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‘I know, I know,’ said Einstein, shaking his head. ‘You’ve said it a hundred times. But what does it
mean?’

‘You must listen to me,’ said Wormwood.

‘I
am
listening.’

‘No, you’re talking. Always talking. Just be silent and listen. Hush …’ He put a bony finger to his lips, stared at Einstein, who looked away. ‘You’re like the bugs back in the big green, buzzing, buzzing, buzzing, never sitting still, never listening. Impossible to have a conversation with bugs.’

‘And
there
you
go again,’ said Einstein. ‘The big green. You always come back to the big green. The big green this, the big green that. The big green what? The big green giant? The big green house? The big green bogey?’

‘And there
you
go again,’ said Wormwood. ‘Always talking, never listening.’

‘He means the jungle,’ said Blue. He hadn’t looked like he was really listening. He
never did. He looked bored most of the time, not interested. A hard man. But there was a lot more going on inside him than he let on.

‘Don’t pretend you weren’t there when the Twisted Kids told us all about it,’ Blue went on. ‘About where the disease came from. About the rainforest. South America. The jungle.’

‘That’s one theory,’ said Einstein. ‘I don’t have to believe it.’

‘Feels a whole lot like the truth to me,’ said Blue, and he turned to Maxie and the others. ‘There was a tribe, the Inmathger. They had the disease, only they’ve never met any other humans, and when they did –
pow!
It spreads all over before anyone can stop it. Wormy here was one of the scientists who was out there studying them. Carried the sickness home with him. Ain’t that
right, Wormy? You was out there in the big green?’

‘I was there for thousands of years,’ said Wormwood without looking at Blue. ‘And before that I was a Starchild. And look at me – I still am a star.’

He did a little prima donna thing, raising his chin and combing his hair back on one side with his fingernails.

‘Yeah, right,’ said Blue, shaking his head.

‘Bang goes your
theory,’ said Einstein. ‘Unless we accept that our Mister Wormold here is thousands of years old and came from outer space or something.’

‘Just because some of it’s bullshit,’ said Maxie, ‘doesn’t mean it
all
is.’

‘But how do we separate it out?’ said Einstein. ‘How do we know which bits of it, if any, are the truth?’

‘He definitely worked in the rainforest with the Inmathger,’
said Blue. ‘For Promithios. You should properly talk to the Twisted Kids some time, Einstein. They know stuff.’

‘They give me the creeps,’ Einstein said dismissively.

‘Yeah, well, I’m sure you give them the creeps an’ all,’ said Maxie. ‘You give
me
the creeps sometimes.’

‘That’s because I’m creepy.’ Einstein laughed. He had thick skin. You could say what you liked to him.
To be honest, he was slightly weird-looking as well, with his mad hair and yellow teeth. He didn’t have any social skills, but it obviously didn’t bother him.

‘I’ve talked to the Twisted Kids too,’ Maxie went on. ‘They grew up in the institute. Blue’s right. You should be asking them stuff.’

‘As they tell it,’ said Blue, ‘Wormold came home and when his wife got pregnant the
disease mucked up the embryo and Fish-Face came out.’

‘Very scientific, I’m sure,’ said Einstein. ‘You should write a paper: “Mucked-up embryos leading to fishness of the face”.’

Maxie sucked in her breath. Einstein could be a real douche sometimes. Didn’t worry at all about hurting anyone’s feelings. Blue wasn’t about to let Einstein get to him, though. As ever, he showed
nothing.

But Maxie was glad Fish-Face wasn’t there. She was the Green Man’s daughter. She had a bizarre flattened head, her eyes forced round to the sides. Maxie didn’t even know what the girl’s real name was. It felt demeaning to call her Fish-Face, but that’s what she chose. ‘The Twisted Kids’, as they called themselves, carried their mutations with pride. Blue said they
even had their own song, but Maxie hadn’t heard it. Wasn’t sure she wanted to.

‘If you don’t listen,’ Blue said to Einstein, ‘how you ever gonna learn?’

‘Theories, theories, theories,’ said Einstein. ‘There’s no proof in any of this.’

‘Didn’t Einstein have a theory?’ said Blue. ‘The real Einstein? You gotta start somewhere.’

‘Well, let’s start in the big green, shall
we?’ said Einstein. ‘Up the jungle without a paddle.’

‘I was there,’ said Wormwood. ‘In the big green. I was there before I was the Green Man. I was there when I was wormwood the poison star, fallen from heaven.’

‘Wait, stop, let me get this down,’ said Einstein. ‘This is scientific gold.’

‘What is wormwood anyway?’ said Blue.

‘It’s a poisonous plant,’ said Einstein. ‘
Artemisia
. Brings on hallucinations if you eat it.’

‘I reckon he must have eaten a whole forest of it,’ said Blue, looking at the Green Man.

‘It’s in the Bible as well,’ said Andy. Maxie had forgotten he was even there. She saw that he had a little Bible open in his hands. He must carry it around with him. She’d had no idea he was a God-botherer.

‘The Book of Revelations.’
Andy turned a page and began to read. ‘
The third angel sounded his trumpet, and a great star, blazing like a torch, fell from the sky on a third of the rivers and on the springs of water – the name of the star is Wormwood. A third of the waters turned bitter, and many people died from the waters that had become bitter.
’

‘That kinda makes sense,’ said Blue. ‘Could be a
description of the sickness.’

‘That is not science!’ Maxie had never seen Einstein get genuinely angry before. ‘That’s just a book. It’s made-up stories. His name’s Mark Wormold and his scrambled brains have picked up on a load of claptrap from the Bible and so now he’s Wormwood, the death star.’

‘Poison star,’ said Andy.

‘I was Wormwood, the exterminating angel, the great
flea. I was king of the bats and bugs. That was long before I got into this broken body and stepped down from being a Starchild, became a human bean.’

Maxie had noticed the way the Green Man talked about himself almost as if he was two different people: the Mark Wormold part and the Green Man part. He was
like someone possessed, switching between two minds. A man possessed by
the disease, as if it had a voice, a mind of its own.

‘Forget all that,’ said Einstein. ‘Forget the jungle and the birds and the bees. Forget about the big green for a minute, can’t you? Tell me about the blood.’

‘My blood,’ said Wormwood, ‘is bad blood.’

‘You can say that again.’ Einstein had his eyebrows raised in a slightly camp way. ‘And my blood?’

Wormwood made a
dismissive noise.

‘Not good. Not bad. It’s just blood. It’s everyday quaffing blood. A nice snack is all.’

‘Charming.’

‘Your blood couldn’t drive out anything.’

‘What about me?’ said Blue. ‘What about my blood?’

‘The same, the same, the same. All of you. You need to find the good blood.’

‘What for?’ said Einstein. ‘For you to drink?’

‘No. To drive out the bad
blood.’

‘Do you mean like a kind of vaccine?’ said Maxie. ‘Are you saying that if we could find the right blood, the right kind of healthy blood, we could use it to fight the disease? Make a cure?’

‘Oh, the girl’s smarter than she looks.’

‘Thanks,’ said Maxie sarcastically.

‘The girl’s got the right idea,’ said Wormwood. ‘The good blood will drive out the bad.’

‘Yeah, you can stop the love-in,’ said Einstein. ‘It’s not like that’s a new idea or anything. What do you think I’ve been doing here? Making cupcakes? All I need is some kid who’s survived being bitten by a sicko. But so far I can’t find any. Not any that stay alive.’

‘There was one here,’ said the Green Man. ‘I could smell him when I arrived.’

‘You mean Paul?’ said Maxie.
‘The kid who went crazy?’

‘I don’t know names. I’m just a wormy old ratbag of rot and decay. Don’t throw names at me.’

‘Is it possible Paul was bitten by one of your sickos?’ said Maxie, using the museum kids’ term. She knew that Einstein had kept some grown-ups for research, locked up out in the old car park, and it had been Paul’s job to look after them.

‘Possible,’ said
Einstein. ‘That could explain why he went postal. But he’s buggered off.’

‘His blood was better,’ said the Green Man. ‘Smelt pretty good. But not the best. There’s another, though.’ He gave a sly smile. ‘Best blood of all. Sweet and clean and pure and …’

‘Another kid who was bitten, you mean?’ said Blue.

‘Not bitten, no. Born with the good blood.’

‘A kid born with
immunity?’ said Maxie. ‘Is that possible?’

‘Anything’s possible,’ said Einstein. ‘But the question is – who is it?’

‘Not telling.’ Wormwood twisted away, like a little boy with a secret. ‘Not unless you give me something to eat.’

‘We give you plenty to eat, you greedy bastard,’ said Einstein. ‘We’ve been feeding you three meals a day since you got here.’

‘No,’ said
Wormwood petulantly. ‘Something good to eat, the real sweet stuff.’

‘That’s enough,’ said Blue moving towards the Green Man and raising the club he had with him. ‘No way, man.’

‘What’s the matter?’ said Andy, coming alive, sensing danger.

‘He wants to eat one of us.’

‘You must be able to spare one, a little one, a weak one. I need the flesh. I need the blood. My brain
is going cloudy. Can’t help you any more. The other ones. They fed me. They gave me sweet flesh.’

‘Ed told me how he was kept locked up by the religious freaks at St Paul’s,’ said Maxie. ‘Like you kept your grown-ups here. Only they fed him children.’

Einstein laughed. A couple of the other kids swore.

Maxie went over to the Green Man. ‘We’ll give you blood,’ she said,
feeling almost sorry for the pathetic creature. ‘We’ll give you the good blood, yeah? We’ll try to cure you. You can be our guinea pig.’

‘Yeah,’ said Blue. ‘You can be our crash-test bunny. But you’re not eating no one. You so much as sniff one of our kids and I will cut your head off with a blunt knife. We’ll inject you or whatever we have to do – you tell me. I ain’t no scientist.’
He gave a questioning look to Einstein. ‘Help me out here. What do we do, make a serum?’

‘Something like that.’

Blue walked closer to the Green Man, his club still raised, giving him the hard stare. ‘You got that, wormhole?’

‘You’re cruel.’ The Green Man shrank away, looking hurt and self-pitying. ‘It’s not fair. I’m an important person.’

‘You’re a tool. A green stain.
Now tell us who it is. Who’s got the good blood? Who was born with immunity?’

‘I’m not telling you. You’ve been mean to me. I’ll never tell you. Not unless you feed me properly.’

‘I’ll tell you,’ said a voice and Maxie turned. It was Fish-Face. She’d come up to the Darwin Centre with some of
the younger kids. She was the shyest person Maxie had ever met. She twisted
herself into contortions to keep her head turned away, staring at her shoes.

‘Don’t tell them,’ said Wormwood. ‘I need my good stuff.’

‘You need a good kicking,’ said Blue.

‘How do you know?’ Maxie asked Fish-Face. ‘Did he tell you?’

‘He didn’t need to. I know everything he thinks. It’s almost like we share one brain.’

‘So who is it?’

Fish-Face didn’t say anything,
but Small Sam stepped forward.

‘She says it’s me,’ he said.

10

Shadowman was shocked how close the main body of the grown-ups was. He and Jester hadn’t gone far past the Bayswater Road, that ran along the north side of Hyde Park, when they’d come across the first sentinels standing, waiting patiently, unmoving, burning in the weak sun. Jester went a sickly pale green colour and started babbling about running, or fighting, or getting
help – scared silly by these harmless outliers.

‘These are nothing,’ Shadowman said. ‘You wait. These losers aren’t anything to wet your knickers over.’

‘You make me jumpy.’ Jester’s voice was tight and high-pitched. ‘Pointing that crossbow at me all the time. I keep expecting at any moment to feel a bolt in my back.’

‘So it’s me you’re scared of, yeah? Not the strangers?’

‘I just wasn’t expecting them so soon. It’s been so quiet lately. We never see them round the palace.’

‘That’s why I wanted you to come and see,’ said Shadowman. ‘Or you wouldn’t have believed me.’

‘OK, well, I believe you now, so can we go back?’

‘Nope. I want you to really see.’

So they pressed on, Jester moaning every step of the way. Half an hour later the two
of them were peering round a corner and looking down a long, straight stretch
of Kilburn High Road, which ran roughly south to north. There were sentinels strung out all along it, closer together than Shadowman had seen before.

‘OK. Point made,’ said Jester. ‘I can really see.’ And he pulled back, worried about being spotted, even though the sentinels were completely ignoring
the two of them.

‘You don’t listen,’ said Shadowman, giving Jester a playful slap. ‘This is nothing. I want to show you the hard stuff. I want to show you their army.’