We all sat staring out at the coast. The same group of kriks had been patrolling back and forth for days now, scuttling in and out of the houses along the shore. There was a sort of sick need to watch them, to check up on where they were. You didn’t want to look, but somehow your eyes always ended up on them, even if just looking at them made the shivers run down your spine. It was like picking at a scab that you knew wasn’t ready: even though you knew it would just bleed again, you couldn’t stop playing with it, and scratching around it, and worrying at it, until finally you gave in and ripped it off. And ignoring the kriks was just like that. Each time they went into another house, I imagined what it was they were doing, and what the house looked like inside. I pictured them scrabbling over the sofa, clawing up the stairs, searching for food in the kitchen, with that weird mechanical lurch of theirs. Were they finding any food? I couldn’t see any human life out there, but if any humans were hiding from the kriks, they’d also surely be hidden from us. Was there anybody?

Above the houses, the cliffs rose, the birds circling over their nests and calling as they had for thousands of years. Beyond them, the sheep grazed peacefully in the overgrown scrub land which had once been fields. The road – that pathway away from the coast and into the unknown – was still clear of vegetation. It was still wet from the morning’s rain, shining silver in the weak sun like a beacon. I knew it wasn’t really a beacon, and that that was all just rubbish inside my head. But still . . . as the dark clouds overhead drifted slowly across the sky they cast shadows on the land below, shadows which never seemed to reach the road. As they crossed it they seemed instead to create deeper, more intense patches of brightness, like the road had a magic of its own.

‘We just have to get off this thing,’ I said. ‘We’ve got to get over there.’

Chapter 8

8

Deciding we needed to escape was easy; figuring out how to actually do it was another matter. Trust me, if we’d had any idea at all how to get to land we’d have been away, running through the green grass of those hills towards freedom. That didn’t stop people having plans though. And there was zero chance of keeping those plans quiet on the Jellyfish. There was zero chance of keeping anything quiet. In fact, there was no quicker way to make sure everybody knew your secret, than to try and keep it a secret. Gossip spread really quickly, and we loved it. Not that there was anything particularly interesting to gossip about, mind you.