I pull my phone out of my pocket. It’s fully charged but has zero bars of signal. I try to get onto social media, but it won’t connect.

‘It’s the same from our laptop,’ Kat says. ‘So we took Nugget for a walk and spoke to some other people in the park, and they all said theirs aren’t working either.’ She slurps some tea. ‘The word among the dogwalkers is that the XGen stuff caused the explosion at the university and now their network has gone down.’

‘If that was true, surely the network would have gone down when the explosion happened?’ I say. ‘But it was fine yesterday.’

‘Good point. It definitely went off overnight. Maybe something else happened at the lab.’

I think back to the moment my mum glitched into freakishly terrifying mode. ‘I need to know 48 the exact time it switched off,’ I say. ‘Something weird happened to my mum last night, and I know it sounds insane, but I’ve got a feeling they’re connected.’

‘What happened to your mum?’ Kat puts her mug down and puts her hand on my hand.

‘It’s hard to explain. She was standing in the kitchen, making a cup of tea, and then she sort of stopped. It was like her body was there but her mind was reloading, or buffering or something. And then, when she finally restarted, she was … different.’

‘Different how?’

‘It was like she was someone else. Like she’d been hypnotised, or body-snatched.’

Kat’s eyes widen, and I know she’s thinking the same thing that I’m thinking. Anyone who’d been at Crater Lake would jump straight to the alien-spore takeover explanation, because when you’ve been through something like that, it stays with you and changes the way you see the world forever.

‘She looked the same,’ I say. ‘Her eyes were normal, and she didn’t spit any sedative slime at me, like you’d expect a bug-eye to do. But she was acting differently, for sure.’ 49

‘Did she have a worker or hunter vibe?’

‘No. This was something else – something in between.’

‘So maybe she hasn’t been spored? How would there even be spores in Straybridge?’

I use my not-being-held-by-Kat hand to pick up my mug and take a big gulp of tea. ‘I don’t know. But Betty went full psycho when she came in from outside and saw Mum. And have you noticed there’s no bird noise in town?’

‘Oh god, you’re right,’ Kat says. ‘About the birds. I’d noticed something was missing, but couldn’t figure out what. I thought I was suffering from wifi withdrawal.’

‘The birds always seem to be one step ahead,’ I say. ‘They’d left Crater Lake before we even got there.’

‘And now they’ve left town.’