.

‘Now she can live with them.’

      Roth looked to his left. Pearce’s face wore an entertained grin, and one corner of his lips perked at Grant’s last sentence. Roth could not interpret what that particular grin meant, and Pearce did not elaborate.

      Roth had not spoken to Shannon much during their time together in the Citadel. As far as he remembered, the girl had spent most of her days locked away in some far corner of Floor A like a fairy-tale princess. Whether this was through her own choice or through her father’s overprotection, Roth had never known; he just knew that Shannon Grant had been a private neurotic failure of a person, and she was probably still her private neurotic failing self in Spitfire’s Rise too.

      ‘Now, if you please,’ Grant finished. Roth brought his attention back to the Experiment Chamber and the clone who stood inside, and he remembered how excited he was to witness the proceedings about to take place.

      Pearce nodded and pushed a button. The CCTV cameras around them began to record.

      ‘Eight minutes past seven,’ announced Pearce, ‘May sixteenth, Year One. Final phase of practical experimentation underway. Atmospheric Metallurgic Excitation, research trial twenty-six. Commencing.’

      Marshall retrieved the radio from his belt, and spoke to the clone behind the glass.

      ‘Soldier,’ he began, ‘move to the other end of the room. At jogging speed, passing between the pillars.’

      Roth watched in amusement as the clone gave a frightened stare towards the shielded humans, perhaps trying to ask his superiors why. When none of them gave any reaction, the clone turned his head forward again.

       He knows his only option is obedience. Poor guy.

      The clone ran for about ten metres, weighed down by his excessive array of weaponry, before passing between the two stone pillars.

      He didn’t live long enough to notice what happened next.

      The slow-motion replay would later show the air rippling around him, as if he had run through a vertical surface of water. The previously blank space between the pillars turned crimson and wavy when touched. The clone’s head, the first part of him through, was unaffected by the waves. But his fate was sealed as his metal equipment followed.

      The space between the stone pillars burst into action. Tiny lightning shards attacked the metal in the clone’s grasp: his assault rifle and handguns, his grenades, the belt buckle and hunting knives, and the fronts of his steel-capped boots.

      But at that moment, Oliver Roth could only watch at regular viewing speed. To him the dozens of explosions seemed instantaneous, as every metallic item around the clone’s body was detonated by the red barrier. The shrapnel from the firearms and blades ripped through his limbs, sending his extremities across the room and his artificial blood splattering across the chamber floor. His right hand slapped the bullet-resistant glass in front of Iain Marshall, causing hysterical laughter from Roth. As the clone’s torn remains fell to the ground, nothing more than visceral chunks of carved meat, the rippling red curtain faded back into invisibility as if nothing had happened.

      Bloody hell, thought Roth, grudgingly impressed. As much as he despised Nathaniel Pearce, the Chief Scientist had surpassed himself this time. Atmospheric Metallurgic Excitation had once been a crackpot idea from the depths of Nicholas Grant’s imagination, but somehow Nathaniel Pearce had brought it into the realm of reality: an invisible wall of energised air that destroyed anything forged from metal.

      ‘Sir,’ Pearce asked into the phone, ‘are you happy?’

      Nicholas Grant’s discreet laughter answered the question for him. As Roth started to bounce on his toes with an excited smile, he looked to his side and found even Marshall smiling. Pearce rested his smart-arse mug at the side of the control panel and started to applaud himself.

      ‘Happy is one word for it, certainly,’ Grant said. ‘Nat, can you confirm that AME can be reproduced on a much larger scale?’

      ‘Everything we understand about the laws of physics tells me it is now possible,’ Pearce replied. ‘If it works for a square metre, it’ll work for a square mile. And if it works for a square mile—’

      ‘And are we still on target to achieve this within four days?’

      Grant’s attachment to May 20th continues to make his decisions for him, Roth thought to himself.

      ‘Yes,’ finished Pearce. ‘It’ll be done within four days. Happy anniversary, sir.’

      Chapter 1

      The underground tunnel from Spitfire’s Rise was too small for Kate to stand up inside. Whenever she tried, the soil would scrape off the ceiling into her hair. It wasn’t the effect on her appearance that bothered her, but rather the sensory chaos of a mud massage against her head.

      There were another twenty-ish metres before the trapdoor to the grassy hill. Raj was nearly there, barely patient enough to wait for his girlfriend.

      ‘Come on,’ he whispered in the darkness.

      Kate took a deep breath. Normally she only broke the rules on Sundays, but today she and Raj had a special reason for sneaking outside. Raj reached the trapdoor, pushed it open, and natural light flooded into the tunnel. He barely gave himself a moment to acclimatise before hauling himself up onto the grass.

      Kate dipped her head a little further and walked along the last wooden planks before the exit. Last year, McCormick’s idea of an underground tunnel had sounded great: an opportunity to enter and leave Spitfire’s Rise without using a visible entrance that might give away its location. But it had taken a long time to dig for a hundred metres, and the claustrophobia of those months had stayed with her.

      ‘Before we do this,’ Kate said as she approached the grass-covered trapdoor, ‘are you sure today is the 16th?’

      ‘Yep. And even if it’s not, let’s celebrate him anyway.’

      May 16th. Her brother’s birthday. James Arrowsmith, autistic like Kate but in a completely different region of the spectrum, had turned nineteen just four days before Takeover Day. His profound disabilities were so complex, and his reliance on routine so strong, that nothing at all was allowed to change for his birthday. Wrapped presents and birthday songs would have been intimidating to him, but he had spent the day happy with how people had treated him.

      He had eaten his dinner with a birthday candle. But he had done that every day for the previous eight years. On his eleventh birthday Mum and Dad had placed a battery-powered candle on his plate (not wanting to scare him with actual fire, of course), hoping he would tolerate it without becoming anxious. Even as a seven-year-old, Kate had wondered whether the candle had truly been for James’ sake or their parents’. But James had loved the flashing light, so much so that he had demanded it the next day. The day after, too. Before the family knew it, every single dinnertime, all year round, needed to feature a battery-powered flashing birthday candle on James’ dinner plate.

      On his nineteenth birthday the candle was used accurately once again, just like how a broken clock was correct twice a day. And Kate remembered spending the day looking at James with beaming smiles. Even during her time at Oakenfold Special School, after her escape from mainstream, smiles had been hard to come by. So that day with her brother must have been wonderful.

      Wow, the world had changed. James was now twenty years old, celebrating with whatever routine he had established in the depths of New London’s Inner City prison. He had been in there for almost a year, assuming he was still…

      Maybe he really i s alive.

       But maybe he’s not.

      Maybe he found Mum and Dad .

      But maybe he didn’t .

      As