I was at my locker when it started…
Kate’s brain faded into autopilot as she followed Mark, her eyes fixed on his feet as they trod before her. It was the least appropriate time to retrace the past, but perhaps Nicholas Grant had chosen the school for that exact reason.
And to be fair, it was working.
It had been between English and maths, and she had been exchanging her exercise books in her locker. Chloe and Sally had complained about not getting a signal on their phones. In the background, Charlie was shouting about his human rights being taken away because he couldn’t access social media.
The staff had looked worried, but said nothing. Rule number one in times of crisis – hide everything from the students, even news that might help them.
With Chloe and Sally equally clueless, Kate had walked down the corridor and noticed Raj talking to his friend Callum.
‘I overheard two of them,’ said the dyslexic kid who would one day become her boyfriend, ‘saying something about a fire in town. But not just one. Loads of buildings are on fire. There were gunshots too. Maybe it’s a riot.’
Kate had not believed the bit about gunshots. She had learned a lot from the false rumours people had spread about her in mainstream. Exaggerations and blatant lies were unquestioningly believed in schools, while the truth was ignored for not being entertaining enough. But something was worrying their teachers…
‘OK,’ said Mark, returning Kate to the present. ‘Here we are.’
Kate realised how lucky she was that some sneaky clone hadn’t opened fire from around a corridor corner while she had been daydreaming. She’d have been dead before noticing any attackers. Of course, Ewan would have called it lack of due care and attention on Kate’s part, rather than luck.
Mark opened his locker in near-total silence, the clicks of his combination lock the loudest noise in the corridor except for Kate’s erratic breathing.
‘Can’t even see the numbers,’ Mark muttered. ‘I just know I put them to triple-zero whenever I locked it, so I know how many… here we go.’
The pained scrape of the metal locker sounded deafening to Kate’s sensitive ears. But the faint expression on Mark’s face showed his indifference to it.
‘Single malt,’ he said. ‘Scottish, twelve years old. Well, thirteen now.’
‘Malt?’ whispered Kate. ‘Isn’t that vinegar?’
‘Whisky.’
‘You brought alcohol into school?!’
‘Kate, I spent a year away from lessons after stabbing my dad in the leg. I was already set up to fail my exams, and my adulthood was screwed before it had even begun. When Grant took over I was about a month from leaving this graveyard. Thought I’d do some celebrating on my last day, in front of as many people as possible. What were they going to do, expel me?’
Kate could barely contain her disbelief. She looked at the walls, if only to make her face less visible to Mark. She could have sworn one of the pieces of artwork on the corridor wall was Simon’s, since it was as bright and vivid as his personality had been back then.
It was odd how the little things stuck in her head. Kate had also been looking at Simon’s artwork when the rumoured gunfire had reached Oakenfold Special School. Everyone was late for maths but none of the staff cared. They were all too busy with this mystery crisis that the students must not know about.
Until Judit Ciskal, one of the reception staff, broke the news. She was wounded, bleeding from her shoulder, and running full pelt down the corridor yelling at the students to hide. There had been screams and meltdowns and panic attacks at the sight of real blood and the promise of something dangerous in the school.
Kate remembered the sight of her first clone: the tall bald model, which she had seen a hundred times since in a hundred other clone soldiers. She had believed him to be a real human at the time. He had run around the distant corner in navy blue uniform, with an actual assault rifle in his hands. It had been a sight Kate had never seen before, and would never have expected in a school.
And wow, this clone had been angry. The type of angry she would later learn was built into their neurology, as Nathaniel Pearce had built his soldiers with ‘peace’ and ‘war’ settings. She had seen angry people before, but nobody with that kind of face…
Judit had stopped to bend over and help a frozen student to his feet. When the clone had got too close, she drew out a cutlery knife and went for him. And that was when the clone had shot her to death.
‘Besides,’ said Mark, ‘I’m eighteen now, so I can legally drink this even by old world standards. This is coming back with me tonight, and I’ll still use it to celebrate leaving Oakenfold. Just leaving in a different way.’
Kate jumped at the sound of Mark closing his locker, and followed him further down the corridor. He reached for his radio.
‘Anything yet, guys?’ he asked.
A short pause, which Kate used to collect herself.
‘Nothing in the classrooms,’ came Ewan’s voice. ‘But they give a good view of the outside. Simon mentioned a bunch of metal shapes he saw around the school’s perimeter.’
‘Mentioned them?’
‘He does talk, you know. Around people he actually trusts. He saw these little shapes outside dotted around the place. They look like land mines.’
‘Better be careful on the way out then. Raj, how’s things?’
A short pause, although long enough for Kate to hear Mark’s voice echo off the walls. It had risen above a whisper, and that worried her. Mark’s complacency could spell trouble, but she didn’t dare to tell him with words.
‘I’m here too, you know,’ said Gracie. ‘Raj found the sports hall, and he’s looking through it right now. It’s packed with these huge things.’
‘What kind of things?’ asked Mark, impatiently.
‘He said something about power. He thinks they generate electricity or something. They’re big whirring things that reach halfway to the ceiling.’
‘So that’s how they’re powering the school, huh.’
Kate took out her own radio.
‘No,’ she gasped into it, ‘this is something else. We can power the whole of Spitfire’s Rise with a small petrol generator. Those things in the sports hall are for powering the AME shield.’
‘It’d make sense,’ came another voice, which she recognised as Jack’s. ‘The energy needed to maintain a shield over the school would be massive. Oh, and I’m fine out here, by the way.’
‘Have you seen anything?’ asked Ewan.
‘I’d have told you if I’d spotted movement,’ said Jack. ‘But now you mention it, I can see those little land-miney things too. But I don’t think they’re actual mines.’
‘How come?’
‘Because they’ve made no effort to hide them. They must be for something else.’
There was a momentary silence. Neither Kate nor any of the other students came up with any ideas.
‘We’ll keep searching,’ Kate said. ‘We’re almost at Paul’s office.’
Even after a year it still felt good to call the head teacher ‘Paul’ instead of ‘Mr Dale’. Special education had always been less formal in those ways, and it had been the ideal refuge for teenagers who had been traumatised in schools full of Misses and Misters in posh suits.
‘Speaking of Paul,’ said Mark, ‘I wonder if we’ve found him.’
Kate looked around, and saw nothing. Then