‘Yeah,’ said Robbie. ‘All the rest of them were killed, along with two of my team. We underestimated the sickos. If it wasn’t for Jackson and Ethan, who carried me back here, I’d be dead too.’

‘I know,’ said Maeve again, patiently. Robbie was slightly feverish, caught up in his own thoughts and nightmares.

There were kids in two of the other beds, sitting up, watching. A boy who’d been injured in the recent attack, and a girl who had some kind of stomach upset. Maeve had been brought here by Samira, who acted as one of the museum’s doctors. She was sitting on the opposite side of Robbie’s bed to Maeve, her hair tucked up inside a headscarf. Ella and Jibber-jabber were on hospital duty and sat on an empty bed watching. For once Jibber-jabber was quiet. Robbie looked very unwell and there was a hushed atmosphere in the room.

Samira had explained on the way over that Robbie had escaped being bitten, but his injuries were still bad and were proving slow to heal. He had a badly wrenched arm and a nasty gash in his other arm, but worst of all, apparently, was a puncture wound in his groin, on the inside of his thigh where his leg met his abdomen. As far as Samira could tell, one of Robbie’s friends had broken his sword in the fight and a sicko had got hold of a piece of blade that had snapped off. The pain as the sicko drove the metal into his body must have been awful and it had put Robbie completely out of action.

He was quiet now, tears rolling down his cheeks. Whether from the pain or the bad memories Maeve couldn’t tell.

‘The wound refuses to heal,’ said Samira. ‘It keeps oozing this mixture of very black blood and a thin, watery sort of gel and this horrible stinking yellow pus.’

‘Nice.’

‘I can’t move my leg,’ Robbie added. ‘And the whole of the side of my body is burning up.’

‘We just don’t know what to do for him,’ said Samira.

Maeve had learnt a bit about the set-up at the museum. As well as Samira, there were two other kids who acted as doctors. Alexander, whose father had been a surgeon, and Alexander’s girlfriend, Cass, who’d picked up stuff from studying books she’d found in the museum. Samira had always wanted to be a doctor and had done several emergency first-aid courses at school. The three of them also worked with Einstein in the laboratories. Other kids helped out with general nursing duties and some of the younger ones also took it in turns to be general dogsbodies, cleaning up and running errands, mainly to keep from getting bored.