‘Aw not these jellyfish guys again,’ said Kyle.

‘No no no, this is different.’ Salim stood beside him above the waves. ‘Look, this is really cool.’ He folded his hands and leaned forward and flew across the ocean, Kyle a heartbeat behind him. He always thought of those Hindu gods you saw on the prayer cards that blew into the compound from the street shrines. His dad didn’t like those either. They arrived over the kronkaeur armada, beating through a rising ocean on a steady breeze, topsails inflated. When the huge, sail-powered jellyfish had appeared, Kyle had been so excited at his first experience of a newly evolved species that the vast, inflatable monsters had sailed like translucent galleons through his dreams. But all they did was raise their triangular sails and weave their tentacles together into huge raft-fleets and bud off little jellies that looked like see-through paper boats. Once the initial thrill of being part of the global game-experiment to start life on earth all over again and see how it evolved differently had worn off, Kyle found himself wishing that Salim had been given somewhere a bit more exciting than a huge square of ocean. An island would have been good. A bit of continent would have been better. Somewhere things could attack each other.

‘Every bit of water on Alterre was land, and every bit of land was water,’ Salim had said. And they will be again. And anyway, everything eats everything out on the open ocean.’

But not in a cool way, Kyle thought.

Apart from his tech and his skill at football, nothing about Salim was cool. At home he would never have been Kyle’s friend. Kyle would probably have beat him about a bit: he was geeky, had a big nose, couldn’t get clothes right - all the wrong labels -and had no idea how to wear a beanie. He went to a weird religious school for an hour every afternoon and Fridays to the mosque down by the river steps where they burned the dead people. Really, they should not be friends at all. Ozzie Ryan, who’d been the team big one before Kyle, said it was unnatural and disloyal and you couldn’t trust them; one moment they’d be giving you presents and the next they’d be setting you up for people out there to shoot you. Kyle knew Ozzie Ryan was just jealous.