Once DogNut was done Chris put down his pen and looked up, rubbing his eyes, which looked feeble and watery in the candlelight.

‘Thank you,’ he said, closing the book.

‘Not sure what use any of that’s gonna be,’ said DogNut. ‘The only thing I know for sure, talking about it, is I want to be back there at the Tower right now.’

‘You never know what’s going to be important in the future,’ said Chris. ‘There are loads of stories in London. There are kids out there now going through the same things as you, and they’re all parts of one big story. The story of our survival, of fights and victories, and defeats and death, friends being killed, enemies being slain.’

‘Slain?’ said DogNut. ‘Nobody says “slain”. You even sounding like a book.’

‘Why not?’ said Chris, and he tapped the leather cover of his ledger with his fingertips. ‘We’re all in a book – this book. We’re all in the story. Tonight we’re writing down your part in it, DogNut.’

‘Yeah, great,’ said DogNut. ‘To be honest I didn’t understand any of what you just said.’

‘Everything you’ve done since you left the Tower,’ said Chris patiently, ‘all the people you’ve met, it will all have an effect, and who knows where it will all end? It’s like dropping a stone in a pond, ripples go out in all directions.’

DogNut snorted through his nose. He was beginning to think Chris Marker was half mad. He’d never really known him before. This was the most he’d ever heard him say. Somehow this weird kid had come alive here, in this world of books.

‘There you go again, Chrissy-Boy,’ he said. ‘Hitting me with your deep stuff. You ain’t making it no clearer, bruv. Let me tell you.’

‘I suppose what I’m saying, DogNut, is that you’re part of history. We don’t know yet how important a part, but you’re in there all the same.’

‘Is anyone really gonna be interested in reading about me, though?’

‘I’m interested,’ said Chris, ‘and others will be too. We’re the new generation. We’re the survivors. We’re making a whole new world here. In the future, kids are going to want to know what happened. How it was. I think your journey, crossing London, could be really important, because you’ve taken the first steps to uniting all the kids around London, drawing us all together. It’s like someone coming from the other side of the world, like Marco Polo travelling to China, or Columbus arriving in America. You’ll all be important figures to future generations. You’ll all be heroes.’

‘Future generations?’ DogNut scoffed. ‘If we’re lucky.’

‘We’re going to make it, DogNut,’ said Chris.

‘Who says these future generations are gonna want to remember, though?’ said DogNut. ‘I’d of thought they’d want to forget all about this.’

‘No. History is important … You know what Winston Churchill said?’ asked Chris.

‘We’ll fight them on the beaches, or something.’

‘Yeah, he said that, but he also said that history is written by the victors.’

‘What’s that mean then?’

‘It means that if you win a war you can write the books and say you were the good guys and the losers were the bad guys.’

‘Yeah, OK, I’m on it. So what?’

‘I think it works the other way round as well,’ said Chris. ‘If you write the history, you’ll become the victor.’

‘You lost me again.’

‘If we make our own history, if we tell stories that bring us together, we’ll be stronger. It’ll give us something to believe in. The sickos can’t do that – they’re no better than animals – but we can. Every battle we win we have to tell the story over and over, so that we can win more battles. People love stories. They’ve told stories since even before they could write. Myths and legends, stories of heroes and villains, gods and monsters. Real things happened, the story got told and then the stories became legends. That’s what we’ve got to do – tell our own heroic stories.’

‘I don’t feel like much of a hero,’ said DogNut, and Courtney laughed. ‘Plodding across London, letting poor little Olivia die.’

‘It depends how you tell the story,’ said Chris, and he smiled at DogNut. ‘You’re Jack the giant-killer, and the Collector was an ogre in his castle, the Cyclops in his cave, the Minotaur in his labyrinth. Olivia was the virgin who was sent off to be sacrificed, and you’re the guys who tried to save her, who slew the monster once and for all so that nobody else would be eaten by him.’

‘Yeah, maybe when you put it like that it don’t sound so bad …’

‘That’s the power of storytelling. That’s why we have to control the stories – to control history. What was the Collector’s version? It was the story of a poor lonely man, the last of his kind, just trying to survive, and being ambushed in his den by vicious killers. That would make it very different. If we told it that way, we’d feel sorry for him, and then it’d make it harder to kill other sickos in the future. That’s why we have to tell the stories, so that we’re the heroes and the sickos are the monsters. We tell it our way.’

‘What are you saying, book-boy?’ DogNut was shaking his head slowly. ‘I keep thinking I got it and then you hit me with more words and it goes out my head.’

‘I’m saying you’re going to be a hero, DogNut, whether you like it or not.’

55

Jester was sewing a patch on to his coat by the glow of a fire. It was a small piece of material he’d cut from an old T-shirt of Shadowman’s. He’d found the shirt in a pile of clothes that Shadowman had left at the palace. Jester had brought it along with him in his satchel …

Just in case.

He had no doubt that Shadow was dead. This way he’d always remember him. When he got back to the palace, he’d find out whether Kate or Tom had made it. He doubted he’d ever see Alfie again, and would have some explaining to do if he did. Probably, though, he would distribute Alfie’s belongings among the other kids, and hold one item of clothing back.

To cut a patch from.

He put down the needle and thread, and stared into the fire, watching the embers. It was the closest thing to television any of them had now. You could stare into a fire and imagine it was anything you liked. You could be staring into another world. Witnessing the eruption of a volcano. The birth of a planet. The lights of a giant city from the air …

Or just a fire.

He rubbed his face. It was very late. Apart from the guards they’d posted around their camp, the others were all asleep. He was lucky. He knew that much. He’d stumbled across a group of kids who knew how to look after themselves. Two groups of kids, if he was going to be accurate. Each group had been holed up inside a different supermarket, and he gathered that they didn’t exactly get on. That was useful information. He’d tuck it away in case he needed to use it later. After he’d been rescued he’d managed to persuade both groups that they’d all be a lot better off at the palace. He was good at that kind of thing. Talking people round. And he knew that once he got these kids to the palace, if he wanted to keep them there, doing what David told them, he was going to need to use all his powers of persuasion, his skill at bending the truth. He was going to have to convince them that they were looking at something white when it was actually black.

These were tough kids who weren’t used to being told what to do by anyone else, but if he could make them believe that the palace was the best place to live in the whole of London, then David would have the best army around. It was going to be difficult. Not everyone took to David. Not everyone wanted to live under his rule. He drove Jester himself up the wall sometimes.

Yeah. He was going to be busy, and was already planning his strategy now. The Holloway kids weren’t all fighters. They had younger kids with them who would appreciate the greater safety and security on offer at the palace, so that was a start. It was their leaders who were going to be the most trouble. Although on that front Jester had had a little luck. Arran, the leader of the Waitrose kids, had been killed in a pitched battle with some particularly nasty grown-ups. A girl called Maxie seemed to have taken temporary charge, but he wasn’t sure how much authority she had. She’d be easy to deal with. The leader of the second group of kids, however, the ones from Morrisons, the bastards who had initially chased him away, was going to be harder. His name was Blue, and he was one tough case. David was going to have to offer him something he really wanted. Failing that, Jester would have to arrange for poor old Blue to be taken out of the picture. Jester wasn’t ever going to forgive him or his crew for driving him away with stones.