‘You’ve always got me, babe,’ Trent says from the floor.

‘Shut up, Trent,’ Ade says.

‘You know you’re beautiful when you’re mad,’ says Trent.

‘Where the hell have you been learning these lines, man?’ Mak says. ‘They suck butt.’

‘I see,’ Ade says. ‘If someone says I’m beautiful, it must just be a line? Nice to know how you feel about me, Maksym.’

‘I never said that.’ Mak looks panicky. ‘I just meant that they’re new levels of cringe.’

‘Not as cringe as you getting your ear pierced because your girlfriend told you to,’ Kat says. And I’m completely confused because now she seems to be on Ade’s side and I’m not sure what changed in the middle of this mental conversation.

‘Guys, we’re getting off the point,’ I shout. ‘We can keep accusing each other all day, and we’re apparently just gonna drag up a load of other stuff.’

‘As a tight friendship group, you guys have some serious issues to work through,’ Karim says. ‘No offence.’

‘Man, don’t say “no offence” when you mean offence,’ Mak shouts. 217

‘Kat said it to me when she was accusing my mum of being a creepy pixie, and no one cared about that,’ Karim says.

‘Everyone, shut up!’ I yell, loud enough to shock them into silence. ‘We need to find out who the bug is. Nothing else matters right now.’

‘Is there a test we can do?’ Ade says. ‘Do you have any tardigrades, Mak? We could all eat some.’

‘But Mak could tamper with whatever we’re eating and give himself something different,’ Chets says. ‘No offence.’

‘That’s true,’ I say. ‘We wouldn’t be able to trust the outcome. It needs to be something we can all see and believe.’

‘So Chetan can say “no offence” and nobody complains,’ Karim mutters. ‘And what the hell is a tardigrade anyway? Once again, the new kid is out of the loop.’

‘They’re microscopic eight-legged creatures that are almost indestructible and can often be found living in wet environments, like in moss on riverbanks,’ Kat says. ‘We learnt about them at Crater Lake from this guy called Dale who was a scientist before he became an alien.’

‘At Crater Lake we used them to turn the bugs 218 back into humans,’ I say. ‘Because the tardigrades consume the sporiness within the host bodies.’

‘Right, got it,’ Karim says. ‘Those wrinkly mini hippos you showed me a picture of.’

‘Ah, they are like wrinkly mini hippos,’ Kat smiles. ‘But with weird nose-mouths.’

‘Like toothy vacuum-cleaner nozzles,’ I say.

Karim nods and makes a face. ‘And we want to eat these.’

‘Actually, there’s something I’ve been wondering about that,’ I say, turning to Ade. ‘If we eat tardigrades, we know they won’t die, so does that mean we poo them out, or that they get absorbed into our bodies?’