‘Eva worked here last Christmas,’ Kat says. ‘She’s my older sister,’ she adds for Karim’s benefit. ‘It’s where they store the spare stock that they can’t fit out on the display, so at Christmas it’s full of trees to put out once the display ones have been 107 sold. Eva used to sneak back here with her boyfriend so they could … be alone.’ I can’t see her face clearly, but I can hear the ‘ew’ in her voice.

‘And she told you about it?’ Karim says.

‘No, she told her friend about it on the phone, and I happened to be listening. I didn’t really want to – there was a lot of information that I would prefer never to have had enter my ears. But it was one of those car-crash moments; I couldn’t tear myself away.’

‘Good thing you didn’t,’ I say. ‘This place is a life-saver.’

‘So,’ Kat says, as Karim chews on his bar. ‘What next?’

And of course I’ve been thinking about this but my brain is a bit of a puddle, and it always helps to talk things through. ‘We need to go through what we know, and what we don’t,’ I say. ‘Then we can plan our next move.’

‘OK, so we definitely have an alien situation. Somehow the spores have got into Straybridge and infected loads of people,’ Kat says.

‘Yes, loads of people, but not everyone,’ I agree. ‘I mean, we’re all OK for some reason. The 108 problem is we don’t know how the spores have got in, or who is infected. Why some people and not others?’

‘Until we know, it doesn’t feel safe to go to sleep.’

‘And until we know, we have to work on the basis that anyone could be a sporeling.’

Kat nods.

‘The good news is,’ I say, ‘that they don’t know we know. From what we overheard, they didn’t ID us at the labs.’

‘What was that creepy “At all costs” thing they said?’ Karim asks through a mouthful. ‘Is it their planet-invading catchphrase?’

‘That’s new,’ I say. ‘And we need to find out what it means.’

‘So they’re different from how they were at Crater Lake?’

‘There are quite a few differences,’ Kat says. ‘At Crater Lake you could tell they were bugs from looking at their eyes; but the eyes on the new sporelings seem normal.’

‘And there were two types before: workers and hunters. Workers weren’t really a threat unless you attacked them, they just got on with the jobs 109 they were supposed to do. Hunters were smart and fast and in charge. And they really wanted to hurt-slash-infect us.’

‘None of the ones we saw today seemed workery,’ Kat says. ‘They’re more switched on. Also, it isn’t obvious what jobs they’re doing. At Crater Lake they were always busy building the dam and draining the lake.’