She took a rubber-handled electrical screwdriver out of her coat pocket and touched it against the fuse box’s metal door. The bulb in the end of the screwdriver didn’t light up, but she was still wary as she used the metal tip to open the fuse-box door.

The inside had a couple of dead spiders bouncing in cobwebs. Charlie checked carefully for live bugs before tapping the electrical screwdriver in several places to ensure she wasn’t about to get electrocuted.

The metal cabinet had a main power switch, three high-voltage sockets and a row of fuses. A drip hit Charlie’s arm as she studied the fuses. None were labelled, but the power sockets were linked to a bank of three switches along the bottom row. Two were on green, but one had blown out and flipped to red.

‘OK,’ Charlie told herself, nervously approaching the red switch and resetting the fuse by pushing the switch with the tip of the screwdriver.

‘We have light,’ Juno announced. But before her words were out, the fuse clicked back to red and the bulbs inside the RV died. ‘What about the diesel generator?’ she asked.

‘It’s not enough juice when all the equipment’s running,’ Charlie said. ‘I’m gonna try another socket.’

Charlie pulled the high-voltage RV hook-up, then locked it into another socket. The lights behind Juno wobbled, but this time they stayed on.

‘All righty!’ Charlie said, jiggling her ass as she shut the fuse box. ‘I didn’t die!’

She felt drained and frustrated as she headed back into the RV. She’d done a full day at high school, followed by baseball training, a supermarket shop and a microwaved dinner. Then, while most seventeen-year-olds headed out for Friday-night fun, Juno had picked her up and they’d driven out to the remote storage warehouse for a lab session that would last into the early hours of Saturday.

‘What was I doing when the lights went out?’ Charlie asked herself as she peeled off her disposable blue gloves, dropped them into a trash can, then grabbed a clean set out of a wall-mounted dispenser.

Mango had moved her gene-editing lab out of Development Kitchen 2 a few weeks before the law made it illegal to own unregistered gene-editing equipment. Over the following year and a half, Charlie had worked in a variety of homes and shuttered retail units, before Mango came up with the idea of using an RV.

The vehicle had been purchased new, its double bed and TVs replaced by refrigerators, storage cupboards and an extra sink. Oak kitchen cabinets and homey décor in the main cabin had been retained so, when the lab equipment was stowed, anyone peeking inside saw nothing but a vehicle in storage, awaiting its owner’s next expedition.

‘Six jobs, two complete,’ Charlie sighed, looking at rows of trays and bottled solutions.