That must have been Kate. Nobody else would be so thoughtful in a crisis.

Her efforts saved Raj at least three or four seconds, at a time when every single one of them counted.

He was about twenty metres behind the metal points when they buzzed, and the shield went up.

There was a red flash, like sheet lightning up close, which vanished a moment after it came. It was replaced with a sea of crimson ripples which distorted the sight of the world outside Oakenfold, including the hill and the faces of his horrified friends.

Before the ripples lost their colour, Raj looked up. The AME shield formed a dome over the school, like a semi-spherical net pegged down by the metal points. The crimson barrier faded in silence, and their surroundings returned to normal.

Kate was screaming.

Raj said nothing. He retrieved his handgun, pulled the topside to remove a bullet, and tossed it half-heartedly towards his friends.

The bullet hit the shield and exploded violently, causing Raj’s bladder to weaken. Around the area the bullet had hit, a set of furious lightning shards buzzed across a metre-wide canvas of crimson ripples, before they all faded again into nothingness.

‘Raj!’ shouted Ewan, running as close to the shield as he could get away with. There was anger rather than sorrow in his eyes. ‘What the bloody hell took you so long?!’

He’s not angry at me personally. It’s his way of grieving the loss of a friend.

‘These did,’ Raj replied with a hiccup, lifting the files he had seized from the library. ‘I can’t pass the folder through because it’s got metal rings, but I can give you the paper.’

He opened the folder and removed its contents, concentrating hard enough on the task to ignore the enormity of what was happening to him. But that became difficult when he passed the pile through the shield, and saw the air calmly ripple around the papers as they went through. Ewan’s hand took them at the other side and passed them to Jack, who had made his way down the hill.

‘It tells you which parts of New London deal with AME,’ Raj said, his voice quaking. ‘I know because… because I read it.’

Jack and Ewan’s eyebrows lifted in surprise.

‘…I read it, guys,’ Raj repeated for the satisfaction. He may have been a dead body in waiting, but he had kept their hopes in the war alive. And he had done it by reading.

‘The way they’ve set it up in New London is similar to here,’ he said, hoping that Ewan would take time away from his anger and listen to him. ‘There’s a computer that controls the shield, filled with coordinates for these metal things. They’re border points of some kind… Grant probably has a posh name for them.’