McCormick’s head fell to the side, but he could not feel the carpet against his cheek. When he realised he could no longer read the time on the clock, he said goodbye to the world and closed his eyes.

In his last moments of brain activity, he thought of his years in the 3rd Durham Boys’ Brigade, his holidays to Whitby with his long-gone parents, and the day he started university. He thought of the generations of students who had come and gone over the decades, and his honeymoon in Anglesey. He thought of his escape from depression. He thought of Ewan West, the closest lad he ever had to a son, and the words in the letter that awaited him at Spitfire’s Rise. He thought of the thirty-nine years he had spent in marriage to Barbara, the two years Polly Jones had spent rebuilding him, and the 365 days he had spent with the best friends he had ever had.

Ewan, Kate, Lorraine, Thomas, all of you… I loved you so much.

And Barbara…

Thank you, Barbara…

*

Not many rooms away from Joseph McCormick’s body, Oliver Roth looked at his computer screen in disbelief, verging on horror. He had seen and heard every moment of the end of McCormick’s life, spying on the CCTV system with the excuse of using it to find the remaining rebels.

He brought his hands to his face and clawed against his own skin. After every lesson Marshall had taught him about self-control, every lecture about strategic thinking, the same man had finished off McCormick with an impulsive gunshot to the heart.

Roth no longer knew what kind of death he had wanted for the old man, but his dream of ‘sticking your head on the spike of an electric fence’ had faded away during that conversation in the store room. One thing was for sure: he was overcome with a feeling that McCormick had deserved better.

Iain Marshall was right there onscreen, standing over the corpse of his greatest enemy, the furious expression on his face so stern that he must have known how much he had screwed up. Nathaniel Pearce couldn’t interrogate a dead body. There would be no McCormick clone model either, like he had watched Crossland suggest over the CCTV, and no extractable memories that could reveal the location of Spitfire’s Rise.

And on top of that, McCormick’s bomb would not be stopped. Roth checked both the clock on his wall and the digital clock onscreen, both accurate to within a second of each other. They showed less than ten seconds until Kate Arrowsmith’s watch read ten thirty.

‘Iain,’ he muttered to the psychotic idiot on his screen, ‘Grant’s going to kill you for this.’

Marshall wandered to his leather chair, but didn’t have time to sit down and collect himself.

10:30:00 p.m., 19/05/0001. Somewhere below them all, a button was pressed.