you’ve already had your implants—” she was saying. Polly opened the door and went out.
And nearly fell over Colin, who was sitting on the pavement, his back to the lab’s wall. “Sorry,” he said and scrambled to his feet. “Where have you been? I’ve been looking all over Oxford for you.”
“What are you doing out here?” Polly asked. “Why didn’t you come in?”
He looked sheepish. “I can’t. It’s off-limits. Mr. Dunworthy’s being completely unreasonable. I asked him to let me go on an assignment, and he phoned the lab and told them I wasn’t to be allowed in.”
“Are you certain you didn’t attempt to sneak into the net while someone else was going through?”
“No. All I did was say that on certain assignments someone my age could provide a different point of view from an older historian—”
“What assignment?” Polly asked. “The Crusades?”
“Why does everyone keep bringing up the Crusades? That was something I wanted to do when I was a child, and I am not—”
“Mr. Dunworthy’s only trying to protect you. The Crusades are a dangerous place.”
“Oh, you’re a fine one to talk about dangerous places,” he said. “And Mr. Dunworthy thinks every place is too dangerous, which is ridiculous. When he was young, he went to the Blitz. He went all sorts of dangerous places, and back then they didn’t even know where they were going. And the place I wanted to go wasn’t remotely dangerous. It was the evacuation of the children from London. In World War II.”
Where she was going. Perhaps Merope was right.
“Speaking of dangerous,” he said, “here are all the raids. I didn’t know when you were coming back, so I did them from September seventh to December thirty-first. The list’s awfully long, so I recorded it as well, in case you want to do an implant.” He handed her a memory tab. “The times are when the bombing began, not when the air-raid alert sirens went. I’m still working on those, but I thought I’d better get the raid times to you in case you were going soon. And if you are, the raids generally began twenty minutes after the sirens sounded. Oh, and by the way, if you’re on a bus, you may not be able to hear the sirens. The noise of the engine drowns them out.”
“Thank you, Colin,” Polly said, looking at the pages. “You must have put in hours and hours of work on this.”
“I did,” he said proudly. “It wasn’t easy to find out what had been hit. The newspapers weren’t allowed to publish the dates or addresses of specific buildings that were bombed—”
Polly nodded, still looking at the list. “They couldn’t print anything which might aid the enemy.”
“And a lot of the government’s records were destroyed in the war and afterward, with the pinpoint and then the Pandemic. And there were lots of stray bombs. It’s not like the V-1 and V-2 attacks, where they have the exact times and coordinates. I’ve listed the major targets and areas of concentration,” he said, showing her on the list, “but there were lots of other things hit. The research said over a million buildings were destroyed, and this only lists a fraction of those. So just because the list says Bloomsbury, it doesn’t mean you’re safe wandering about some other part of London. Particularly the East End—Stepney and Whitechapel and places like that. They were the hardest hit. And the buildings on the list are only ones that were completely destroyed, not those that suffered partial damage or had their windows blown out. Hundreds of people were killed by flying glass or shrapnel from anti-aircraft shells. You need to keep as close to buildings as you can for protection if you’re out during a raid. Shrapnel—”
“Can kill me. I know. You’ve been spending too much time with Mr. Dunworthy. You’re beginning to sound just like him.”
“I am not. It’s just that I don’t want anything to happen to you. And Mr. Dunworthy’s right about its being dangerous. Thirty thousand civilians were killed during the Blitz.”
“I know. I’ll be careful, I promise.”
“And if you do get hit by shrapnel or something, don’t worry. I promise I’ll come rescue you if you get in trouble.”
Oh, dear, Merope was right. “I promise I’ll stay close to buildings,” she said lightly. “Speaking of Mr. Dunworthy, you haven’t told him I’m back, have you?”
“No. I haven’t even told him I’m here. He thinks I’m at school.”
Good, then she needn’t worry about him giving her away.