‘I’m sorry, but I need to selfie this moment,’ Kat says, taking her phone out of her pocket. She doesn’t say ‘just in case’ but I feel like it’s there, hovering in the air between all of us. I imagine a handful of human rebel fighters finding her phone, years in the future, and realising that this was the last selfie taken before the world ended and the human race faced total annihilation. But then I realise I’m being a drama queen, so I huddle in and pull my best stupid selfie pose.

‘If I angle it right, I can even get Chets in the background,’ Kat says. ‘Everybody say “certain death!”’ We all crack up, and then look at the photo and laugh even harder at Chets’ peed-off face in the corner.

‘Right, let’s do it,’ I say. ‘Unless Karim wants to take off his dodgy gold chain first, and add it to the reject pile.’

‘Hey, this was a gift,’ Karim says.

I stand up, and the others stand next to me, with the sound of claws scraping metal all around us, and my body-snatched best friend Hoching up in the corner of the ceiling.

260 Mak points at a spot on the wall behind the viewing platform, next to where the Lookout leads into the Tail. ‘That’s the fake wall,’ he says in a low voice. ‘If you hit it at around chest level and slightly to the left, it shouldn’t blow up.’

‘You never said it could blow up!’ Kat squeaks. ‘What have you got in there?’

‘Probably best you don’t know,’ Mak says.

Kat sprints over to the steep stairs that lead to the viewing platform, and starts to climb, at the same time that Karim takes a step towards Chets with his epi-pen held up, and I move forwards with the hairspray.

‘Flank him,’ I say.

Chets is still growing his mandibles, so he’s not quite ready to fire yet.

‘Did you put the tardigrades into the syringe?’ I ask Karim.

‘This baby is fully tardigrade loaded,’ he says. I think he thinks he’s in an action movie. We move to either side of Chets, who turns his head from me to Karim and back again, his mandibles almost fully extended now. In a moment he’ll be ready to spit.

‘I know you can’t talk right now, Chets,’ I say. 261 ‘So you should just listen. We have PVPs and an epi-pen full of tardigrades. If we inject you, you’ll be human again in seconds.’