The Plan crept up on me. I never thought I’d actually do it. Not to start with. It just felt good to imagine it: being a move ahead of them for once.

And it felt good to spend some time in the shed after Gramps had gone out for the afternoon, reacquainting myself with the tools I’d not touched in close to a year. I was just building a mock-up out of curiosity, nothing more. It was just something to do that beat sitting in my room crying for the rest of the day.

I found a scrap of steel tubing, which I wrestled to hacksaw down to size with my swollen hand. I dragged Gramps’s arc welder out and closed the ends of the tube off. A hole was bored in the side. A swift shopping trip yielded a bulk pack of Swan Vestas. It took barely a couple of hours, start to finish.

I didn’t expect it to fire when I took it to Perrett Woods that night. But I was disappointed when it didn’t. And, when Sophia seemed amused by its failure, that was enough encouragement to take it home and spend a couple of evenings re-engineering it. It was a distraction from my unbearable daily existence, I told myself. I was just daring to dream.

Each time the Mackies told me I was going to die on the last day, though, each time a weapon was flashed in my direction, each time I woke to another lake of lighter fuel, it seemed less of a dream and more of a solution.

But it was what they had planned for Sophia that really pushed me over the edge. Within days, everyone in the class had Amit’s video. They used it to taunt me. Every time a teacher left us alone in class, I’d hear it begin to play somewhere in the room. Their grins and laughs would grind into me from every angle until I had to dash outside. Debauched promises were whispered to me every day: explicit details of exactly what the whole class was going to do to her.

With little more than a week until the end of term, by the time the hot draught from the third prototype tore through the trees, flashing our faces with orange light, it had become the only solution. Our one hope of a way out.

We’d never asked to be but we were at war. Defeat didn’t bear thinking about. In the same situation, I swear anyone else would do the same thing.

1.57 p.m.

I don’t know where I’m walking to, but I’m walking there fast. I don’t know why I’m grabbing my balls as I walk, but it seems essential. I look only at the ground. The grass at the extreme perimeter of the school field blurs past beneath me in tufts and mounds.