He had hoped they would be productive thoughts, but they weren’t. They were chaotic ones that cycled through his brain, growing bigger and bigger as they went. The thoughts themselves never changed: his brain repeated the exact same phrases, but said them louder each time until they became his whole universe. Grant took Oakenfold. Grant took Oakenfold. GRANT TOOK OAKENFOLD.

Over the course of his life, Ewan had tried numerous strategies to break the cycle and set his brain back on track, and the most effective one had been finding a distraction. After a childhood of being told distractions were bad, it seemed strange that they worked so well for him in times of anxiety. (Of course, adults commanding him to avoid them had only forced him to do the opposite.)

Ewan found a suitable distraction, in the form of his mentor’s face pictured in his mind’s eye. Dr Joseph McCormick, the anchoring figure of stability for Ewan and the rest of the Underdogs, who had turned him little by little from an impulse-driven violent child to someone vaguely capable of doing things well. Ewan pictured everything about McCormick: his glasses that magnified the calmness in his eyes, the hair that wore thinner on his scalp, and that warm smile that he seemed to wear no matter what mood Ewan was in. The mere image of that face in Ewan’s mind helped him to steady his breathing, and before long he could start to refocus on his long march home.

It was almost midday when he and Shannon got to the trapdoor, and a short walk through a narrow tunnel led them to the cellar entrance to Spitfire’s Rise.

Ewan let Shannon through the door first. Partly out of respect, and partly so she would not see him glancing at the Memorial Wall on his way past. The name of Charlie Coleman still looked out of place: Ewan’s old classmate and Temper Twin, with whom he had shared troubled times at Oakenfold and heroic adventures at Spitfire’s Rise, now reduced to two words on a slab of dead people’s names.

Gazing at his best friend’s name felt like staring at the sun, so Ewan distracted himself with the cellar’s other contents. Namely the weapons and combat tools on their respective shelves, and the doors to the other two underground tunnels to neighbouring houses: one which led to the room where they kept their electricity generator, and the other which led to their makeshift farm where they grew their freshest food.