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"From here," Hunter Leader says, "we’ll go east, towards the river, so that we’ll hit the first sanctuary at daybreak. Questions?"

"We haven’t seen anything yet," complains the thin fair young man, whose name Jasmine remembers to be Ross.

"It’s still too close to the Wall," Hunter Leader explains, "We’ll probably be seeing them tomorrow night, though."

As though in response, something moves inside the old wreck. A shadow trembles inside the skeletal cabin, an arm waving, a silhouetted hand flapping loosely.

"What..."

Hunter Leader vaults silently up on a caterpillar track, a pistol appearing in his hand as if by magic. "Don’t worry," he says, peering into the cab. "It’s dying. No threat to us." They listen to it dragging itself around the cabin of the wrecked ‘dozer. There are other sounds. Finally, there is a soft moan, and the thing in the cabin falls silent.

"Let’s go," says Hunter Leader, and lopes away towards the east.

Jasmine has known she was special since school.

"Why can’t you be like everyone else?" she had heard, over and over, and finally in school she discovered the simple answer.

"Because I’m not everyone else," she’d said aloud, right in the middle of class, astounded with the simplicity of it. "I’m me."

The fact that she had been who she was, though, was apparently far from acceptable or even comprehensible to anyone else, let alone to those in authority over her, parents and teachers and employers. It had only been when she moved into sufficiently remunerative self-employment that she could really try to be what she thought she wanted to be. But, even there, she was herded and chained by a thousand rules. More rules than ever before, since the Happening.

This adventure, then, had been a way of trying to break free. And now she wonders if it’s even more restrictive than all she’s ever known.

The sanctuary today is in the basement of a building three stories high, the upper two of which are gutted and choked with their own rubble. The basement’s accessed by a set of narrow steps cut into the pavement, with an armoured door at the bottom. To open it, Hunter Leader slid away a panel by the door and input a code. The code can only be used once before it’s changed. The maintenance team that will follow them will have the new code.

Inside, the basement’s surprisingly comfortable. The walls are covered in glossy paint and prints of great works of art, including those long-ago masters, Picasso and Monet. There’s even a carpet on the floor, a kitchenette and curtained sleeping recesses. There is electricity, running off batteries, which power the lights and air-conditioning system. The follow-up team will change the batteries as well.

They’ve cooked breakfast – Hunter Two doing the preparation, what little there is of it. Most of the food is preserved and just needs heating. It’s probably healthy but far from palatable. Jasmine’s hardly a competent cook, but she thinks even she could probably have turned out a better-tasting meal than this. But everyone’s hungry, so they dig into the dehydrated scrambled eggs and toasted cereal without comment.

At one side of the room is a kind of periscope array, and Hunter Leader raises it at frequent intervals and has a look around. The periscope rises and retracts with a faint, almost inaudible hum of electric motors.

"Nothing to see," he tells anyone who asks if he’s seen anything. "Nothing at all."

Jasmine has begun to feel the fatigue in the muscles of her legs, and she goes off to one of the curtained alcoves to try and get some sleep. There’s a sleeping bag there, slung like a low hammock on an aluminium frame, and it doesn’t look as though it would provide even a mite of comfort, she thinks as she climbs dubiously into it. Not a mite of...

A hand on her shoulder, shaking her awake. Hunter Two is leaning over her, his dark Semitic face expressionless, a steaming mug of coffee held out for her to take. "It’s almost dark," he announces. "We’re moving off in half an hour."

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