Fractured Read Free Page B

me. For your own good, you have to stop asking. At least for now.’
    And there is no logic, no thought, no control: I can’t help it. My eyes fill, my throat closes up tight. Mum tried to find out what happened to Ben. For me. She never told me, because she never found out anything. What a risk she took: asking questions where Lorders are involved is dangerous. Potentially lethal.
    What a risk Ben’s mum is taking, right now.
    When they start saying goodbye, I sneak back up the stairs and into my room. Relief that Ben’s mother never told Mum she found me with Ben that day mixes with sorrow. She feels like I do: the loss. Ben was their son for more than three years, since he was Slated. He’d told me they were close. I long to run to her so we can share this pain, together, but don’t dare.
    I wrap my arms around me, tight. Ben . I whisper his name, but he cannot answer. Pain hits me like being crushed. Trampled. Smashed into a million pieces. Before, I had to stop myself from feeling it all, or my Levo would make me black out. Now that it’s not working the hurt is so much, I gasp. Like surgery without anaesthetic: no dull ache, but the slash of a blade, deep inside.
    Ben is gone . My brain is working better now, no matter the messed-up memories inside it. He is gone, and he is never coming back. Even if he lived through his Levo being cut off, there is no chance he survived the Lorders. With my memories comes knowledge: once the Lorders take someone, they never return.
    It hurts so, I want to push it away, hide from it. But Ben’s memory is one I must keep. This pain is all I have left of him.
    His mum comes out of the front door moments later. She sits in her car a few minutes before leaving, hunched over the steering wheel. As she pulls out a light rain starts to fall.
    Once she is gone from sight I open the window wide, lean out and stretch my arms into the night. Cold drops fall light on my skin, along with hot tears.
    Rain. Something about it is important, itches in my memories, then slips away.

CHAPTER FOUR
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    I lean over my sketch, furiously drawing leaves, branches, remembering to use my right hand. The new art teacher the school has finally come up with doesn’t look dangerous, or inspiring. He doesn’t look much of anything. He isn’t a patch on Gianelli, the man he replaces. But so long as I can draw, anything, even just trees as instructed, I don’t care how insipid the teacher.
    He moves around the room, making bland comments now and then, until he stops at my shoulder. ‘Hmmm…well…that’s interesting,’ he says, and moves on.
    I look down at my sheet of paper. A whole forest of angry trees I’ve drawn, and in the shadows underneath, a dark shape with eyes.
    What would Gianelli make of this? He’d say, slow down, and take more care, and he’d have a point. But he’d like the wildness just the same.
    I start again, soothed by the scratch of charcoal on paper. The trees less angry. This time, Gianelli himself looks back at me from their shadows. No one but me would recognise it as him: I know what happens when you draw the missing, as he did. Instead, I draw him as I imagine he might have been, a young man lost in a sketch. Not the old man the Lorders dragged away.
    An hour later, I scan my ID in at the door to study hall, and step into the classroom. Start to walk to the back…
    ‘Kyla?’
    I stop. That voice: here? I pause, and turn. Nico leans against the desk at the front of the room. He smiles, a slow, lazy smile. ‘I hope you are feeling better today.’
    ‘I’m fine, Sir,’ I say, and manage to turn away, to walk to my seat without falling over.
    His presence as bored teacher in charge of making sure we study silently shouldn’t be that much of a surprise. They change all the time, so it was bound to be Nico sooner or later. Yet I wasn’t expecting to be faced with him again, so soon. I have to hold my hands together on my lap for a moment to stop them from shaking.
    I