‘No,’ Ella interrupted. ‘I saw what those children are like. I saw what Louisa and Sonya did. If you won’t have anything to do with them then I won’t either.’

‘I don’t know if I can keep you safe, Ella.’

‘I’m not leaving you.’

‘Listen, Ella,’ said Malik. ‘Sure, kids are still desperate, but it’s a year since I was in Slough. That was all a long time ago. Things have settled down a lot since those early days. For the most part kids have stopped fighting each other and they respect each other’s turf. That’s what the races are all about.’

‘What are the races?’ Ella asked. ‘Isaac was going on about them like I should know what he meant.’

‘It’s what they call these games that the kids have over at Ascot. It’s their way of competing against each other without anyone getting killed. Well, all right, sometimes there are deaths, but that’s not the main idea.’

‘What sort of games are they?’

‘I don’t know. I’ve never been, Ella. Since I left Slough I’ve tried to avoid other kids.’

‘Have you been alone for all that time? Did you go straight to the farm?’

‘Not right away. I wandered all over at first, but the countryside can be a harsh place if you don’t know what you’re doing, which I didn’t back then. I had no idea how to live off the land and there were still grown-ups about. The kids had stayed mostly in the towns, and the grown-ups had been forced out. So it wasn’t safe anywhere. Funnily enough, though, it was grown-ups who looked after me. Saved me. Treated me better than the kids had.’

‘Grown-ups?’

‘Yeah. There was a group of them, sort of survival nuts. They’d got out of town when everything started to go wrong. They’d been ready for it. Looking forward to it, I reckon. They had everything you need to survive, weapons, tools, medicine, armour, traps, tents, water-filtration kits, night-vision goggles. They were living here on the farm. They set up a lot of the traps and things. They’d stay indoors during the days and hunt at night.’

‘Weren’t they sick?’

‘Yeah, they were sick, but fighting it. Looking after each other. There were five of them when I first met them, Brian, Waggers, Mike, Roy and Tomasz. There’d been more to start with, but they’d got the disease worse. The rest of them were going down slower. Learning how to keep it at bay.’

‘So how did you find them?’