‘Will you hurry up, loser?’ Lana opened the door, throwing in some clothes for me. ‘Get these on quickly, and get downstairs. I want to be at the castle before the sun goes down. Huh. You don’t look too bad, do you?’

‘No. I don’t.’

I kept on looking at myself in the mirror while I was getting dressed, but it felt rude, like I was spying on a naked stranger.

Lana had chosen a pair of leaf-coloured jeans and a plain white T-shirt, and some red trainers. She had also chosen a pair of pants, and a bra, which had small pink birds on them. When I put the white T-shirt on top (and, yes, it took me a few minutes, because putting on a bra doesn’t come naturally, OK?), you could just about make out the pattern of the birds underneath if you stared and stared, and I was glad about that. I was glad about the underwear, because it already felt special to be wearing it – not just because it was comfortable and clean, though that was good – but because it felt like I had this special secret that you couldn’t know about just from looking at me.

‘Come on, Martha!’ called Lana. ‘Let’s get out of here.’

I think we all felt completely fabulous, and for the first time, standing in the middle of that deserted town, we looked like we really could be something. We didn’t look like we were losers who’d been marooned on a lump of jelly wearing rags, and eating raw seaweed as a treat. We looked like we could be fighters, like we could defeat monsters.

Chapter 36

36

On one of the trees overhanging the river there was an orange plastic bag tied to a branch. We’d stopped to stare at it, and to hope.

‘They must have come this way! That’s from Dr Jones’s hair!’ said Kate. ‘They got away!’

‘It’s just a plastic bag,’ said Lana. ‘There are thousands of those.’

‘It’s tied in a bow though,’ I pointed out. ‘It hasn’t got there by accident. It’s a sign for us.’

‘It’s a rubbish sign for us,’ muttered Lana. ‘Literally.’ But she said it quietly, and I could see she was having to stop herself from smiling. Orange plastic bags were rare, and it was unlikely the wind could have tied a bag as neatly as that – trust me, we were experts in plastic bags.

The land around the mouth of the river was flat and open and gave a good view along the coastline. There were abandoned, broken boats, and there was debris strewn along the length of the shore in amongst the sunken, sea-damaged houses near us, and the beaches and cliffs beyond. But there was no sign of the boats the Jellyfish people had been in.

I avoided looking the other way, the way we’d come. The way the Jellyfish was.