‘Don’t like this room,’ Kat says, as we back out and close the door. And I know she’s thinking she wants to smash all the test-tubes and set the flies free, but we’re all aware that there are bigger things at stake right now.

We make our way down the corridor as fast as we can, opening doors and quickly skimming the rooms before moving on. There’s a room that holds floor-to-ceiling fish tanks, each one containing zebra fish. They flit around their tanks, scales shining in the artificial light, and I’d love to know what they’re doing there. I wonder if they do. We find another room that’s full of food: giant cans of meat and three-litre bottles of fizzy drink are piled up on shelves.

‘Lance, look!’ Katja gasps, pointing to some 83 familiar-looking tubs stacked in neat lines along a low shelf.

‘Oh man, I could have happily gone through the rest of my life without ever seeing that again.’ Since I got back from Crater Lake, I haven’t even been able to look at soup. Just the thought of it makes me wanna puke.

‘It’s their favourite brand and everything,’ Kat says.

‘That’s their favourite brand?’ Karim makes a face. ‘It’s not even Heinz.’ And I smile because it makes me think of Chets.

It’s when we leave the food room that I start to notice the smell. It’s sweet, but not in a nice way.

‘This is taking too long,’ I say. ‘There’s some weird shiz in these rooms, but nothing that helps us. I say we head up there.’ I nod towards the end of the corridor. The lights in that area haven’t come on yet, but I can see that it opens out into a larger room. ‘Follow the smell. Agreed?’

‘Agreed,’ Kat says. ‘That smell’s not right. Karim?’

‘Yeah,’ Karim nods. ‘Let’s do it.’

The lights blink on one by one as we follow the corridor to its end, the smell growing stronger 84 with each step. The space it leads to is about six metres wide and maybe twice that in length, so more like a chubby hallway than a room. There’s a glass-fronted lab that wraps around the entire left wall and half of the wall facing us. The glass is undamaged, so I’m guessing it’s more of that toughened stuff like the material they used on the signal beacons. The door to it is tinted so that we can’t see in, other than through a small circular clear patch, like a porthole. There’s a metal pad next to the door, which tells me that we really need to see inside this room.

‘Will the card work again?’ Kat says, but there’s no slot for the card.