There was a movement and Ebenezer stretched the elastic on his slingshot, although Jackson didn’t think the boy in the shadows had any intention of attacking them. There was a shuffling and scraping as he moved along behind the shelves and then a very thin cat appeared, smoky grey and short-haired. It looked at Jackson and the others and then sat down and began to clean itself.

A moment later a boy rounded the end of the shelves.

Chapter 63

63

The cat got up and started to rub against the legs of the boy. He was only about five foot tall, slightly hunched. Jackson tried not to show in her face what she was feeling. The boy looked awful, as if he’d once been much bigger and had suddenly shrunk leaving his stretched skin hanging in loose sheets. There were great folds and ridges of it around his eyes and mouth and it was rucked up around his neck, and piled on his shoulders. More folds hung out of the bottom of his sleeves, half covering his hands. He was walking with some difficulty, and his eyes, where she could see them, looked sad and ashamed.

‘That is so cool!’ said Achilleus. ‘Let me look at you, Skinboy. How the hell did you end up looking like that?’

‘I didn’t end up like this,’ said the boy, ‘I started out like this.’

‘You were born that way?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Does it hurt?’

‘No.’

‘So is there, like, a proper medical term for it?’

‘Nope. Nobody else has ever been like this. All of us, we’re all different.’

‘Are you, like, experiments, or something?’

‘In a way, but not the way you mean. No person made us like this. It wasn’t a mad scientist, or an evil Nazi doctor. A disease did it.’

‘The disease? I thought kids couldn’t catch it.’

‘Sort of. It’s connected. Hard to explain. Our parents all worked for Promithios.’ Jackson could see that the boy had some trouble speaking as the folds of skin hung down over and around his mouth, giving it the muffled sound she’d noticed before. She also saw that he had no teeth.

‘Our mums all got sick, though they didn’t know it until a long time later. They went to the rainforest to work with this lost tribe. And they were really careful not to pass on any germs and diseases to the natives there. They knew they’d have no immunity. The tribe was fine. They didn’t get sick. But instead they passed on a disease to our parents. Our parents had no idea. It wasn’t any disease they knew about. It showed no symptoms. Except one. Us. We were the first symptom.’

‘You?’ Jackson was trying to make sense of this information.

‘Yes,’ said Skinner, forcing the folds of his skin into a sort of smile. ‘We got the disease in the womb. We were born like this.’