‘Nah, that’s just a nice little extra,’ Karim says. ‘I’m diabetic, so I have to keep snacks, my blood-sugar testing kit and an epi-pen with me at all times. Plus, the pouch makes me look cool – it’s like the Karim trademark accessory.’

‘So that’s why you and Lance hang out together – you’re both freaks with weird diseases,’ Trent snorts.

‘Is there any way of turning the intercom off?’ Kat asks.

‘Not from up here, unfortunately.’ Mak clenches a fist. ‘I’m honestly going to kill him.’

‘FYI, Lance and I hang out together because we’re both incredibly cool, funny and good-looking,’ 252 Karim shouts into the air. ‘And my mum always says that my diabetes is my superpower.’

‘Like Lance’s sleep apnoea is his,’ Kat grins. ‘We would never have survived Crater Lake without his ability to be amazing, even when he’s had no sleep.’

‘My CPAP helped, too,’ I say. And just the thought of it makes me realise how tired I am. I look around at the others. Karim is pale, Kat looks exhausted, and Ade and Mak don’t look great either. They might have got more sleep than we did last night, but it’s been a long day, and the stuff with Chets and Trent has left its mark. Part of me wishes I’d brought my portable CPAP with me, so we could get some rest, but with the hive knowing where we are and it starting to get dark, we wouldn’t be able to close our eyes anyway.

We’re not sleeping until this is over.

‘How are we gonna finish this?’ I ask, lowering my voice again so that Chets won’t hear, and hopefully Trent won’t either. ‘Even if only a quarter of the people in Straybridge have been turned into sporelings, that’s still way more than we can tardigrade back.’

‘We could lure them to one of the rivers,’ Kat 253 says. ‘But they’re not exactly deep or fast. They’d just be able to wade across and climb out.’

‘And there’s no dam to destroy to create a rush of water like we had in the crater, so I don’t know how we’d get them all in,’ says Mak.

Karim has taken over Chets-watch, so he whispers through the side of his mouth. ‘But if we don’t fix things by the end of today, it’s game over. The cones are going to open tomorrow and release millions of spores, and everyone in town will go buggy, even if they don’t have a tree in their house. I really don’t want to be a sporeling, guys. Stingers should not be growing out of human butts – it just isn’t right.’