‘No time to think,’ said Einstein.

‘No. So we had this guy in charge called Arran and he thought about things. I could talk to him. He was clever. That’s why he was our leader.’

‘What happened to him?’

‘He died.’

‘Stupid question really.’

‘Yeah. Only, listening to Caspar shouting his head off, it made me think about Arran, about when he got injured. You see, he was bitten by a grown-up, got really sick and then got hit by an arrow in a fight. That’s what finished him.’

‘So what’s the problem exactly? What do you want to know?’

‘This weird thing happened when he got bitten. At the time I didn’t think too much about it. There was too much other stuff going down.’

‘And what happened then?’