‘Yes,’ finished Pearce. ‘It’ll be done within four days. Happy anniversary, sir.’

Chapter 1

The underground tunnel from Spitfire’s Rise was too small for Kate to stand up inside. Whenever she tried, the soil would scrape off the ceiling into her hair. It wasn’t the effect on her appearance that bothered her, but rather the sensory chaos of a mud massage against her head.

There were another twenty-ish metres before the trapdoor to the grassy hill. Raj was nearly there, barely patient enough to wait for his girlfriend.

‘Come on,’ he whispered in the darkness.

Kate took a deep breath. Normally she only broke the rules on Sundays, but today she and Raj had a special reason for sneaking outside. Raj reached the trapdoor, pushed it open, and natural light flooded into the tunnel. He barely gave himself a moment to acclimatise before hauling himself up onto the grass.

Kate dipped her head a little further and walked along the last wooden planks before the exit. Last year, McCormick’s idea of an underground tunnel had sounded great: an opportunity to enter and leave Spitfire’s Rise without using a visible entrance that might give away its location. But it had taken a long time to dig for a hundred metres, and the claustrophobia of those months had stayed with her.

‘Before we do this,’ Kate said as she approached the grass-covered trapdoor, ‘are you sure today is the 16th?’

‘Yep. And even if it’s not, let’s celebrate him anyway.’

May 16th. Her brother’s birthday. James Arrowsmith, autistic like Kate but in a completely different region of the spectrum, had turned nineteen just four days before Takeover Day. His profound disabilities were so complex, and his reliance on routine so strong, that nothing at all was allowed to change for his birthday. Wrapped presents and birthday songs would have been intimidating to him, but he had spent the day happy with how people had treated him.

He had eaten his dinner with a birthday candle. But he had done that every day for the previous eight years. On his eleventh birthday Mum and Dad had placed a battery-powered candle on his plate (not wanting to scare him with actual fire, of course), hoping he would tolerate it without becoming anxious. Even as a seven-year-old, Kate had wondered whether the candle had truly been for James’ sake or their parents’. But James had loved the flashing light, so much so that he had demanded it the next day. The day after, too. Before the family knew it, every single dinnertime, all year round, needed to feature a battery-powered flashing birthday candle on James’ dinner plate.