On his nineteenth birthday the candle was used accurately once again, just like how a broken clock was correct twice a day. And Kate remembered spending the day looking at James with beaming smiles. Even during her time at Oakenfold Special School, after her escape from mainstream, smiles had been hard to come by. So that day with her brother must have been wonderful.

Wow, the world had changed. James was now twenty years old, celebrating with whatever routine he had established in the depths of New London’s Inner City prison. He had been in there for almost a year, assuming he was still…

Maybe he really i s alive.

But maybe he’s not.

Maybe he found Mum and Dad .

But maybe he didn’t .

As was always the case, the worst part was not knowing. Even after almost a year apart, Kate’s co-dependency with her brother remained strong to the point of causing enormous anxiety. And with no facts to guide her, every possibility could float around her mind. Especially the worst ones.

Kate shook the thoughts out of her head, and climbed through the trapdoor. She gripped the overgrown grass and used it to pull herself up. The wind was soft, but cold. The sky had probably been clear all night, judging by the temperature.

‘Never stops being beautiful, does it?’ said Raj.

Kate looked up. Raj had already stopped searching for clone patrols: they were almost unheard of in the countryside now, twelve months after the end of the purges. Instead he sat himself at the top of the hill and admired the view, waiting for Kate to join him, and then closed his eyes to pray in silence.

Kate sat on the grass next to him, thinking about how curious it was that she and Raj Singh had ended up together: two Oakenfold Special School students who had never spoken back in the old days, largely because Raj was in a class specifically for dyslexic students who could barely read their own names. There were some great thinkers in that class, but none who would be able to complete a formal written exam. Raj himself had been a genius at anything that required visual-spatial thinking, and could come up with bright ideas that would never have crossed Kate’s mind, but his inability to record his brilliance on paper had left him in a class on the other side of the school to her. But here they were a year later, the autistic girl and the dyslexic boy, going out after however many years of not noticing each other’s existence.

She sat herself on the grass and found that Raj was right: the Hertfordshire countryside was a fine place to spend a war. Not all soldiers had picturesque villages and winding rivers outside their living quarters.