I put the hoody back on the chair, quick as I can, not wanting the smell to rub off on me, but then pick it up again and check the front pocket. Inside there’s a plain plastic card with a magnetic strip across the back. I don’t know if it’s anything important, but I put it in my pocket anyway, and take one last glance around the room. In the middle of the ceiling is what looks like a metal spider, about the size of an upturned cereal bowl.

71 ‘Looks like they have a sprinkler system,’ I say. ‘Weird that it didn’t go off in the explosion.’

‘Can we look for my mum now?’ Karim says.

‘Course,’ I say, thinking about what I’d do with an injured woman if I was a human/bug hybrid and wanted to take over the world. ‘The more I think about it, the more I’m sure that if a bug did take her, they’d want her alive and in good shape. The bug-eyes need every human body they can get. Plus, she has loads of information about the town, she’s got a powerful job, and she has connections to the people in charge. They’ll want to use her.’

‘You mean they’ll want to turn her,’ Karim says, looking like he might cry.

I don’t want to freak him out, but there’s no point in lying to him. There’s nothing worse than being told everything’s OK when you know that it isn’t, even when it’s said with the best intentions in the world. When you know the reality of a situation, you can start dealing with it, and dealing is definitely what we need to do here.

‘Yeah, I think they’ll want to turn her.’ I look him in the eye. ‘But there’s a way back from that. We know: we’ve done it before.’ 72

‘You brought your friend Chets back, right?’ Karim says.

‘Yes. And, if anything, the whole being a host to an alien spore thing actually helped him.’

‘It’s true,’ Kat nods. ‘He’s so much more confident now. And Miss Hoche who you met outside – she was a really nasty bug-eye.’

‘And now she’s back to her really nasty semi-human self,’ I say. ‘Unless she’s been re-infected and is involved in all this.’

‘Hard to tell,’ says Kat.

‘Because there’s still too much we don’t know. But we have an opportunity here to get some answers. We might never get back into this building again, so we need to find out what we can about the explosion, and what they were keeping in those labs.’

‘Definitely up for sneaking into a restricted area,’ Karim says. ‘And I bet that’s where Mum is.’ He jogs out of the office.

‘Where are the labs?’ Kat says as we catch up and keep pace with him.