‘It’s not normal glass,’ Karim says, over his shoulder, as I stop to poke one with the toe of my trainer. ‘It’s practically unbreakable.’

‘Did they use the same stuff on the masts?’ I say, but Karim is too far ahead to hear.

It’s about sixty metres to the other end of the room and the doors of destiny. One of them is glass and leads to the clean room through a kind of glass pod like an airlock. We can clearly see that there’s nobody in there, and as much as I’d like to go in and look around, we don’t have time.

We try each of the other doors, but all we find are rooms full of stuff.

‘There’s no one here,’ I say, as Karim starts peering under desks and inside drawers, though I don’t know how he thinks his mum’s going to be 78 inside one of them unless she’s been chopped into tiny pieces. ‘We need to move on.’

Karim swears and nods, and we head out of the XGen labs, leaving the light to flick back off behind us.

‘We’re trying the other secret lab, right?’ Kat says.

‘I don’t think I can get into this one.’ Karim looks at the security pad next to the middle door. ‘They’re not XGen, so I doubt my mum’s codes will work.’

‘Who uses them, if it’s not XGen?’ Kat crinkles her nose like a cute baby hedgehog. ‘There are no signs on them.’

‘There are loads of other research projects going on here, not just XGen stuff.’ Karim tries stabbing a few numbers into the keypad. ‘Mum says some of them are like top-secret government ventures that only a handful of people know about.’

‘Is your mum supposed to tell you stuff like that?’ Kat says.

‘She doesn’t.’ Karim smiles, then frowns as the keypad lights up red. ‘She doesn’t tell me anything, but I make it my business to know. Eyes and ears, friends. Eyes and ears.’ 79

‘What’s that slot on the side of it?’ I say, and as soon as I ask the question, I know what it is. I pull the plastic card I found in the hoody out of my jeans and slide it through the slot. The pad lights up green and something in the door clicks.

‘Genius,’ Karim says. ‘Now let’s see what’s behind door number two.’

8

Lights Out