Chapter 1

My name is Summer Richards, and I’m a runner. I run 800 metres track, and so does my cousin Tilly. We’re in Year 9 and on the school team, and best friends as well. We both take it quite seriously and train, and we do quite well at it - about 2:15 already. We’re pretty similar build and everything, and do the same times, depending, so we always train together.

We live near each other too, and at the bottom of Tilly’s road are some woods and we quite often go running in them, which is good for endurance and also it’s just a nice place to be, especially in the summer holidays like now. It’s an old wood with what our mums and dads call a dense canopy, so in most places the ground is just leaves, with a few bushes and small trees here and there. So we can run where we like, and generally do three or four miles in intervals like some sprints and some longer runs.

Our parents fuss ridiculously about it and try to stop us, saying we’re targets for predators, but there are two of us and we’re not the kind of girls who’d keep quiet while someone does things to us, even though we’re not that big. Also we’re not the kind of daughters who just get told what to do these days, we walk there and there’s nothing they can do to stop us. Though Tilly is hot now, and she says I am, being a blonde, but I think my ears are too big and my hair is just straight while hers is wavy and gorgeous. But anyway hardly anybody else goes there and nothing ever happens.

Plus, these days you can get a thing called a stun pen, which looks like an ordinary pen and just clips onto your pocket or shorts but it’s a stun gun. You get them from Amazon like anything else and it gives out 25 million volts! So we’ve both got one and it makes a difference as you’ll see. They have all those volts but hardly any amps apparently so they’re not actually dangerous, you can zap someone without being a murderer.

As I said nothing ever happens in those woods, but one day last week there WAS a guy in there too, who we passed going the other way. He wasn’t totally in shape but not too bad, tall, about 40 or something. He wasn’t bad looking but we didn’t quite like the way he looked at us so we just nodded when he said ‘morning’ and kept going. I had a feeling I’d seen him before somewhere. It was a bit like he was hanging out there.