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Chapters (86)
  1. Title Page
  2. CONTENTS
  3. Love
  4. Before
  5. One
  6. ONE
  7. Two
  8. TWO
  9. Three
  10. THREE
  11. Four
  12. FOUR
  13. Five
  14. FIVE
  15. Six
  16. SIX
  17. Seven
  18. SEVEN
  19. Eight
  20. EIGHT
  21. Nine
  22. NINE
  23. Ten
  24. TEN
  25. Eleven
  26. ELEVEN
  27. After
  28. One
  29. ONE
  30. Two
  31. TWO
  32. Three
  33. THREE
  34. Four
  35. FOUR
  36. Five
  37. FIVE
  38. Six
  39. SIX
  40. Seven
  41. SEVEN
  42. Eight
  43. EIGHT
  44. Nine
  45. NINE
  46. Ten
  47. TEN
  48. Eleven
  49. ELEVEN
  50. Twelve
  51. TWELVE
  52. Thirteen
  53. THIRTEEN
  54. Fourteen
  55. FOURTEEN
  56. Fifteen
  57. FIFTEEN
  58. Sixteen
  59. SIXTEEN
  60. Seventeen
  61. SEVENTEEN
  62. Eighteen
  63. EIGHTEEN
  64. Nineteen
  65. NINETEEN
  66. Twenty
  67. TWENTY
  68. Twenty-One
  69. TWENTY-ONE
  70. Twenty-Two
  71. TWENTY-TWO
  72. Twenty-Three
  73. TWENTY-THREE
  74. Twenty-Four
  75. TWENTY-FOUR
  76. Twenty-Five
  77. TWENTY-FIVE
  78. Twenty-Six
  79. TWENTY-SIX
  80. Twenty-Seven
  81. TWENTY-SEVEN
  82. Twenty-Eight
  83. TWENTY-EIGHT
  84. Eleven Months Later
  85. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
  86. Copyright

‘Exactly. There’s an order to this.’ Dev gestures at the neat row of dresses on the rail in front of her. ‘If we intervene,’ she sticks her hand between two of them, making the space between the hangers wider, ‘even if we don’t mean to, and someone dies before they’re meant to, or in a way they weren’t supposed to, it doesn’t just mess up that person’s timeline, but everyone else’s. My old history teacher, for example.’ She pulls out one of the pink sequinned dresses that she was just admiring and holds it up to me. ‘If he’d died of a heart attack when he saw me, that means that he didn’t get hit by a bus two hours later, like he was supposed to, and maybe.’ She puts the pink sequinned dress back on the rail between two black ones. ‘That bus hits someone else. Someone who wasn’t meant to die that day.’

I stare at Dev as the horror of it finally begins to register, and it’s like putting a two-pence coin in one of the arcade games at the Pier and hearing the slow roll then waiting for the splash.

‘So that’s why it’s so dangerous? In case someone else dies when they were supposed to.’

‘I don’t know.’ She stops to shrug again then reaches for a lime green fake-fur bag on the shelf over the clothes rail. ‘Not for sure, anyway. No one does. Only Deborah. But there must be a reason she doesn’t send us near where we used to live. I’m sure she does it on purpose to avoid us bumping into anyone we used to know.’

So that’s why our reaps have been on the other side of town – Seven Dials, Preston Park, the Level. Well, that explains why, despite my best efforts, I’ve been unable to engineer it so we pass either my estate or school on the way back from one of our reaps so I can check on my family and Adara. I just want to see them once – just once – to make sure they’re okay. Maybe, one day, when Deborah trusts me to do a reap my myself, I’ll be able to. But, until then, I’m stuck with Dev who is obviously under strict instructions not to go anywhere near Whitehawk.

‘But what if we do bump into someone we know? By accident, I mean?’

Dev doesn’t seem worried about that. ‘As long as they don’t recognise us, it doesn’t matter.’

I suppose.

‘Besides, after a while, you stop looking, I guess,’ she adds, putting the bag back on the shelf.

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