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landed scared her, and she jumped and knocked over the Lego. It scattered across the floor and as she walked the sharp edges hurt her paws.
    The bathroom door clicked shut. Tess heard her father’s footsteps in the hall. She sat down in the middle of the room and prayed with all her might to be a little girl again.
    The door opened. ‘What’s all the noise about?’ said her father.
    Tess sat still and looked carefully up towards the door.
    ‘What have you been doing?’ her father said, as he came into the room.
    Tess stared at him in astonishment. How could he not have noticed?
    ‘Are you all right, sweetheart?’ he said, squatting on his heels beside her.
    She stared wide-eyed into his face, then looked down at her hands. She was Tess again, sitting on the floor in her nightdress, all warm and pink and human.
    ‘I was a bear a minute ago,’ she said.
    ‘A bear!’ said her father. ‘Well. No wonder you made such a mess.’ He righted the dolls’ house and began putting the things back into it.
    ‘But I was, Daddy, I really was.’
    ‘Well, you’d better be a tidy little squirrel now and pick up all that Lego before your mum sees it. You can pretend they’re all nuts.’
    ‘But I wasn’t pretending!’
    ‘Of course you weren’t.’
    ‘Do you believe me?’
    ‘Of course I do.’
    But she knew by the tone of his voice that he didn’t. Changing into bears just wasn’t the kind of thing that adults did. They would be far too worried about what other people were thinking. So when, a few weeks later, Tess turned herself into a cat, she promised herself that she would never, never tell anyone ever again. And she never did.
    That boy, that scruffy Kevin character, he couldn’t know. He just couldn’t. It wasn’t possible. All the same, there was something about the way he had looked at her that scared her and made her almost believe that he did, somehow, know what she could do.
    ‘Tess?’
    ‘Yes?’
    ‘You’re not eating your dinner, sweetheart.’
    ‘Oh. I was just listening to the news.’ She hadn’t been, but she did now.
    ‘Meanwhile,’ said the TV newscaster, his face impressively grave, ‘the freak weather conditions continue. The snow storms that have been ravaging the Arctic regions for the past eight weeks show no signs of abating, and their area of activity continues to increase. The death toll in northern Europe now stands at more than seventeen hundred, and there are many more people unaccounted for. Evacuations continue across the Northern Hemisphere.’
    The TV screen showed a picture of a line of cars driving through a blizzard.
    ‘Inhabitants of Alaska and northern Canada continue their southwards exodus as weather conditions make their homes uninhabitable. Air-rescue teams are working round the clock to move people from outlying areas, and snow-ploughs are working twenty-four hours a day to keep the major routes clear. However, it is feared that there may be thousands of people trapped in snowbound vehicles on minor highways throughout the area, with no hope of relief from the already over-stretched services.’
    ‘There’s something fishy about all this,’ said Tess’s father.
    ‘Fishy?’ said her mother. ‘How can there be something fishy about the weather?’
    ‘I don’t know, but it isn’t natural.’
    ‘How can the weather not be natural?’ her mother asked. ‘If the weather isn’t natural, what is?’
    ‘Well, it’s not normal, anyway.’
    ‘Normal is a different question entirely. No one is saying this is normal.’
    ‘Shhh!’ said Tess.
    ‘The fourth land attempt to reach the weatherbound Arctic drilling station has had to be abandoned,’ said the newscaster above pictures of army snowmobiles and tanks. ‘Radio contact with the rig was lost soon after the storm conditions began, and successive attempts to reach it by air and by land have failed.’
    An army officer appeared on the screen, dressed like a Himalayan mountaineer. Snowflakes whirled