By now we were close enough to the first Hive that I could see just how rough edged and patchy looking its exterior really was. What on Earth, I wondered, lay within? Did people live in there? Or something else?

‘These people,’ I asked. ‘The bee-brains. Do they still look like human beings?’

‘Pretty much,’ she said, looking distracted as she peered ahead, slowing a little as we reached another intersection. ‘Okay, we’re still where we’re supposed to be. That’s all well and good.’

I glanced at a street sign in Portuguese, then thought I saw something moving up at the next intersection. I told Nadia, and she pulled to a stop, before taking a pair of binoculars from the dashboard and peering ahead.

‘Trouble?’ asked Oskar.

‘Probably not,’ said Nadia. ‘I don’t see anything, so might just have been a lone . . . wait, no. I see them now. Hoo boy. A lot of them, too.’

I licked suddenly dry lips. ‘What do we do? Take a different route?’

She shook her head. ‘I don’t think so. Long as we keep our distance, they’re going to act like they don’t even know we’re here.’ She put the binoculars back down. ‘But we might have to wait a little while until they’ve passed through.’

‘What are they doing?’

‘Fixing that thing up,’ she said, nodding through the windscreen at the Hive. ‘It’s built out of scraps of stuff from all over. You can see bee-brains hammering buildings apart all over the place. Best thing to do is wait until they’re gone, like I said. Here,’ she said, handing me the binoculars. ‘Look and learn.’

I lifted them to my eyes and saw maybe a couple of dozen bedraggled-looking figures making their way across the intersection ahead. The majority were naked or wore rags that barely clung to their flesh. There were men and women of all ages, but no children. Every one of them was carrying something – bricks, or bits of rubble, and in some cases what looked to me like crude home-made tools. Any one of them could have glanced up and seen us immediately, less than a few dozen metres farther down the road. None of them did. They looked, I thought, like people walking in their sleep.

‘Do they know what they’re doing?’ I asked. ‘I mean, are they consciously aware?’

She shook her head. ‘Not according to Winifred, no. She’s the expert on this stuff.’

‘They’re not really human,’ said Oskar from behind me. ‘There’s a reason they’re called bee-brains. Don’t get any ideas that you can communicate with them in any way. They can get pretty vicious at close enough range.’