Immediately, I wanted to do it again, but the weather landed down on us. The sky darkened and lowered. Thunder rolled. A huge cloud spilt its bloated guts and a curtain of cold rain fell on the main building, as if someone was pouring it from about fifty taps. The Astroturf was now like a skating rink, but it wasn’t getting any wetter. This was focused rain. Whizzy rain.

The cloud wasn’t finished. It bubbled like a boiling kettle. I’ve never seen a cloud do that before, and I’m never, ever going to forget it. The whole cloud was a dark, rippling circle, like a cauldron, and inside it different, lighter clouds churned. The noise on the rooftops was deafening.

Lenny snatched at my shoulder and screamed, ‘Look at that!’

And there was Whizzy, filling the whole sky, and she wasn’t a sunhorse any more – she was a dragon.

She flew across the sky in fiery ripples. She wasn’t the creature I knew, made of light or electricity or both – she was fire now. Actual flames. There were crackling, hissing and steaming noises all around, but the loudest thing I could hear was my own banging heart. And then she stopped flying and just hovered with her head down low, almost to the treetops, hanging over us and obviously searching for something.

And she found me. Our eyes met and my heart raced more than ever. She was magnificent in this form, but so utterly devastating and different. Flames from her underside licked out. The smell of scorching tree mixed with waves of heat and the sound of screaming boys, and I found tears rolling down my cheeks.

After that, everything happened so fast, it was like the Mandeville Centre was the target of a storm attack. Whizzy reared up, and in a move that was more shocking than anything I’d seen before, she travelled backwards through the air like she was getting ready to take a run at something.

I ducked and covered my head. So did the other boys. Some were running back towards the building.

The lightning started without any warning at all. Brilliant white flashes, so close to us that everyone was stunned. Too stunned to even run. A blinding flash of forked lightning zigzagged from the ground, through Whizzy, up to the cloud, then back down near the perimeter fence. Thunder crashed immediately, like the actual air was splitting apart, and Whizzy shot up skywards like a rocket.