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beating behind his eyeballs. But he had to remain normal, he had to remain casual, he had to remain a fourteen-year-old kid.
    ‘Oh, I threw it out into the garden,’ Laura said. ‘It’s bad luck to kill a spider. It makes it rain. Which do you think, rogan josh or teriyaki?’
    Everett M saw that Laura expected an answer from him.
    ‘Teriyaki,’ he said. ‘Unless it’s Bebe Ajeet’s rogan josh. Hey, what are you painting, Vee-Arr?’ The little girl beamed and held up her pink-and-purple world. Her eyes. Her eyes were round, dark brown Anglo-Punjabi eyes. Now Everett M thought his heart would burst from relief. Victory-Rose/Victoria-Rose, Laura Braiden/Laura Singh, there was no difference between them. They were his family now. He would fight to the last watt of energy in his body to keep them safe.
    ‘No, it’s Sainsbury’s “Taste the Difference”, from Jamie Oliver,’ his mum said.
    The Nahn spider was out there, and every second, every polite word, it was gaining distance. Yet Everett M had to keep cover, though he felt sick, sick as if everything inside him had rotted into slime.
    ‘How long will it be?’ he asked.
    ‘I said, there’s bread and stuff if you’re starving.’
    ‘Just want to do something before dinner.’
    Everett M dashed to his room and quickly pulled on anythingthat might make him look like one of the runners he had so effortlessly beaten on the way home from school.
    ‘I’m going for a run,’ he announced in the kitchen. Even Victory-Rose stopped daubing fluorescent pink seagulls on the paper sky at that.
    ‘You’re going for a run?’ his mum echoed.
    ‘I’ve got a game tomorrow. I need to get ready for it. And you said I was eating the house out, and like, I have to burn up all that food somehow. Run.’
    ‘You’re going for a run.’
    ‘People do. Like me.’
    ‘Oh …’ Laura said, drawing the word out long. ‘It’s for someone, isn’t it? There’s someone, isn’t there? You’re buffing up for her. That is so sweet, Everett.’
    ‘Mum!’ But Laura’s guess was a perfect cover story, so Everett M worked the lie. ‘I have a game tomorrow. Really.’
    ‘You know, that really is kind of romantic. Buffing up for a girl. Are you going to run past her house? That’s a cute beanie.’
    ‘Mum. I’m gone. The teriyaki. A lot of it.’
    And he was gone. The cold hit him deep. His energy levels were still low and he was ravenous. He should have had one of Laura’s sandwiches, a dozen of them because he knew he would need power, but the image of the Nahn spider hurrying, hurrying on too many legs through the frosty grass was like barbed wire in his brain. He knew what the buzzing in his head was now. When he had been trappedin the Madam Moon battle suit, when he had thought he was going to die the worst death he could imagine, his Nahn alter had said that it would take several months for the Nahn to learn Thryn technology and assimilate it. And on the inside of the suit Madam Moon had whispered that she was analysing and assimilating Nahn nanotechnology. The buzzing was his own implanted Thryn augments responding to the presence of the Nahn. He had his own inbuilt Nahn radar. Everett M turned on to Roding Road and into a slow run and opened up his augmented hearing. His ears opened into the electronic, the electromagnetic. Radio and cell-phone signals deafened him, a hundred satellite channels poured into his head. One by one Everett M screened them out. Next came the chatty buzz of Wi-Fi networks, the shoutiness of Bluetooth, the minicab channels and Tesco home-delivery network. A pirate dubstep station was broadcasting on the edge of an emergency-services frequency. Television and radio and high above, like night birds, the voices of aircraft around London’s airports. The world was a cacophony of silent voices that passed through everyone except those who needed to hear them. Everett M heard them all, every single one, and one by one he tuned them out until he