As the thrumming fills my ears, I see a change in the river in front of us. The swirling ripples are flattened away as the surface becomes eggshell smooth, and then it vibrates violently in raised lines and parallel troughs. It moves like the mesh covering on your headphones when you’re playing music really loud. Whatever this thing is, it’s right above us, and it’s big. The louder it gets, the more we try to disappear into the dirt behind us. My mind picks through our options, though as we have no idea what we’re dealing with, everything is based on guesses and hope. If it comes to it, we’ll have to break cover and run, but 129 assuming this thing is fast, and that it’s part of the hive, that has to be a last resort.

It doesn’t know we’re here, I tell myself. It has loads of ground to cover, and it can’t know the town like we do. It doesn’t know about the overhang, and it will only search this area for so long before it moves on. Once again, our best bet is to do nothing. So we sit tight. Hold our nerve.

For a moment, the sky above us seems to grow a little darker, like a cloud has blown across the moon. The river throbs. There is no sound except for the buzz. I brace myself to run, trying to work out where I could get a weapon. A tree branch might work, or a spade or something with a long handle. There must be a groundsman’s shed here somewhere.

But then the shadow passes, the river calms, and the god-awful buzz starts to move away. We wait as the sound lessens, whirring away to nothing. And then we wait some more.

‘Seeing as you two know way more about this stuff than I do,’ Karim says, his voice scratchy, ‘I would love for you to tell me what the hell that was.’

11

Hunter

‘I honestly don’t know for sure,’ I say.

‘Then hit me with your best guess.’

I don’t know whether to tell him what I’m thinking. I mean, it’s nuts, and it’s also terrifying. But he’s come this far with us and he hasn’t totally lost it yet, so I figure I owe him honesty.

‘Back at Crater Lake,’ I say, ‘we only saw one of the sporelings fully transform.’

‘Digger.’ Kat shudders.

‘Kat trapped him on the climbing wall. He was still superglued there when the police and our parents arrived.’

‘And what does the final evolution of an alien sporeling look like?’ Karim says.

‘Huge,’ Kat says. ‘Matte-black furry bits. Bulgy eyes.’

‘I remember there being some goo involved,’ I add. ‘And that its head looked like a mouldy potato.’

131‘And,’ Kat says. She’s still holding my hand. ‘It had wings.’