Even as he said it, Arran looked around to see Maxie arriving with her flanking squad. Their eyes met. They must have both been thinking the same thing at the same time. They were linked. For a moment it was as if nobody else existed. Arran was so proud of her. She was brave and strong and clever. She smiled at him and he smiled back. He knew at last. He knew that she felt the same way about him as he did about her. He just knew. He couldn’t say how. And she understood. He felt a great force of happiness well up inside him.

He was ten feet tall. Knowing that somebody cared about him made all the difference. It gave him fresh strength. He could cope with anything now.

He turned and slammed his club into the face of a father who had managed to get past the fallen bodies.

With Whitney and Maeve’s help, Lewis’s team had managed to take control of the little kids. They had herded them off to the side, where a paved pathway ran above the Regent’s Canal. It looked easy to defend. There were tall walls on one side and railings on the other. Past the railings was a fifteen-foot drop to the canal towpath. The older kids had to push and shove and yell at the younger ones to stop them from running again. Whitney stayed at the center, gathering them in, towering above the smaller kids, pulling them to her, calming them.

While the main group of grown-ups had been waiting, a splinter group had come around the side, trying to get at the smaller, weaker kids. A gang of them blundered across the road toward the pathway, and a father charged, breaking through the bigger kids at the end and taking hold of a screaming girl. His face was so swollen with boils he looked like some ghastly sea creature, a puffer fish.

“No you don’t!” Whitney bellowed, and she punched him so hard that his boils exploded and half his face fell away as he let go of the girl and flipped over backward.

Maeve, Ben, and Whitney picked up the stunned father and dropped him over the railing, where he landed with a smack on the pavement below. Meanwhile, Lewis shoved his way through the crowded kids and back out into the road, yelling at the other grown-ups.

“Stay back!”

The grown-ups froze.

Lewis would keep them away for as long as he could. He prayed that the main fighting force would hold out, or else the chances of any of them getting to the palace alive would be very, very slim.