‘Come on. You can only have this much water, though, because I’m not carrying any more over. And, wait, let me measure you. I need to know what clothes size you are.’ She whipped a piece of tape round my chest, and then bent forward to examine the numbers on it.

‘What the . . . ?’

‘Just shut up, Martha. Hold still.’ She peered in close again, and then moved the tape down to my waist.

‘Excellent,’ she said, though I had no clue what it was about any part of my body and a tape measure which would mean praise from Lana. ‘Put your toothbrushes and stuff in that rucksack over there.’ She pointed towards a large yellow bag in the middle of the street, the one we’d carried the petrol cans in. ‘We’re going to fill just that one with clothes and things, and then we can take it in turns to carry it. Just one bag, and then the other three of us can hold the weapons to defend it.’

‘To defend us, Lana,’ I pointed out. ‘It’s us who need defending, not a bag full of clothes and toothbrushes.’

‘Yes, that’s what I meant,’ said Lana, though her voice made it clear she didn’t. I was fairly confident that if kriks attacked, she would defend the toothbrushes rather than me.

Kate emerged beaming, her wet hair glistening and sleek. She was wearing a pair of well-fitting black jeans, and a long-sleeved green T-shirt. She looked, to somebody who’d only ever seen her in rags, amazing. Simply amazing.

‘We’ll get some nice clothes for you, Martha,’ she said. ‘You just go and get washed.’

James was swaggering along the street whistling and clutching several water pistols. Two of them were so large they had straps so that he could carry them over his shoulders. He had these ones slung casually across his back. He raised another in a wave as he walked past us – a blue one with a large water chamber. He grinned and pointed it at the window behind us, pulling back the powerful-looking pump to release a jet of water which missed us by only a couple of inches. Then he turned around and fired off another couple of random shots at the empty street.

‘Pow, pow!’ he said. ‘I’m a killing machine! Are you scared of me?’

‘Nope,’ I said. ‘I can think of a few things that look a bit scarier than you.’

‘Bet they’ll be scared of me when these are filled with petrol. Or if they’re not, then they should be.’

He squinted at one of the lampposts, took careful aim and fired.