He stopped sharpening the knife and stared at the wall, trying to remember. He was in some kind of abandoned storeroom, in a part of the museum that looked like it hadn’t been used in years. A warren of poky rooms had been constructed here with thin partitions. Like the cubicles the kids had made in the minerals gallery downstairs. Some were storage spaces; others were workrooms and tiny, box-like offices. There was a dusty, chaotic jumble of bits and pieces lying around the place. Old pieces of scientific apparatus, broken display cases, collapsing shelves, filing cabinets, and cupboard after cupboard stuffed full of rocks, crystals, lumps of metal, bits of meteorite, all neatly labelled. There was even a small kitchen up here, with a few cups and knives and forks sitting where they’d been left when the museum staff had deserted this part of the tower long ago.

He was safe up here. A narrow staircase led in a long, straight line down to where the other kids were sleeping, but the door at the bottom was firmly locked. He’d been busy shredding newspaper and pulling the stuffing out of an armchair to make a bed.

He could stay hidden for a long time.

He’d originally been intending to go back to see David at the palace …

That’s right. That was how it had happened. It was coming back to him now.

David had shown him that the only way to fix everything was to open those doors, to let the sickos through and get revenge for what the kids had done to him. Which was …

Never mind. He’d remember that soon enough.

Soon enough.

He was still hoping to go back to the palace and live with David. But on his way out of the museum, after opening the doors, he’d had to hide, to avoid both the gangs of sickos who roamed the galleries and the kids who’d come out to try and stop them. Sneaking through the shadows, he’d found his way up on to the rooftops from the Darwin Centre and had enjoyed being up high, out in the open. His head had cleared and he’d stopped to stare in awe at the stars that were scattered across the night sky. For the first time it had struck him just how vast the universe was. Going on and on and on forever. He understood it now, what Buzz Lightyear meant by ‘To infinity and beyond …’

What happened here, to him and all the other kids in the museum, meant nothing. Who would remember any of this in a billion years’ time? Nobody. Down below were dinosaurs so old they’d become rocks; above him … infinity and beyond. Inside him – atoms, molecules, particles, circling like the stars of a nano-universe.