I am a star, he had thought. And laughed. A fallen star. And for a moment he had thought he could hear the stars calling to him, distant voices, like the voices you heard coming over the radio late at night.

He had no idea how long he’d stayed there on the roof staring at the stars and trying to understand what the voices were saying. Time had lost all meaning. Afterwards, though, he didn’t want to go to the palace any more. He was going to stay up here on the top of the world for a while. He was a bat. He could fly out over the rooftops of London. He was God, sitting up there among the stars, looking down on Earth.

Exploring further, he’d found a way into the east tower, which stood at the corner of the museum, opposite the Victoria and Albert Museum. At the very top of the tower was a huge empty room, its roof supported by a complicated criss-cross of iron bars and struts. There were tall, thin windows looking out from each wall and from up here he could see everything that was going on.

It would be his own little world. He would go down into the museum when it was quiet and take his favourite exhibits, bring them up here and start his own collection, like …

Like.

Someone he had known. A collector.

The kids wouldn’t miss anything, even if they did survive the night. One of them, the little know-it-all kid they called Wiki, had been very fond of telling everyone at any opportunity that the museum held seventy million specimens.

Seventy million specimens …

Seven billion-billion-billion atoms in the human body …

Seven thousand stars visible to the naked human eye …

He was better than the dozy kids below, because he was cleverer than them, stronger than them. Wiki might know useless facts and figures, but Paul understood things, how the world worked, how the universe worked, the stars, the planets.

I am a star …

He rubbed his forehead. It felt hot, throbbing. He pulled down the collar of his roll-neck jumper, found his neck slick with sweat. Tried to let some of the heat out. He ran his fingers over the half-healed wound where a sicko had bitten him two weeks ago. It itched horribly. He wanted to scratch it and scratch it, to tear his skin off with his fingernails, but he fought the urge. He had to let it get better. He hadn’t told any of the other kids about it. Didn’t know how they might react. They might want to do experiments on him, or maybe just throw him out to protect themselves. In case he turned into one of them. They could sense it in him, though. The sickness. That’s why they hated him. Because he was different. He was bitten.

No. It was his secret and he had to fight it alone.