‘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.