Calm down. Think straight. Don’t let stuff get to you.

‘This sucks,’ Deion raged, smashing his palm on his locker, and kicking the one below with his size thirteen.

His thoughts had been balled too tight to hear the girl who’d turned into the hallway behind. Pink cotton pumps, a Rock Spring High gym shirt and milky, vein-pencilled legs. He’d startled her and was about to apologise when …

Noise ripped. So loud it hurt inside both ears. Blazing light. Heat. The girl screaming. The yellow locker door, unhinged and smashing Deion in the face. Stumbling. Blood. Tripping on something. A mouthful of dust, and ceiling tiles falling like oversized confetti.

2 NOT HARRY POTTER

The klaxon yowled as twenty-four hundred high-schoolers bustled out into sun-blasted gravel and hundred-degree heat. Out of fire doors and down clanking metal stair treads. A few straddled first-floor windows. Smoke plumed from the Zone C annexe as emergency sirens wailed.

The clueless school security guard kept a wary hand on his taser. Teens from the dance studio felt scorching sidewalk on bare soles and a math teacher rolled a kid in a wheelchair past the cholla cacti at Rock Spring High’s main entrance.

‘This is not a fire drill,’ a deputy principal yelled, pit stains showing as he waved students away. ‘Do not gather at the assembly points. Just get as far from the building as possible.’

‘Is there a shooter?’ someone asked, almost colliding with a kid who walked backwards, videoing the smoke.

‘Heard shots for sure,’ another body close to Harry Smirnov said. ‘Five or six.’

Harry followed the crowd away from school on a paved path, his jog slowing as bodies funnelled through mesh gates. He was a ninth grader. Fourteen, slender limbs, floppy black bangs, still more boy than man. He’d only been in Las Vegas eight months since moving from the UK with his aunt.

In the run-up to leaving London, Harry’s two best mates joked darkly about American high-school shootings. One even wrote mind the bullets in his leaving card and drew a stick man letting rip with an Uzi. Now the joke seemed thin.

‘Smoke’s from over by the wood shop,’ someone behind Harry noted as a guidance counsellor urged teens not to shove at the gate. ‘My dad’s a carpenter. One place he worked, there was a spark in the dust extraction and the whole joint went boom.’

‘Where you going, Harry Potter?’ Lupita from Harry’s homeroom spat, as he cut off the path. ‘Ain’t no other gate up there.’

First name Harry, a black mop and an English accent made the nickname inevitable. Even his home-room teacher used it.