If the beetle wants to get somewhere it needs to fall off first, I think.

“Kyle, please,” Chiu groans.

I glance back and Farah has slowed down as well.

“Kyle,” Chiu says again. Irritable now.

“We’re really close,” I say. “I’m sure of it.”

The treeline is thicker up ahead and for a heart-stopping moment we lose sight of the wall. But then we round the outcropping of bushes and on the far side there is a gate.

Standing open.

Tall: three times my height at least. Made from wrought iron and ornamented so extensively that it reminds me of a storm that’s been frozen in time.

“That doesn’t exactly look inviting,” Chiu says, doubtfully.

“It’s fine,” I say. “It’s where we want to be.”

I can’t exactly explain the excitement rushing inside me. Escape, my mind says. Deliverance. It didn’t want us to get this far. I turn and grin at the others. They seem less impressed than I’d expected them to be.

On the other side of the gate is a park of some kind. Winding paths cut through dense treeline, cutting back and forth, rising up a steep hill. I take the map off Farah and look. There’s lots of green spaces on the map and it’s impossible to tell which one we’re in, if any of them. But I’m certain that if we get to the top, it’ll become clear.

I’m sweating and my breath is tight in my throat. I stumble, scramble my way up the hill. We’re close. Chiu and Farah call from behind me, but I don’t stop. They’re following, that’s enough and we’re moving faster again.

It’s not exactly a mountain, but I’m thinking about all the mountains Mum and Father Michael like to talk about. “Mountains are closer to God,” they like to say. Like Mount Sinai where God gave Moses the Ten Commandments and Mount Nebo, where he saw the promised land. This is my mountain, I think. But it’s not taking me closer to God. It’s taking me somewhere better.

I’ve given up on the paths now and I’m scrambling through the brambles and the ferns. They catch on my jeans and claw at my T-shirt. I stumble into a patch of stingers and feel the angry needles like tiny electric shocks across my palm. The others are calling after me. They sound scared as well as angry now.

Then the brambles give way and we’re in a wide-open field. It’s been well looked after, more of a park than a field, with a broad, gravelled path and trees carefully planted to obscure the view until you are at the very top.

We climb. And then we’re there and beyond the brow, between the trees.

London.

Laid out, like a meal on a plate.

Just like the photos I’ve seen on the internet, just like all the tourist information and visitor sites I’ve trawled over the years. There’s the Shard, spearing upwards like it’s slicing the sky in two. The dome of St Paul’s below it. The Gherkin off to the left, swollen and unlikely, like a seed pod ready to burst. To the right, the Walkie Talkie, which could be a regular tower block except that it’s somehow warped and half melted in the heat.

The breath leaves my lungs and I feel for a moment as if I’m floating.

The London skyline has always looked unworldly to me, but seeing it now, after everything we’ve been through in this world, I find it hard to imagine that the architects who built this place haven’t spent some time in the Stillness.

“It’s Parliament Hill,” I say.

“It’s London,” Farah says firmly, as if to say: This isn’t Barnet.

I sit, feeling my own exhaustion now, but elated as well, because here is the place I’ve wanted to come for as long as I remember and here I am, towering over it, as if I could reach down and pluck one of the ripe, succulent buildings and eat it like a grape.

“We can’t stay here,” Chiu says, his voice tinged with panic. “We need to get inside.”

I shake my head. “We should rest here. It’s OK.”

“But we’re outside,” Chiu says.

“Don’t you feel it?” I say. “The danger isn’t about inside or outside, it’s something else. People come here; they feel safe here. So long as a place has weight, we’re OK.”

I can feel It considering me, appraising me. I know I’m right.

Chiu contemplates this for a moment, then his face flickers with relief. He sits and I experience another one of those moments where I’m surprised by how young he is. Farah sits too, cross-legged with her hands on her knees. She smooths back a strand of hair, wraps her arms around her stomach.

Chiu lets out a shivering breath. “This calls for a game of Uno.”

THIRTY-TWO

We’re exhausted, but we play anyway and then we sit for a long time, until the sky starts to turn sooty with the onset of night. It doesn’t change gradually like it does in the ordinary world. It changes in discrete steps, one minute it’s a particular shade of turbid grey, the next, it’s another. Somehow, you never see it change. You blink, or you look away, and the colour of the sky becomes different.

The darkening, starless dome recedes, becoming more impossibly vast with each step. I’m caught by a sudden insight, a vision of myself: a flicker, a guttering candle, an astonishingly small moment. Darkness before and darkness after.

I blink and the feeling is gone. The brain is like that, I think. It’s attuned to notice change and proportion. If you close your eyes and hold a penny in one hand and ten pence in the other, you can tell the difference; but if you hold a brick in one hand and a brick with ten pence on it in the other, you can’t. If you spend your life locked in your room, then going to the shops is, proportionately, terrifying; but if you feel, for a moment, the vertigo of falling through all of space and time and the immensity of your insignificance, then nothing in the ordinary world feels like such a big deal anymore.

All of which is to say, I think things are going to be different when we get back to the ordinary world. Small comfort.

As night falls, we drift back into another game of Uno. The cards are our version of music: they bind us together, create a space that is for us alone.

But I feel It always now. My aura. That implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention. It notices me now. I don’t know whether it happened when I killed Tongue, or when I got us here, but I’ve definitely caught Its attention.

“How did you do it?” Chiu says.

“Do what?” I say.

“Get us here. Escape.”

Farah nods. “It didn’t want us to get out, but you knew how to get us here.”

“Blindsight,” Chiu says. “It’s getting stronger, isn’t it? Ever since Jonah.”

“I don’t feel any different,” I say.

Chiu pulls a card from his hand and holds it up with its back to me. “What card am I holding up?”

I half laugh. “How should I know?”

“Tell me what card,” Chiu insists.

“But I can’t see.”