‘You should have come to Bing with me.’ Trent’s voice rings out across the Lookout, making me jump. ‘I would have looked after you.’

‘Great, he’s found the intercom,’ Mak sighs.

‘I don’t need looking after,’ Ade snaps. ‘Stay out of this, Trent. You lost your right to an opinion when you locked us out of the bunker.’

‘It is sick down here,’ Trent says. ‘I can stay in this bunker for however long it takes you lot to sort out the alien stuff.’

‘We could have all gone down there,’ I say.

‘If you were down here, you wouldn’t be dealing with the situation up there. Also, I didn’t want to risk Chetan stinging me. However, I am willing to consider a deal.’

‘What kind of deal?’ Kat asks.

‘I will allow Adrianne, and only Adrianne, to 243 enter the bunker if she brings down a couple of bottles of coke. I can only find water down here, and weird milk powder. Then we can sit this out together.’

‘I’d honestly rather become a host to a vile alien parasite,’ Ade says.

‘And we need her,’ I say. She smiles.

‘What happened, Ade?’ Kat says. ‘I mean, you don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to, but I really want to understand.’

Ade looks at Kat, then down at her doughnut and clips on the floor. ‘It was loads of things. Back in primary I always felt so sure of myself. I knew what I liked, and who I liked, and I knew what I wanted. I never really had any doubts about anything. Then we got to Latham and all the rules changed. There were loads of smart, confident people like me, and I know this sounds awful, but I was so used to being head girl – the only head girl. It threw me a bit that there were other head girls in every class.’

I’ve never been the best at anything, so I don’t really know how it feels to suddenly face competition where there was none before. But it was hard at first having hundreds of kids in our 244 year group when there used to be just thirty. So many new people, and everyone trying to be top dog. My way of dealing was to go back to my old ways, sitting in the back of the class, mucking around and having a laugh. Ade obviously chose a different way to deal.