Bianca heard a keening scream. She didn’t need to see the woman to know it had come from Sophie’s mother. The harrowing sound was a chord of love, loss and fear. The growing group of onlookers silently parted when the doctor arrived in his thick woollen coat. He opened his bag, put on his stethoscope and pressed it to the frozen girl’s chest.

‘She is alive,’ he pronounced, and Sophie’s mother wilted into the arms of a police officer.

Bianca stared at Sophie’s happy face. ‘Did the silver book do this to you?’ she whispered, almost certain that it had.

Like a shoal of fish when the tide turns, the people either side of her moved and she heard a ripple of murmurs.

‘Another child’s been frozen!’ a man whispered loudly. ‘A boy, beside the boating lake.’

This news hit Bianca like lightning. She bolted away, running as fast as she could down to the lake. She was one of the first to reach the boy. He was sitting cross-legged on another pedestal of ice, positioned beside the water. He looked like a sleeping god, his head turned up towards the full moon, an enigmatic smile on his lips. His eyes were closed and his brown skin was dusted with snow.

‘Casper! Oh no!’ Bianca gasped, staring at her kind and clever friend, whom she walked to school with, who laughed at her stories and helped her in maths when she struggled. Blinking back tears, she reached out, placing her hand on his chest, and thought she felt the languid throb of his chilled heart. Crouching down, she saw the same words that were carved into her brother’s pedestal.

DARK DAYS GROW EVER WARMER.

WINTER’S ON THE RUN.

ICE BECOMES A LIQUID,

BENEATH A SEARING SUN.

WHEN THE SEASONS ALTER,

SOMETHING MUST BE DONE.

WITH THE HEARTS OF CHILDREN,

WINTER WILL LIVE ON.

A police officer laid a gentle hand on Bianca’s shoulder, drawing her away from her classmate. ‘Where are your parents?’

‘Over there,’ Bianca replied, pointing in the direction of the rose garden.

‘Please return to them.’ He had a roll of yellow tape and began to cordon off the area around Casper.

Bianca retreated, her mind reeling. Sophie and Casper! Two more frozen children! A shiver of fear crept up her spine, and suddenly she wanted to be with her family more than anything. She stepped off the path to take a short cut across the grass back to the

rose garden, and that was when she noticed the towering form of a man in a long, dark coat, wearing dark glasses and a top hat. He was standing at the edge of the group of concerned onlookers.

Bianca froze.

This man had been looking at Finn last night. The moon lit up one side of his face and his expression chilled her blood. He was

smiling. Not a sad smile, but a triumphant one, and the sight of his pointed teeth made her gasp.

Like a crocodile, she thought.

Darting behind a tree, she watched the man. He appeared to be muttering to himself, although she couldn’t hear what he was saying. Eventually he turned and walked away. His body moved in the most peculiar way, as if he were made of spaghetti.

Without thinking about whether it was dangerous, Bianca followed him.

As the news that more children had been found frozen spread through the city, concerned and curious folk trickled into the park. The tall man walked with his spaghetti strides against the flow of newcomers. He was easy to follow. Bianca kept her eyes fixed on his top hat.

Heading south, the man left the park through the main gate. Once outside, Bianca kept to the shadows on the opposite side of the road, avoiding the pools of light from the street lamps. She noticed the ground was twinkling with frost and took care not to slip as she crossed the market square, following the stranger across the bridge over the canal.

As she approached the city’s industrial district, Bianca grew more and more worried. She didn’t know this area. What if she got lost and couldn’t find her way back?

But she knew in her bones that this odd man was somehow connected to what had happened to Finn, Sophie and Casper. The memory of his crocodile smile made her hands curl into fists. I can’t turn round now, she thought.

Every building she passed was a warehouse or a factory, and Bianca realized with growing horror that nobody lived in this part of the city. It was busy during the day, but at night it was a ghost town. If she cried out for help, there would be nobody to hear her. And so she took extra care, hiding in doorways, ducking behind walls and tiptoeing as she trailed the mysterious man.

Bianca was hiding behind a dustbin, peering over the top, when the towering man sneezed. It was the strangest sound, like a nasal roar. Although she didn’t feel it, a breeze must have caught the hem of the man’s coat because it billowed and rose, as if the sneeze had been powerful enough to blow it off. Bianca double blinked. She could have sworn that, just for a second, she had glimpsed four feet!

‘Quilo!’ the man said, chiding himself as he approached a dilapidated old building with broken windows.

Slipping out from behind the bin, Bianca sidled along a low fence between the pavement and the factory, getting as close as she dared. The hairs on her body were tugging her skin into a petrified pattern of goosebumps. The closer she got to the factory, the colder she felt. Here, the ground was covered in a thick layer of ice. She pulled her coat close to her body, wrapping her arms across her chest. She was shivering. She read the peeling wooden sign outside the run-down building.

DOWNY FALLS

BOOKBINDING FACTORY

‘We’re here!’ boomed the stranger, and Bianca jumped as his coat shot up into the air again, like a carrier bag caught by a strong gust of wind. A pyramid of children was standing beneath it!

Rising to look over the fence, she saw, at the bottom of the pyramid, a boy and a girl dressed in grey, with grey hair and grey eyes. They looked like twins, different only in that one wore a dress and had long hair. Bianca guessed from their size that they were about the same age as Finn. Standing on their shoulders was a chunkier boy wearing a bearskin. He had cherubic cheeks and his ruddy face was framed by a tangled mass of brown curls. He was only the height of a ten-year-old, but of the four he looked the oldest. Sitting on his shoulders was a pale child as thin as a willow sapling, dressed in an old-fashioned white suit, like a page at a wedding, with white hair tied back in a ponytail under the top hat.

The child dressed in white used the shoulders of the boy in the bear suit for purchase and somersaulted to the ground, catching the top hat as it fell and putting it back on.

The twins ducked, stepping backwards in unison, dropping the boy in the bear suit on the ground. He landed flat on his back, expelling all the air from his lungs.

Bianca felt a thrill of terror as her hair was blown back from her face by a sudden gale. The trees behind her shook and broken shards of glass dropped from the factory windows and hit the ground with a crash. She clamped her hands over her mouth to stop herself from crying out, and dropped back down behind the fence, trembling.

Who were these children?

Crawling along the ground, her muscles rigid with fear, she found a hole in the fence to peer through.

The short, stocky boy in the bear suit jumped to his feet. ‘Pitter!’ His joyful voice roared as he grabbed the shoulders of the grey boy. ‘Patter!’ He looked at the grey girl. ‘You rats!’

Bianca thought his eyes too old for his cherubic face. He looked as if he’d seen terrible things. There were silver streaks in his chestnut mane.

‘You are always so loud, Quilo!’ Pitter exclaimed.

‘Yes, you huff and bellow and billow!’ Patter echoed.

‘We should not be out here, making all this noise,’ the deathly pale child said, looking around.

Bianca had thought the figure in the top hat a man because of the dark glasses, height and clothes, but she realized that this child, who’d been the face of the stranger, might be a girl or a boy. They were about the same height as she was and, from the way they spoke, the leader of the gang.

‘We could be seen!’ the child snapped.

‘Or in a word . . .’ Pitter looked pointedly at Quilo.

‘. . . overheard.’ Patter finished her twin’s sentence.

Quilo stuck out his tongue at the twins, blowing the longest, loudest and most powerful raspberry that Bianca had ever witnessed. It blew the grey pair backwards, right off their feet, sending them rolling across the ground.

‘Enough, Quilo! Pitter, Patter, get inside.’ The child in white herded them towards the door into the factory.

‘It’s not my fault, Jack,’ Quilo said, putting on puppy eyes. ‘I can’t help it.’ A mischievous grin lit up his face. ‘It’s my nature to be impulsive.’ He waggled his eyebrows and Jack tried not to smile. ‘Now, my frosty sibling –’ Quilo reached up, putting an arm round Jack’s shoulder – ‘how about giving us some glass for those windows?’ He pointed at the factory. ‘Smarten the place up a bit.’

‘So that you can shatter them again with one of your tricks?’ Jack’s voice was accusatory.

‘I don’t know what you mean,’ Quilo blustered. ‘I thought it might stop people hearing what we’re up to.’

Jack paused, considering the suggestion, then tugged at the gloved fingers of their right hand. ‘That’s a good idea.’

Bianca’s mouth dropped open as the glove slipped off, revealing the hand beneath. Each jagged digit was extraordinarily long, whalebone-white, and tapered into a sharp needle of ice, like a snowflake. Jack placed the alien hand on the brickwork of the factory. A crackling sound ricocheted up the empty street. Bianca held her breath as every vacant window grew a fresh pane of glass. It spread like spilt water across the empty casements. In under a minute all the factory windows were repaired.

‘Wonderful!’ Quilo clapped.

‘Shhh. If we are discovered, our mission will fail,’ Jack said, withdrawing the hand and putting the glove back on. ‘You know we cannot afford to fail.’

‘Don’t fret. Do not fear,’ Pitter poked his head round the door.

‘It won’t be long. Our time is near.’ Patter’s head appeared above her brother’s.

‘The winter is coming.’ Quilo suddenly looked serious. ‘We will save our sister.’

Jack replied with a nod, then glanced up and down the street, before following the others into the factory and shutting the door.

Bianca slumped onto the icy ground, giddy with relief that she hadn’t been caught.