Kay pushes me through the other door.

I don’t let myself think about what just happened. What’s important is that we get out of here. These people think we were with The Leader. We need to get away. The painkillers have really kicked in and my whole lower arm has now gone numb. I can think clearly and I’m strangely calm.

We sneak down another set of stairs and into a changing room. I pull a lifeguard’s hooded top off a peg as we walk past.

‘Put this on,’ I say. ‘It will hide your uniform.’

Kay helps me shrug off my own jacket and turn it inside out before draping it over my shoulders. Now, at least at first glance, we’ll look different to the people they were chasing. We slink out of the changing rooms and back towards the front of the centre. Shouts are still coming from the rear of the building.

We walk past a bunch of teenagers ripping a screen from the wall. Just as we’re about to reach the exit, a man walks in and grabs me by the arm.

I see Kay readying to fight, but the man only says, ‘Is it true? Is The Leader here?’

‘I . . .’

‘Yes,’ Kay says. ‘That way.’ She gestures behind us.

The man hurries off in the direction she pointed.

Once we’re out of the building we begin to run. Eventually, we slow to a brisk walk.

‘Why did he do that?’ I ask. I can’t make sense of The Leader’s actions.

Kay knows exactly what I’m talking about. ‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘Maybe he really thought he was going to make them not angry.’

‘He didn’t have an efwurding clue, he was on another planet.’ There’s a sort of buzzing inside me. I can’t tell if it’s anger or sadness or something else, but it feels bad and makes me want to shake myself to try to throw it off.

‘They shot him, didn’t they?’ I say.

Kay nods.

The buzzing gets stronger. But this is what I wanted. I was going to kill him myself.

‘Do you think he’s dead?’

She nods again. ‘I saw it through the door when we were running away. It hit him in the head.’

‘Good,’ I say. And I mean it.

But the buzzing doesn’t stop.

It takes a long time to get back to the hospital. Fortunately, I still have metro passes in my shirt pocket from when I had to half carry Ven back from the factory, but the service has been disrupted. I hope it’s because of the trouble the Resistance have caused, but of course there’s no mention of that on the announcements about delays. We waste time sat on stationary trains. The painkillers start to wear off and my fingers burn and throb.

When we finally cross back over into the Wilderness, we find that the car that Ven drove this morning is still where we hid it. It’s good that we have a car to travel back to the hospital in, especially now that it’s getting dark, but the fact that Ven hasn’t picked it up himself sends a chill through me. Even if he survived his jump out of the window, the guards must have got him.

When the hospital finally appears out of the darkness, it looks the same as it always did. I half expected to find it razed to the ground. We still don’t know how much Robin’s friend found out about the Resistance.

I park the car, but I hesitate before getting out. I check the revolver is still inside my jacket. There’s no one guarding the back door.

‘Ven!’ I call. My voice echoes around the dark, dirty corridor. ‘Paulo!’

No answer.

Kay looks at me with wide eyes. ‘I’ll go to the rec room,’ she says.

I run down the corridor. It’s horribly quiet. I fling open the door of Tanisha’s office. It’s empty. I sprint into the cafeteria and the kitchen. They’re empty too. I run to the stairs, where Kay is coming back up.

‘I can’t find any person,’ Kay says. ‘They’re all gone.’