That was the word that had lodged in Blue’s mind. Planted there so firmly by Seamus that he couldn’t get rid of it, even though he could see that the three people up here weren’t technically monsters. They were kids. Like him. Only not like him.

Blue’s team were filtering out on to the deck. Achilleus appeared, eyes wide, mouth open in a sloppy grin.

‘Freak of the week,’ he said.

‘Shut up,’ said Ollie. ‘That’s not funny.’

‘Freak lives.’

‘I said shut up. Can’t you see they’re kids?’

‘Nope.’

It was hard. They obviously were just children. But something had changed them.

There were two boys and a girl. The girl sat in a big, high-backed chair that looked a bit like a throne, and indeed she was wrapped in some sort of robes and had a crown on her head. Although, as Blue looked more closely, he saw that it wasn’t a crown; she had a ring of bony growths on the top of her bald skull, jutting up and stretching the skin. And he saw, too, that she was sitting in a wheelchair, and the ‘throne’ part of it was just painted cardboard, or maybe thin sheets of wood, that had been fixed to the back of it. Her face was slack and expressionless, but her eyes were glittering and intelligent, watchful. The boy standing next to her was only wearing a pair of ragged jeans. His body was huge and bulging with muscle, like something out of a comic book. His muscles, however, had grown in an unbalanced, misshapen way, giving him a lumpy look.

A badly drawn comic book.

Blue used to read a lot of comics. One of his favourites was about an ancient Celtic warrior called Sláine, who went into a warp spasm in battle, so that his whole body distorted. Well, here was the living Sláine, in permanent warp spasm. The boy’s head appeared small in relation to his body, and one eye was unnaturally large, maybe five times the size of his other eye.

The second boy’s head was completely normal, but the rest of him was twisted, as if his skeleton had been broken and remade. His back was in an S shape and his arms and legs were bent. He was sitting on the floor, his knees up round his ears, taking his weight on his arms. He was smiling.

‘You found us then,’ he said.

Found what exactly? Blue didn’t know what to say. He didn’t want to stare, but it was hard not to. He fixed on the boy’s eyes – he was a human being after all. But what the hell had happened to him?