Here it comes, thought Larissa. Here comes the explosion.

But she was wrong. Jamie stared at her, his face reddening, then let out a long, weary sigh and dropped his eyes.

“Were you ever going to tell me the truth?” he asked, his voice barely audible.

“I was going to tell you this afternoon,” said Larissa, realising how pitiful the words sounded. “I was coming to find you when I found out you and Frankenstein had left the Loop.”

Jamie let out a grunt of laughter with absolutely no humour in it. “That’s convenient,” he said.

“It’s the truth,” she said. “I hope you can believe it.”

“No more secrets,” he said, and grimaced. “Right? That’s what we promised each other.”

Larissa didn’t respond. There was nothing she could say. She stared silently at her boyfriend, profoundly aware of the chasm that seemed to have yawned open between them. Jamie kept his gaze on the ground, his shoulders hunched, his arms wrapped tightly round himself. He looked so small, as though a strong breeze could have blown him off the branch and sent him tumbling to the lawn below. When he finally spoke again, he didn’t look at her.

“I’ve been thinking,” he said. “About everything that’s happened since Alexandru arrived in this tree. Blacklight, Dracula, vampires, all of it. And I’ve realised something. Nothing good has come of any of it.”

Larissa felt her heart break in her chest. “Nothing?”

“Nothing.”

She tried to ignore the pain his words had sent coursing through her body, and forced her vocal cords into action. “You can trust me,” she said, hearing the unsteadiness in her voice. “I know it probably doesn’t feel like it right now, and I understand if you find it hard to believe. But you can trust me, Jamie. You really can.”

He raised his head and looked directly into her eyes. “I’ve heard that before,” he said. “More than once.”

Anger burst through Larissa as her vampire side rushed to the fore. She knew she was in the wrong, that Jamie had every right to feel disappointed and let down, but she could not simply float in the cold air and allow herself to be tortured indefinitely.

“What are you saying, Jamie?” she demanded. “No more bullshit. Talk to me.”

“I need to think.”

“About what?”

“About everything,” said Jamie. “About what happens next. It’s all coming to an end, Larissa. Everything. Can’t you feel it?”

She shook her head, and felt red heat boil into her eyes. She was suddenly furious with him for wallowing in self-pity when there was so much at stake.

My family won’t even talk to me, she thought. They might as well be dead. At least your mum is safe, and your dad still wants you, even if he did lie to you. At least he cares that you’re alive.

“I don’t recognise this version of you,” she said, her voice little more than a growl. “The Jamie I know, the one that I fell for? That Jamie fights to the very end, even when everything seems hopeless. Where the hell is he?”

Jamie stared at her. “I’m tired of fighting,” he said.

“So what do we do now? Tell me.”

“Go back to the Loop,” he said. “I just need some time. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Larissa floated in the air, her glowing eyes fixed on his. He held her gaze for a moment, then shifted it to the gravel drive below, where everything had been set in motion by the thunder of machine-gun fire and the apparent death of a man who had been desperate for a way out. She wanted to shake her boyfriend, to scream at him to snap out of it, then wrap her arms round him and tell him that she loved him, couldn’t he see that, wasn’t that enough for him?

Instead, she turned away without a word and flew back towards the Loop as fast as she could force her body to move. The cold air made her eyes water, hiding tears that she would never have let anybody see, not least the boy she was leaving behind.

Matt Browning’s stomach rumbled so aggressively that he immediately looked around to check whether any of his colleagues had heard it, his face reddening with embarrassment. Mercifully, it had either not been as loud as it had seemed or his fellow members of the Lazarus Project were simply too engrossed in their work to have noticed it; there was not so much as a raised eyebrow to be seen.

Matt checked his watch and saw that it was well past noon. He had been at his desk for almost seven hours, and had not eaten since grabbing a sandwich sometime the previous afternoon.

He was absolutely starving.

Matt got to his feet and carefully stretched his arms out above his head until he felt the muscles in his shoulders creak. The doctors had told him he could remove the foam neck brace tomorrow, but for now it was still wrapped round his throat like a thick collar. His back and neck were in constant pain, the result of the car crash he had caused in San Francisco, but a regimen of dizzyingly strong pills was keeping it at bay. The finger that Major Simmons had broken as he gripped the steering wheel was splinted and wrapped in bandages, but mercifully it was the little one, and it didn’t interfere with his ability to work.

He lowered his arms and took a look around the lab. At the far end of the long room, Professor Karlsson, the project’s Director, was deep in conversation with two of his senior staff. In the corner nearest the door, three of Matt’s colleagues were sitting in plastic chairs, staring intently into a slowly rotating holographic model of their best guess at what the genetic structure of a cure for vampirism might look like: a swirling cone of DNA strands, balls of blue and red proteins rotating round grey stretches that represented sections as yet unmapped, of which there were still a frustratingly large number. The rest of the Lazarus staff were huddled at their desks, grinding through the seemingly endless potential formulas that required testing on the project’s supercomputer array. Every one would almost certainly turn out to be flawed, at which point the results would be written up and filed away, and the process would begin again.

To Matt’s right, her blonde head buried in what looked like a protein recombination equation, sat Natalia Lenski, the girl he no longer knew exactly how to refer to. His friend? His girlfriend?

He had no idea.

Whatever existed between them was fragile, the result of a halting, tentative courtship involving two people to whom confidence did not come naturally, a courtship that had culminated in a kiss that had quite literally taken Matt’s breath away. It had been instigated by Natalia as he arrived back from California and been designed to soften the blow of the news he was returning home to: that Jamie Carpenter, his best friend, had been bitten by a vampire, and turned.

There had been two more kisses since. Whereas the first had been full of fire and passion, the second had been gentle, almost chaste, as Matt lay in the infirmary after a scan had confirmed there was no permanent damage to his spine. The third had been frenzied, a stolen moment the previous day when they had run into each other in the Level B corridor, a remarkable coincidence given how much time they both spent in the Lazarus laboratories. The momentarily empty corridor and the possibility of being caught had lent the kiss an urgency that had left Matt dizzy; he still blushed at the memory of it.

But that had been yesterday. Now he was standing two metres away from her without the slightest clue what he should say or do, and the determined way that Natalia was staring at her screen suggested she had no more idea than he did. In moments like this, the ones that other people appeared to navigate with ease but which he found as difficult and confusing as a labyrinth, Matt often asked himself what Jamie would do. The honest answer was usually something reckless and arguably foolhardy, but it was still a helpful exercise. Inaction did not come naturally to Jamie; he would do something, even if it turned out to be wrong, and Matt was gradually realising that it was better to try and fail than do nothing.