I steadied my breathing and looked around at the landscape. We had been careless to let ourselves get into this situation. We’d been careless and wrong to rush into a world we were no longer familiar with. We’d forgotten we were in a war. And it was a war humanity was losing.

I knew then what we were going to have to do. I’d known it, I think, since we first stepped back on to land and found that it wasn’t as wonderful and magical and perfect and brilliant as we’d hoped. I’d known it when being on land didn’t feel safe, and when it didn’t even feel quite solid beneath my feet.

I stopped running.

‘We can’t go to the castle yet,’ I said. ‘We’ve got to go back. We’ve got to kill the Jellyfish.’

Chapter 37

37

I couldn’t stop looking at James. I don’t want to sound shallow, but he did look suddenly really hot. I’m not going to say I fancied him, or was attracted to him or anything, but I did really see how people could be. It was either the new clothes, or the threat of our likely death, but his freshly shaven cheeks and his neatly cut hair (well . . . neater, anyway) really brought out his cheekbones. Underneath all that dirt and wild frizz, it turned out his real hair was a dark brown, and was wavy. His face did look odd, with the tanned part on the top half and the paler section below which had been covered by his beard, and also the little cuts on it from shaving for the first time. I think I liked it more like that though, and I liked seeing his dimples when he smiled. I’ll just mention that his muscles really looked good under his black T-shirt too. It’s fine to mention that, because I’m just saying it, and not going on about it. It’s a fact in my story at the moment, and not an opinion.

I think maybe he felt something too, because he was really quiet as we climbed back into town. I don’t mean he felt something about me, I just mean he felt something about the whole situation. We’d decided to stay back up on the hill for the night. There was nowhere else where we felt safe and, weirdly, it was full of sheep again. You couldn’t tell that we had put any on the Jellyfish at all. James did make a couple of jokes about trying to catch them again, but other than that, he just ate a couple of cans of cat food, brushed his teeth, and lay down on the grass.