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I shut up and did as she instructed.

The garden was still and quiet, interrupted only by the buzz of bees.

The buzz of bees.

Not the quiet, languid hum of bees as they went from flower to flower, spreading pollen and ensuring the plants’ reproduction though fertilisation; but rather a loud, disquieting buzz that sounded . . .
angry

Enraged.

‘I don’t like this.’ Alpha said, and her voice was scared. ‘Not one bit.’

‘Me neither. Let’s get inside. Quickly,’ I said, gesturing at the house.

My hand froze in mid-air.

Off to our right, the air was suddenly becoming obscured by a dark, hazy disturbance. It took a second or two to make sense, but when it did I felt my growing disquiet graduating into full-fledged terror.

A huge cloud of bees was rising slowly from the bushes and flowers; a dense swarm that had to be made up of literally thousands of the artificial insects.

Rising up as if they had been hiding the whole time, waiting, and now the wait was over. The swarm looked like it had locked on to us, with the bee that had stung us both merely an advance scout for this terrible army.

We didn’t have long.

I knew how fast these things could travel. I knew that the bees were capable of vertical take-off, and that they could move three times as fast as the creature they were modelled after.

What’s the point in copying life
, my father had once said,
if you don’t take a little time to improve upon the original?

Well, were there any more tricks he’d added?

‘RUN!’ I shouted.

We broke for the house just as the swarm surged forward. Thousands of bees, armed with stings, moving as one unit.

With us as their targets.

We ran.

Ran as fast as our legs could carry us, across the lawn, with that hideous buzz driving us onwards.

Five metres from the door, the swarm caught up with us. The air grew thick and dark and sharp and impossibly noisy. Metal bodies pinged off my face as I smashed into them, and I felt stings plunging into my flesh all over my body. I squeezed my eyes into barely-open slits and focused on the front door ahead of me. Ignoring the stings, the pain, the incessant buzzing, I just aimed myself at reaching the rectangle that had suddenly become the only thought in my head.

Alpha was screaming but she didn’t let it slow her down. We hit the front step at the same time and I already had my filaments ready to open the door. I don’t remember deploying them, it must have been done with pure instinct.

I grabbed hold of Alpha and literally threw us both through the door, retracting my filaments even as gravity took hold and pulled us both down.

We hit the floor of the hall hard and lay there for a few seconds, with our limbs tangled up together, and I could only just hear the sound of the door mechanism closing over the roaring buzz of our pursuers.

My body was covered in stings that all screamed out in various shades of pain, but I managed to ignore them and even raised my head to watch as the door swung closed.

A small part of the swarm had already made it through into the house before the door finished closing. They were in the air above us, a sparse but no less deadly cloud of them, and they kind of hovered there as if they had temporarily lost sight of their targets.

The only way to get ourselves safe was simply to keep moving. I dragged myself along the floor on my knees and one hand, while the other grabbed a handful of Alpha’s clothes so I could pull her along behind me. Putting my weight on to the stings on my hand and legs just made them hurt more, but I couldn’t stop.

I didn’t head for the nearest door, the dining room, because I could see the door was closed. Instead I headed towards my room because I had, as always, left it ajar.

This is insane!
My mind kept saying.
Bees? My father’s bees? Really?

We reached my room just as the remaining bees locked on to us and started heading our way. I could hear them getting closer and I urged Alpha to hurry up. We threw ourselves forward, and made the threshold with a second or so to spare. Alpha and I bundled into the room and I kicked out to slam the door behind us. There was a resounding crash as the swarm hit the door and then Alpha and I were rolling around, brushing at our clothes, just in case we’d imported any of the swarm into my room hidden in their folds.

We lay on my bedroom floor, out of breath, adrenaline levels spiking off the scale, scared beyond our ability to speak, and for a short while the world ceased to make any sense.

My body was on fire in dozens of separate places, the most painful of which was a sting to my left eyelid that had swollen up and was rubbing against the eyeball.

I opened my eyes.

Alpha was hugging herself with arms that were trembling, and she was crying too. I crawled over to her and laid a hand upon her arm. She tensed away from my touch as if retreating from a threat.

Outside the bedroom door the swarm still buzzed, and I could hear the impacts as tiny bodies crashed into it, as if they were trying to get through to us.

Finally Alpha spoke.

‘I guess . . . your father . . . doesn’t want us to find out what he’s up to,’ she said in a voice that sounded somehow as if it had lost some of its clarity, some of its confidence.

‘It’s going to take a bit more than a few bees to stop us,’ I said, full of false bravado.

‘Do you know how many of those bees there are in the world?’ Alpha asked, still sounding defeated. ‘Billions. There are
billions
of them. And your father controls them all.’

‘Looks like Tom Greatorex underestimated.’ I said, feeling sick at the thought that had just occurred to me. Alpha looked at me blankly. ‘He said there were a million eyes watching him, all the time . . .’ I explained. ‘What if he was talking about the
bees
? Tiny little spies that no one pays attention to?’

‘What have we got ourselves into?’ Alpha said, horrified. She looked at me and I saw three livid stings on her face – one on the cheek just below her right eye, one on the side of her nose and one on her chin – and it suddenly flipped my mood from confusion to anger.

My father had no right to do this to us.

Any of it.

Alpha’s father, my own mother, the bees, the lies, the secret machinations.

Whatever he was up to, I was going to stop him.

Or die trying.

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First, though, we were going to have to get out of my room. Again, I thought of Kyle Straker and the moment he tried to escape from his own bedroom. I looked over to my window. My heart sank.

The plexiglass was thick with the bodies of my father’s bees, clambering over each other, urgently trying to get in. I wasn’t even sure it would hold them.

Epic fail there, then. Door or window: both were out of the question.

And that left . . . nothing.

We were trapped.

I almost gave in to despair. It would have been so easy.

But when I looked at Alpha I saw an expression on her face that pulled me back from the brink. I’d been expecting to see fear, or pain, or resignation, but I got something else entirely:
expectation.

A look that said:
so, what are we going to do now?
And that also said: I know
you’ll sort it out.

And the spark of an idea came to me almost immediately. I stood up and searched my room for something to help.

Ideally I needed a sheet of metal, but I thought the chances of finding one of them was slim to none. Alpha watched on with a puzzled look, but didn’t interrupt with unnecessary questions.

In my drawer I found a clothing blank: a neutral garment ready to have a style and a material type flashed on to it. They’re pretty much all that I wear these days. People can still buy clothes, but it seems a bit outdated and unnecessary. I just use my LinkHangers app, and I have any garment I need.

Any garment I need
. . .

I sat down on my bed and thought about it.

A clothing blank had the potential to become any material. ANY material. I needed metal. I’ve worn metal before.

I accessed my LinkHangers and navigated to a small and slightly shameful hanger section filed away as ‘CosPlay’. CosPlay, or Costume Play.

I only have a couple of templates hanging there. Last Quest stuff, from when I was completely obsessed with the games, instead of the ‘mildly obsessed’ I am now.

See, here are Last Quest get-togethers called QuestCons, where people turn up and meet up with people that they know from online activities but have never met in the flesh. And the true Last Quest fans . . . well, they kind of dress up as their online characters.

I selected a chainmail shirt from a hanger and connected my filaments to the clothing blank.

Result: a metal mesh shirt.

I looked up at Alpha.

She was gazing at the garment in my hands with something close to amazement.

I guess she didn’t know about Cosplay, Last Quest, or a Beserker called Tempest who wore a similar garment. ‘We need a bee,’ I told her.

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My father’s bees used micro-electronics and some pretty amazing nano-engineering to give them the illusion of life. But they were, when all was said and done, machines. At their heart was a power cell, rechargeable of course, but it was not infallible.

Lightning could take them out in vast numbers. It wasn’t a problem – the factories that manufactured them could turn them out in batches of millions – and I’d even heard my father confessing that it wasn’t cost-effective to make them hardier against electrical storms; lightning was actually a cash
generator

Bees that stop functioning need replacing.

My father’s factories were only too happy to supply the replacements. At the usual price.

I’d got to thinking that storm clouds weren’t the only things capable of generating bursts of electricity.

Anyone who’s ever played
BubblePop Evolved
knows that.

However, instead of inanely popping soap bubbles, I was going to have a go at popping a bee.

Alpha stood by the door with a glass, which I’d just used to take a legendary dose of calcium supplements, in her hand. I had one hand on the door handle and my shoulder pressed against the door.

‘Ready?’ I asked, and Alpha was so tense and focused that she only managed a curt nod in reply.

I opened the door a crack.

Two bees made it into the room through the crack almost immediately and I slammed the door shut. By the time I’d finished, Alpha was standing with the glass pressed against the wall. The two bees were trapped within.

‘Nicely done,’ I said, and gathered up the mesh shirt. I connected to each arm of the garment with filaments from each hand and then put the shirt on the wall, next to the glass.

‘Do it.’ I said.

Alpha manoeuvred the glass along the wall, and then on to the shirt. The bees buzzed angrily against the glass but remained trapped.

‘Here goes nothing,’ I said, and thought about sending an electric charge from my body into the garment, but not the little charge that could pop a soap bubble; I thought much much bigger.

I felt a sharp, tearing pain in my spine and then through all the bones of my body as the electrical energy used up calcium at an alarming rate.

I felt the current discharge along my filaments and out along the metal mesh.

Nothing happened.

Oh, well,
I thought,
it was a stupid idea anyway

The pain was levelling out into a dull throb of heaviness through my body.

So, we were well and truly trapped, then. I had been thinking that the charge would have been enough to knock the bees out of their flight at least.

Suddenly, one of the bees stopped flying about inside the glass and came to rest upon the mesh.

A blue spark leapt from the mesh to the bee and I could smell something like burnt ozone. The bee kind of bumped up off the mesh for an instant and, when it hit it again, it was dead.

Switched off.

Blown.

Alpha let out a whoop of triumph.

Me, I just breathed a huge sigh of relief.

Then we watched as the other bee found its way on to the mesh and suffered the same fate as its cellmate.

I shut off the current. Alpha took the glass away from the wall and the bees fell to the floor.

She grinned, poking at them with the toe of her shoe.

‘When this is over you’re going to tell me why exactly you have a chainmail vest,’ she said.

‘Maybe,’ I said, smiling. ‘We’ll see.’

I held the vest up.

‘Wanna try it for real?’ I asked her.

‘Let’s go,’ she said, and kissed me on the cheek.

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This time Alpha dealt with the door, while I held the mesh up in front of me like a shield. I turned the current back on, and on a three count she threw open the door and then fell in behind me.

I moved forward towards the swarm.

The bees came straight at me, going directly for my face.

They hit the mesh and I stepped up the current even more, just to make sure.

I felt a surge of panic, that was still a HEX OF A LOT of bees, but then they started falling out of the air, and it was relatively easy to move the mesh around taking out any that I’d missed.

It was over in seconds.

It was almost an anticlimax if I’m honest.

‘Wow,’ was all Alpha could manage, a single word more than me.

We stepped over the fallen bodies of the slain bees and I disconnected from the mesh, bunched it up in my hand and made my way down the hall, Alpha following closely behind.