There was puke sprayed the other side of the double-lounger and a sparrow pecking at it. Harry didn’t think he’d been sick, but most of what happened after Matt left was a blur.

‘Time you got your ass home,’ a cleaner said irritably. She wore a chequered smock, thick rubber gloves and had faded tattoos down her arms.

Harry felt like his brain would rupture as he sat up, rubbing his face and planting his feet down. The pool shoes on the floor weren’t his, but they’d do. He looked around for his tank top.

‘You seen a blue-grey tank?’ Harry asked, then started coughing.

‘Ya ain’t supposed to be here,’ the woman said sharply. ‘And we ain’t gonna start looking for your shit.’

Harry tapped his back pocket, relieved to feel his phone, house key and money clip zipped inside his swim shorts. It was a $90 Lululemon tank that he looked good in, but his thirst and a need for the toilet overrode any desire to start searching.

The deck swayed as Harry stood and steadied himself on a post. The scene across the pool reminded him of a news item he’d seen about kids who lived on landfill sites. There was tons of litter, sticky cocktail spills and lounger cushions floating in the pool.

Harry stumbled round the pool towards the glass elevator, straddling half-eaten nachos, beer cans and dried blood.

A guy in the pool wore rubber waders, using a giant boom to scoop litter off the surface. When Harry caught the cleaner’s eye, he got a look of pure hate. He realised he was the hungover spoiled brat, loathed by people on minimum wage who had to clean up after him.

Harry drank from a water fountain outside the restrooms. A smell like a rotting carcass turned him off the gents.

‘Hello?’ he yelled, making sure there was no answer before cutting into a stall in the ladies. He kicked a dead lip gloss across the floor, then walked into a stall and lifted the seat.

Harry was halfway through a much-needed piss when he noticed a wasp on the wall, the stripes on its back a shimmering metallic purple. He hadn’t noticed with his blurred head and desperation to pee, but someone must have spilled something sugary in the next stall because the synthetic wasps were coming under the partition and a few fizzed up near the ceiling.

‘Christ,’ Harry gasped, spraying his shorts as he backed out frantically.

The University of Chicago biology student who’d engineered purple wasps was serving fifty years in federal prison, but his genetically altered creatures had spread across North America. Besides their dark metallic stripes, purple wasps produced a much more potent venom than regular wasps. It could kill an untreated child in twenty minutes, or an adult in three agonising hours.