She felt on edge, her eyes were sore and she kept seeing shapes and flickers in her peripheral vision caused by tiredness. After the adrenalin-fuelled events of last night, and a morning spent dragging bodies out into the sunlight, she felt drained and irritable. So she wasn’t really enjoying the pantomime.

Well, they didn’t get everything right, did they? Otherwise Maxie and her friends wouldn’t have spent half the night dealing with grown-ups. They’d arrived here right in the middle of a bloody battle, for God’s sake. And somebody had let those grown-ups in, which meant that at least one person in the museum was seriously twisted.

So she hoped there weren’t going to be any speeches about how great life was here. She might just throw up. The best leader she’d ever known was Arran, and the best set-up was the one they’d had in Waitrose. She supposed they’d had no choice but to leave. Food was running low, the grown-ups’ attacks were getting more frequent, and the two facts were probably related. Even so, Maxie looked back fondly on her time in the supermarket, and she missed Arran desperately. She’d been badly shaken up by his death and had had to take on the role of leading the Waitrose kids. She wasn’t really ready for that, and was glad she’d made friends with Blue, who shared leadership duties with her. She didn’t think she could carry everything by herself.

She wondered what this new bunch of kids had to offer. Would she make any friends here? She looked around at them, trying to read their faces. Brooke was sitting next to her, but otherwise the locals kept to themselves and didn’t mix with the new arrivals.

She realized that quite a few of them were wearing weird costumes, as if they were extras from some old BBC drama series, or a Keira Knightley film. Nothing much surprised Maxie any more. In the last few days she’d seen a lot of weird behaviour. Left to themselves the kids of London were going nuts. For the last year the supermarket had been her whole world. She hadn’t thought much about what existed outside. She’d been too busy getting on with the day-to-day business of staying alive. It was clear that there were far fewer grown-ups in this part of London than there had been in the north. The kids round here had it easy. They had too much time on their hands and so they were dressing up and playing at … Playing at what?

David at the palace had thought he was king. What did these kids think they were? Achilleus had told her about the laboratories in their white coats when he’d sauntered in late. Laughed about it. She didn’t know how to take this information. Didn’t know if it was a good or a bad thing.