“I’ve given up trying to identify it,” Mr. Sutton said, settling himself on a stool. Then, just for effect, he added, “It’s possible we’ve discovered a whole new species here.”
That set the boys to gasping. Mr. Sutton didn’t for one moment believe it was true, but he never missed an opportunity to get his kids enthusiastic about science.
They gathered around him as he got started. There was a magnifying glass on a flexible arm attached to the table, which he pulled into position to give him a closer look. With the tip of a scalpel and some forceps, he began to prod and pull at the strange insect.
“Notice the unusual silver color of the chitin,” he said. “It’s abnormally reflective.”
“Chitin?” Andrew asked.
“That’s the stuff insect shells are made of,” said Graham.
“Full marks, Graham,” said Mr. Sutton. “Although I’m not one hundred percent sure it is chitin.” He peeled away a cracked section of wing casing, then picked it up with his fingers. “Feel that,” he said, handing it to Graham.
They passed it among themselves while Mr. Sutton carried on probing.
“Feels a bit like metal, sir,” Mark ventured.
“Good. That’s what I think, too. Wafer-thin metal. Put it aside and we can run some chemical tests on it.”
“But how can it be metal?” Andrew complained.
It couldn’t, but that wasn’t going to stop Mr. Sutton from implying that it was. “That’s something we shall have to find out.”
He could sense the excitement in his audience and, he had to admit, he was feeling some of it himself. He’d given up his dreams of becoming a great scientist when he realized that his talents lay in teaching, but he’d never lost his thirst for the thrill of discovery. And this beetle was something truly unusual.
Delicately, Mr. Sutton pried away another section of the wing casing to get a look at the abdomen underneath. What he saw made him frown in surprise.
“Hmm,” he said.
“What, sir?”
“Mark, why don’t you take a look at this?”
He moved aside and let Mark take his place at the magnifying glass. Graham looked crestfallen that he hadn’t been asked to look first — after all, he was the insect expert among his friends, and he was proud of it. Ordinarily, Mr. Sutton would have recognized this and honored him accordingly, but this was something more suited to Mark’s expertise than Graham’s.
“Beneath the wing case, on the surface of the abdomen. What do you see?”
“Silver lines, sir. There’s dozens of fine silver lines running all over. And little blobs.”
“Notice anything strange about them?”
Mark thought a minute. “They don’t look right,” he said. “I mean, when they bend, they bend at sharp angles, not curves like you’d expect in nature….” Mark fought to explain himself. “It’s all too regular.”
“And what does it remind you of?”
Mr. Sutton waited for the answer, perched on the edge of his stool in anticipation. Underneath his calm facade, he’d become ever so slightly anxious. Could he have been mistaken? Surely it was too incredible to be true? He needed someone to tell him that he wasn’t completely deluded.
Mark was blushing. He knew what he thought; he was just afraid of being laughed at.
“Go on,” Mr. Sutton said gently. “There’s no wrong answer.”
“They look like circuits, sir. Like you see on the motherboard of a computer. Except really, really small.”
“Yes,” said Mr. Sutton. “Circuits. That’s exactly what they look like.”
And if that’s true, he thought, then what on earth are these things?
Tom always kissed the same way.
It started out gentle, just a press of his lips on hers. Then a little harder, then harder still. More often than not he’d give a little sigh through his nose about then, and Erika would feel his lips parting. After a minute he’d pull away, brushing his lips softly against hers a couple of times, and he’d stare into her eyes earnestly, and it would be over.
At first, when he’d done it that way, it had been electrifying. Wow, he can kiss, she’d thought. Nowadays, it was just nice. It had taken her a while to notice, but he always did the same things in the same order at the same time. Whenever she tried to change the rhythm, he looked puzzled and broke away, as if disappointed at her lack of cooperation. In the end, she just gave up and went with it.
That was Tom. He made a heck of a first impression, but once you got past the beautiful blue eyes, the smile to die for, and the athletic physique, he was actually kind of dull.
“See you on Monday, babycakes,” he said.
Oh, yes. And he liked to call her babycakes.
She let him go first, so they wouldn’t be seen coming out from behind the dorm hall together, and risk wolf whistles from his friends at the gate. Tom liked to kiss her in front of everyone, but it made her feel awkward and on display, so she insisted on doing it somewhere nobody could see them. In this case, it was around the back of the visitor’s accommodation block, which was empty on a Friday afternoon.
He turned at the corner and gave her a little wave. She waved back. He really was handsome, she thought. Just the kind of boy you’d expect a girl like her to be going out with.
So why didn’t she feel lucky?
She made her way around the dorm hall and came out onto the main drive of the academy. At one end of the drive was the looming school building, with its stern, narrow windows, exuding an air of disapproval. At the other end was the gate. Halfway between, the drive split in half and looped around a circular lawn, at the center of which was a grand old stone fountain surrounded by wide stone steps. Several pupils were sitting there, watching the activity at the gate. She headed over and joined them.
Friday afternoon was always busy at the gate as parents and drivers arrived to take the children home. Some kids at Mortingham were day students from the nearby towns, but most were here all week and only went home on weekends. Then there were those who didn’t: They stayed at school the whole term, usually because their parents were too busy and important to look after them.
On weekends, Mortingham Boarding Academy lost about four-fifths of its students. Its raucous corridors went quiet. Its halls echoed emptily.
Erika sat on the steps and watched as Tom said his good-byes to his rugby mates by the gate. The drive was lined with cars, and everyone was out of uniform and looking relaxed in their own clothes. The dark clouds overhead didn’t dampen the lighthearted mood that prevailed at the end of a school week. A chilly breeze whipped strands of blonde hair across Erika’s eyes, and she brushed them away and thought of the weekend to come.
She wasn’t going home today; her parents were on vacation. It was a relief to stay at school for the weekend. Home was where there were hours of violin practice, the tennis coach, the math tutor. Home was where her life wasn’t her own.
But then, was it ever?
All those girls who were jealous of her for being good at school, good at sports, good at music … If only they knew the hours she was forced to put in, the hours she never spoke of, just so she could be the best. Even when she’d brought Tom home for the weekend, she was forced to practice most of the time while he made nice with Mummy. Elegant old Mummy and handsome, polite Tom, sharing tea and scones while she played Debussy in the conservatory. How bloody delightful. The way they went on, you’d think they liked each other more than her.
She wouldn’t complain, though. She couldn’t. Who would listen? Who’d ever have sympathy for her?
She knew what they thought about her. Little Miss Perfect. Everyone was waiting for her to slip up. Everyone wanted to see her hit a bum note in a recital, to fluff a penalty shot, to get a B. Even her best friends watched like vultures, ready to exult in the slightest failing, eager for a sign that she was human like them. Sometimes the pressure was enough to make her want to scream and tear her hair out.
But she had a fa
ce made for smiling, so she smiled instead.
She spotted Soraya, and gave her a wave. Soraya was heading home, too — Erika had already said good-bye, knowing that Tom would want some make-out time — but Caitlyn was around. Erika wasn’t sure how she felt about that. Ordinarily she’d have been glad, but sometimes she got the sense that Caitlyn was holding something back, and never more so than at lunchtime. Something was off between them; Caitlyn had barely been able to disguise it.
Erika suspected it had to do with Paul Camber, of course. Probably because he’d given her that look after his stupid fight with Adam. Where Paul was concerned, the smallest little thing could set Caitlyn off. It didn’t matter that Erika wasn’t attracted to Paul, didn’t even like him much. Somehow, in Caitlyn’s eyes, she was encouraging him. Somehow it was Erika’s fault that the boy Caitlyn wanted didn’t want her back.
There were times when Erika wished she lived in a world where being pretty didn’t matter, where your grades didn’t matter, where nobody cared who you were supposed to be but only what you were. But she didn’t suppose a day like that would be coming anytime soon.
She looked up at the sky as she felt the first of the raindrops land on her nose.
Better get inside, she thought. Looks like a storm.
Paul sat in the window seat in his dorm room, his feet up, watching the rain run down the glass. It was darker than the hour suggested, only seven o’clock, yet it might as well have been night. Lightning flickered in the distance. Paul counted nine seconds before thunder growled overhead.
He shared his dorm room with three other boys, all of whom went home every weekend. He liked having the room to himself for a couple of days each week. There wasn’t much privacy in a boarding school. Paul had a knack for getting along with everyone, but sometimes he needed to be alone.
The lights were on across the campus, illuminating the paths and the buildings. He watched a girl in a raincoat hurrying from the library, hood up and a satchel clutched in her arms. A Year Eight, late for dinner. It would be another forty-five minutes before Paul’s year were allowed in to eat.
Well, if I have to be grounded, at least it’s better in here than out there.
When she was gone, Paul let his eyes roam. Ever since January, the walls of Mortingham Boarding Academy had been the limits of his world, and he knew the place well. It was a prison that he had no interest in leaving. Here he was, and here he’d stay.
He looked over at the school building, black beneath the storm. A dozen narrow yellow windows slit its glistening walls. Mortingham Boarding Academy had grown and changed over the two hundred years since it was built, but its chill heart remained. The school building stood at the center of everything, a terrifying Gothic pile that dominated all around it. Its vast grounds had once been used as vegetable plots tended by the occupants of the workhouse, and later as gardens for suffering patients to wander in. Now, among the old dorm halls and the ruins of the chapel, there were buildings of a later age. The most modern was the sports hall, built in gleaming steel and glass, with swooping curves that defied the strict, rigid lines of the school’s facade.
Paul had never been much of a fan of old stuff. History lessons frustrated him. It wasn’t that he didn’t think it was worth learning, it was just that history was history. A great big heap of traditions and grudges. For every good thing it had to teach there were three bad ones. All over the world, people were killing each other because of history. Families threw out their children because of history. Lovers couldn’t be together because of history.
But what he distrusted about it most of all was this: History didn’t change. And if there was one thing the past six months had taught him, it was that everything changed, whether you wanted it to or not. Change was the only thing you could ever rely on.
If it were up to him, he’d wipe the slate clean and start again. No more history. Start from zero, without any of the baggage, without any of the old hatreds.
But that was the problem with history. Once something had happened, it had happened. And no amount of wishing could make it unhappen.
He thought about his confrontation with Mr. Harrison earlier that day. “I’ve seen a hundred boys like you,” the headmaster had said. “You all think you know better. You all think you’re something special.”
But Mr. Harrison was wrong. Paul didn’t think he knew better than anyone else. He just couldn’t help the way he was. The way he’d become. It felt like it was all out of his control.
Mum and Dad were gone. One day, they’d been alive and well and happy and breathing and living and loving. The next, they disappeared from the face of the earth. How the hell could anything ever make sense after that?
The thought brought hot tears to his eyes. They took him by surprise, and he blinked them back angrily before they could fall. He wasn’t allowed to cry. That was what you were supposed to do. You were meant to cry and get angry and do all that stuff for a while, and then eventually you’d feel okay and the world would be right again and you’d go on as normal. But he didn’t want to feel normal. He didn’t want things to be right. And he certainly didn’t want to stop feeling angry.
Because that would mean they were gone. Just gone, winked out of existence. And that would mean that he accepted it was just one of those things. And he didn’t. He never would.
Paul was still staring out the window when something went loping past the dorm hall and across the lawn, heading in the direction of the old chapel. Between the dark, the blurring effect of the rain on the window, and the tears still in his eyes, Paul could barely make it out, but he could tell by the way it moved that it was a dog. A big dog. He wiped his eyes and pressed his face closer to the glass, trying to see through the restlessly switching channels of rainwater.
The sight of a dog on campus grounds was strange enough. But there was something else….
Lightning stuttered in the distance, and the scene was suddenly lit in sharp white. The dog froze still. Paul blinked the dazzle from his eyes and looked again. Yes, there it was, just standing there like a statue. He fought to see through the water running down the pane. And he was certain he saw … It couldn’t be, but …
He could have sworn that dog was silver.
Thunder boomed overhead, violent enough to make him jump. When he looked again, the dog was out of sight, swallowed by the dark.
Paul jumped to his feet and snatched his coat up from where he’d thrown it across a chair. It briefly crossed his mind that he wasn’t allowed to leave his dorm hall, but that didn’t come close to stopping him.
After all, what could Mr. Harrison, what could anyone do to him that was worse than what had already happened?
Mr. Harrison sat back in his chair, the leather creaking as he settled his weight, and took a sip of whisky. There were few things in life as fine as a good whisky. He kept a bottle of Laphroaig Quarter Cask in the drawer of the mahogany desk in his study, and it was his secret pleasure to pour himself a finger of the good stuff before dinner, while he was attending to the last of the day’s paperwork.
It was a whisky kind of day, too: the kind of day when you were glad to be inside. The storm boomed and rolled and threw rain against the narrow arched windows of his study. It was chilly in here — the school building never got warm — but the drink put a bit of fire in him. He had a hot dinner to look forward to in the dining hall, and after that he’d head over to his house in the northwest corner of the campus. He’d put his feet up, stick on some Bach or Brahms. When it came to music, his motto was “Nothing less than a hundred years old.” All that new bleep-bleep rubbish gave him an ulcer.
He put down the whisky and flicked through the papers in his hand. Staff performance reports, which he had to complete for the board of governors. Boring, boring …
Aha.
Mr. Alistair Sutton. Now that might be an interesting one to write. Mr. Sutton’s report would be less than glowing. Mr. Harrison wasn’t a man to mince his words: Mr. Sutton was too soft, and
he was going to say so. The brawl by the lake that morning was just another example of the lack of discipline in his classes. He indulged his pupils far too much. He spent too much time trying to be their friend and too little time trying to be their teacher.
If there was one thing Mr. Harrison’s years of experience had taught him, it was this: Give the little brats an inch, and they’d take a mile.
He’d been idealistic once. Wasn’t everyone, when they were young? Time took care of that. When he first became a teacher, he’d dreamed of inspiring young people to learn. History was his subject, and back then he’d had quite a passion for it.
The problem was, nobody else seemed to.
Oh, he found a few bright young things over the years, kids who were eager to be taught, but they were tiny shards of diamond in a mountain of coal. Most pupils simply didn’t care. He’d been shocked that they didn’t get the same joy from history that he did. They memorized dates and names because they had to, and remembered them just long enough to pass their exams. But they didn’t understand anything.
And then there were the louts, the troublemakers, the ones who tried to disrupt the class. The anti-learners, who wanted everyone to be as ignorant as they were. Those were the worst of all.
Don’t you see? he wanted to cry. Don’t you see how wonderful it all is? How people discover their true worth in times of crisis? How civilizations rise and fall, each one forming the ashes for the next to rise from? It’s the story of us, don’t you see that?
But they didn’t see. The ancient Greeks had come and gone, Rome had risen and been sacked by barbarians, there had been plague and war and empires that had crumbled to dust. Each of his students was the product of a line that had lasted thousands of years, slipping through the deadly minefield of history for generation after generation, a game of impossible chance that resulted in this exact person, that particular child. All that, so they could sit idly at their desk in his class and flick rubber bands and yawn and wait for it to be over.