‘Heads down!’ he yelled back as the car accelerated. Kate obeyed, and squeezed her eyes shut too. It would not shield her from bullets, but would help with the sensory overload that would surely come. Mark must have ducked his own head, as the car’s path became wonkier and more chaotic. A short spray of bullets attacked the car, hitting nothing but its metal back. Mercifully, the tyres were unaffected. Simon did not follow Mark’s command, showing unexpected independence by sticking his head out of the window and firing back at the distant clones. Kate did not look back to see whether he hit any.

Mark turned a corner, and the clones’ gunfire fell into silence. But it did nothing to help Kate calm down. The engine was still roaring, the floor still shook beneath her, and Raj was still dead. Two more corners later she opened her eyes, if only to keep an eye out for more hunters.

The urban drive felt like a ride on a post-apocalyptic ghost train. Some buildings were burned-out shells. Some shops had been looted by bands of survivors following Takeover Day. The blood on the tarmac had long faded, but the occasional skeleton in faded clothes still occupied a space on the pavement. The meat had long been picked clean from their bones: perhaps the crows above Harpenden had developed a taste for human flesh.

That’s what lies in wait for Raj…

‘My house was down the M1,’ Mark shouted, ‘I used to take this route every day to Oakenfold.’

You barely came to Oakenfold. You vanished for a year after you got sentenced, and after that you only turned up when you felt like it.

‘Of course, if we hit the Takeover Day traffic jams on the M1, we’ll be waiting a bloody long time for the traffic to clear. But it’s better than getting shot to death here.’

Kate felt something warm on the back of her neck. Simon was panting behind her, the whole of his body frozen except his lungs, which took rapid, erratic breaths. His panic and Kate’s overload left Mark as the only truly active member of the team.

When they arrived at Britain’s oldest motorway – the birthplace of their country’s worst traffic jams – they discovered the M1 had ended its life with the worst blockage of all. Vehicles were strewn across the road as if a toddler had thrown their toy cars across a fabric floor map, forming a metal hedge maze of vans and people carriers and articulated lorries. Regardless, Mark found a way to manoeuvre through the vehicles whose owners had tried in vain to escape the clones almost a year ago. Kate’s seat rocked beneath her whenever he moved onto the grass, and her fingers twitched in discomfort each time her door scraped along a neighbouring car.

They must have travelled nearly a mile before the explosion.