Naomi put her head back and wiped from her brow a bedbug that had crawled out of her hair. Her body wasn’t twitching any more. It was just burning, she’d scratched herself so sore. Neck, arms, chest, her hairy legs.

But deliverance is coming from above.

The bucket hovered half a metre above her head. There was an astonishing jolt and she was terrified that the computer might fall out. Naomi stretched her arms up (to the spider), but nothing happened except for the fact that now she could reach the bucket.

She clutched it, held it tight, as tightly as she’d hold Anouk if she could just see her once more in her life.

When it was at waist height, she sank to the ground together with the bucket. And cried.

She recalled the day when the exam results had been posted at university and she hadn’t wanted to go to the foyer, hadn’t wanted to queue up with all the other students whose dreams were boosted or shattered with a single glance. And yet she hadn’t been able to wait in her room for a minute. Curiosity had got the better of fear and so she’d taken the quickest route to the noticeboard, just as now her curiosity wouldn’t allow her any hesitation in taking the computer from the bucket and flipping it open.

Naomi managed to keep her eyes closed for one, maybe two seconds. She couldn’t hold out any longer.

She began reading the spider’s message. The last message she would ever receive from it, after Naomi had admitted indisputably the worst things she’d ever done to anyone in her life:

Well done, Mrs Lamar. That’s exactly what I wanted to hear. Finally you’ve told the truth. If there’s anything else you’d like to say before you die, you may now type it into the computer. Once you’ve sent it back up to me, I shall allow you to die.

55

As Martin staggered into the entrance area of Hell’s Kitchen he tried to cling onto the counter, pulling down a plastic pot with artificial hydrangeas.

Anouk had long since vanished.

When he’d finally made it back to his feet and out of the sickbay, all he’d seen was her back, a strip of bare skin where the hospital gown wasn’t properly tied. Then the electric doors had closed and Martin was helpless to stop the girl from leaving the quarantine area.

To hunt for the black-light markings in the ship’s bowels. Barefoot. Holding the UV torch.

His eyes filled with tears, Martin stared at the steel doors of the airlock, completely at a loss as to how he was going to open them again, that was assuming he could manage the indomitable three metres between him and the exit.

Fucking side effects.