Still a vile witch, then. ‘Are you gonna give me a sticker for that? Oh, wait – you can’t. Because you’re not my teacher anymore.’

62One corner of her mouth twitches upward in the start of a nasty smile, and she tilts her head to the side in a way that makes me shudder. ‘I was never your teacher. It’s not possible to teach a child like you: a child incapable of learning or achieving anything worthwhile.’

Karim jogs over to us. ‘Those guys aren’t human. None of my good stuff worked.’ He looks up at Hoche and raises a now-unsmoothed-again eyebrow.

‘This is Miss Hoche,’ Kat says.

‘The Miss Hoche?’ He makes a face. ‘I’ve heard lots about you, Miss Hoche. All good things, obviously.’

There’s a moment of awkward silence.

‘Is there a reason you’re here – somewhere you have no business being – other than to cause trouble?’ Her eyes don’t have the alien yellow rings of a hunter anymore, but they still make me feel cold.

‘My mum works here, actually,’ Karim says. ‘For XGen. She’s communications officer on the SMARTtown project.’

‘So she caused the explosion in the lab, set free a dangerous test animal and shut down the 63 network so that we can’t communicate with anyone outside of Straybridge? It makes sense that a friend of Lance’s would come from a criminal background.’

God, I hate her.

‘Hey!’ Karim says. ‘My mum didn’t do any of those things – she’s trying to fix them.’

‘She’s in charge of XGen communciations, and now we have a service blackout – that’s rather too much of a coincidence, don’t you think?’ She turns sharply to the camera guy. ‘Get this on film.’

He fumbles with the camera and points it at us.

‘Where was your mother – the communications officer for XGen – at four a.m. this morning? Was she here at XGen’s Straybridge headquarters?’

‘No, she was at home in bed like a normal human.’ Karim’s angry now.

‘And where were you, Lance Sparshott, when the network went down?’

‘I was at home, in the kitchen, with my mum,’ I say, my brain ticking over Hoche’s questions. ‘And how is four a.m. significant?’

‘You really aren’t very intelligent, are you?’ Hoche sneers at me. ‘The network went down at four a.m. I was researching on my laptop when I 64 lost access to the internet, and all connectivity disappeared. Very convenient for XGen to be able to stop me from looking into what they were really doing here at the university.’

‘Why would Karim’s mum damage her own project?’ I say.

‘To silence me. To shut the world out. To protect a secret.’ She’s shouting now, and a bit of her spit lands on my face. I try not to puke.