Hayley had never been a very good liar. Honesty ran in the family. One of her gran’s several million sayings was “honesty is the first chapter in the book of wisdom,” and her mum, who used to run an electrical repair business when she was alive, was forever saying “honesty is the best policy.” So when Hayley found herself on the phone to her school that morning, about to pretend she was sick and couldn’t come in, she messed it all up.

“Good morning, Rook’s Heath School, Claire speaking. How can I help?” The school secretary sounded hassled.

“Hi, it’s Hayley Hicks. Grade nine. I can’t come in today … ” Hayley stopped talking abruptly and squeezed her eyes shut, ready to fake a coughing fit. Big mistake. She’d found out last night, while trying (and failing) to sleep, that closing her eyes was like pressing PLAY on the most insane film montage you’d ever seen. Knights on spectral horses. Tourists yelling and running everywhere. Lizard men with red eyes climbing up the walls of the Tower of London.

“Why can’t you come in? Hello?” The school secretary’s voice was high-pitched in Hayley’s ear, snapping her out of it.

How could anyone even think of doing anything today other than trying to deal with the most earth-shattering event in the history of mankind ever?

“The Defender is real! Haven’t you even seen the news?!” Hayley shouted, then hung up. Oops.

Superheroes, monsters, magic—it’s all actually true! The idea was frightening, mad, and exciting all at the same time. It was like someone had ripped off the roof of the world and pumped in pure, undiluted wonder.

But when Hayley padded into the living room and switched on the TV, all the news was showing was a boring report about fishing quotas in the North Sea. Then there was a story about gasoline prices (going up), followed by the weather (rain on the way). Flabbergasted, Hayley flicked through the rest of the channels, but there was nothing. Where were the headlines? LIZARD MONSTER ATTACKS TOWER OF LONDON or maybe KNIGHT ON FLYING HORSE SAVES THE DAY! Hayley didn’t understand. It was like everyone in charge had taken a vow of silence about it.

Hayley went back to her room and fired up her old laptop, searching online instead. What the world was talking about endlessly was how Prince Alfred had run away from his posh school and been photographed in a trash can. Hayley couldn’t believe Britain still had a royal family (in the twenty-first century? Seriously?), not that she would ever dream of saying so to her gran. But what did Prince Alfie have to run away from, anyway? He was rich and lived in a palace with a hundred rooms. Hayley and her gran shared a two-bedroom public-housing apartment and practically lived off potatoes (if you ever needed creative tips on a thousand and one ways to cook a spud, Hayley was your girl). They were lucky they still had the lights on—the electricity company was threatening to cut them off because they were behind on paying the bills again.

Tying her hair back to stop it from distracting her, Hayley went into deep-search mode, scouring chat rooms dedicated to Defender sightings. Her heart leapt when she found a video link to TOWER OF LONDON: NEW DEFENDER SIGHTING! But when she clicked on it, the link was dead.

Someone had written, They don’t want us to know. They’ve deleted it. They want to shut us down! #Defender #Truth in reply below. But directly below that, someone else had added, You all have such great imaginations. But news flash: Superheroes and monsters don’t exist!

Yes, they do! thought Hayley, and I can prove it …

Hayley crossed the bedroom to her wardrobe and lifted out her backpack. She unzipped a small pocket and pulled out the Black Lizard’s scale. It had been hot when she grabbed it at the Tower, and even though it had cooled, there was still something about it that made her wary. She held the scale by its edges, turning it over in the light. Etched into its smooth black surface were tattoo-like swirls that wrapped around each other. If you stared at them long enough, they formed into the shape of snakes, their eyes flashing and fangs bared.

She wanted to call it beautiful, but there was something else, some kind of power deep within it, humming away. It felt alive in the same way you knew a TV was on even when it was on standby. And it felt wrong. It felt … evil.

Hayley shivered. The thing that had really kept her up all night was the memory of the old beefeater lying broken in the dirt, whispering his last words to her … “God save the king.” She couldn’t forget that the scale she was holding in her hands came from the hideous creature that had killed him.

Ping!

Hayley jumped as her phone rattled and a text message from her gran popped up: Tea!!!! Hayley had reprogrammed an old phone to piggyback off her network for free. It had taken her gran a few weeks to master texting, but now that she’d cracked it, the requests for tea, the TV remote control, and updates about what was for dinner (baked potatoes, usually) were nonstop. Hayley sighed. Superheroes or no superheroes, her gran still needed looking after. Hayley zipped the scale away, buried the backpack in her wardrobe, and switched back into caregiver mode.

Hayley looked in as she passed by the living room. “You could say please, Gran!”

Her gran was watching a daytime quiz show and shouting at one of the contestants. “The answer’s Moscow! I didn’t think they made people’s brains so small.”

At least her memory was up to scratch this morning, which meant she was having one of her good days. After Hayley’s mum had died, her gran had become her guardian. But over the last couple of years, they had swapped roles. Hayley didn’t mind—she didn’t have time to, what with all the cooking, cleaning, fetching her gran’s pension, carefully logging which medicines she’d taken on a spreadsheet she’d created, oh, and going to school. She’d even rigged up emergency red cords in every room, which her gran could pull if she was in trouble and which sent an alert straight to Hayley’s phone. There had been a few false alarms, of course, when Hayley had rushed home, only to discover that her gran had gotten muddled up trying to close the bedroom curtains. But it was worth it to know she was safe.

Hayley never told anyone about everything she did for her gran—Hayley didn’t do whining. But it did have its downsides. She couldn’t invite friends back to the apartment anymore in case her gran had a funny turn. Boyfriends were a nonstarter. She’d even had to say no to joining the school’s athletics team—Hayley was the fastest sprinter by far, but practices were twice a week after school and she just couldn’t risk being away for that long. Her sports teacher had accused her of being lazy, but she just bit her lip and said nothing. It didn’t matter what people thought. Her gran had looked after her when she needed someone and now she was going to do the same. End of discussion.

“It’s Admiral Lord Nelson, you fool!” her gran shouted at the TV. “What do they teach you kids in school these days, eh?”

Hayley was pleased that her gran didn’t seem too shaken by what had happened at the Tower last night. In fact, she had taken great pleasure in giving a blow-by-blow account to some of the neighbors in the tower-block elevator when they’d finally made it back home: how they’d visited the Crown Jewels and had lunch in the café; how Hayley had gotten them tickets to see the Ceremony of the Keys; how a knight and a lizard had a big fight in front of them, before the knight flew away on his horse. She’d said it as casually as if she were talking about a delayed train. But Hayley could read the neighbors’ minds: Poor old Mrs. Hicks—she really is losing it.

As Hayley made the tea, her gran shuffled in with her walker and started to rifle through the post on the kitchen table.

“What are you looking for, Gran?”

“Tsch, that useless shop, they’ve forgotten to deliver Lawrence’s newspaper—again!”

Hayley winced. Lawrence was her grandfather, but he’d died twenty years before. Sometimes her gran would hold entire conversations with the empty chair in the living room, thinking her husband was still there.

“All right, I’ll call them,” said Hayley as she helped her gran back into the living room. “Come and have your tea.”

Outside, a gray car with tinted windows pulled up opposite the tower block. The woman at the wheel looked far too tall to be comfortable in any car, let alone this standard-issue undercover pile of junk. Her seat was pushed back so far that any rear passengers would have found themselves crushed. Her name was Fulcher. She was as ugly as she was mean. And she was very, very mean—when the job called for it. Her immense shoulders reached all the way across to the passenger seat and the much smaller frame of her partner, a neat, cold-eyed man called Turpin. Fulcher and Turpin had accepted long ago that they did not like each other. They never talked for fun. But they also knew that together they made an effective team, and the exceedingly secretive arm of the government that employed them prized results above all else.

“What now?” grunted Fulcher, tearing open a packet of the strongest breath mints that science had ever produced. In the early days, Turpin had told her that bad breath was the least of her problems. She had cracked three of his teeth for that one, and he’d never again made the mistake of assuming his colleague had a sense of humor.

“Now,” replied Turpin, focusing his high-powered binoculars on Hayley’s fourteenth-floor apartment, “we wait.”