I break the record for the slowest-ever removal of coat and shoes, and walk through to the kitchen where Mum is standing over a big pan on the cooker, slowly stirring with a wooden spoon.

‘You didn’t need to cook for me, Mum,’ I say. ‘I can just grab something from the fridge.’

‘It’s no trouble,’ she says. ‘You’ve had a busy day – you need something nutritious. Why don’t you sit down at the table?’

I pull out one of the heavy kitchen chairs, gritting my teeth as it makes an awful scraping sound on the floor. Mum hates it when I do that. But then I think, hey, at least I’m acting normal. It’s harder than you might think when your mum has been body-snatched by parasitic alien wasps.

I sit down at the table, and for a moment there 139is just the scrape of the spoon against the inside of the pan, and a bubbling from whatever’s inside.

‘Where did you go for your walk today?’ she says, not turning her head from the pan.

‘We went to the park this afternoon, just for a bit before the curfew bells,’ I say.

‘The park and Katja’s house.’ She turns off the heat on the cooker. ‘Nowhere else?’

She knows we were at the university this morning. Of course she does – half the hive saw us. I choose my words carefully and try to sound as casual as possible.

‘We went with Karim to the university earlier – he wanted to see his mum, and cos the phones aren’t working, he made us trek all the way to her office.’

‘And did you see her?’ Mum is getting a bowl out of the cupboard.

‘No, they have security people there, and they wouldn’t let him in. Then my old teacher turned up and apparently forgot she isn’t my teacher anymore.’

‘Your teacher?’ She opens the drawer and takes out a spoon.

‘Miss Hoche. The one who thinks she’s Lois 140 Lane or something now. She said some things that hacked me off, so we left and went back to Kat’s.’

Mum pours the contents of the pan into the bowl, the steam puffing up and clouding over her face. Then she brings the bowl to the table and puts it in front of me. Tomato soup.

‘Eat up,’ she says, tilting her head again in that way that makes spiders scuttle down my back.

I look at the soup and swallow down the bit of sick that gushes into my mouth. I haven’t eaten soup since before the summer. And I can’t eat this. What if she put a sedative in it, like Digger did at Crater Lake? What if I fall asleep at the table?

‘It was your favourite when you were little,’ she says. She’s testing me.

‘I know it was,’ I say. ‘But I went off it after Crater Lake, remember?’