The Chaos Read Free Page A

we shouldn’t even be letting you into this school.’ He’s a shirt-and-tie kind of guy, the sort that can’t talk to you without talking down to you. He’s reading us the Riot Act now, but I’m not listening. I’m looking at the dandruff on his shoulders, the way the cuff of his jacket is frayed. ‘It’s a disgrace to be fighting on your first day, a disgrace. What have you got to say for yourselves?’
    I guess Rat-teeth, who turns out to be called Junior, has been in offices like this before. He knows the code. We both stand in silence, and after ten seconds or so we mutter, ‘Nothing, sir, sorry, sir’.
    ‘Whatever it was between you, I want you to leave it in this room. Shake hands, boys.’
    We look at each other, and again his number blots out everything else and I’m there with him as the knife goes in. I can feel his surprise, his disbelief, the searing pain.
    ‘Take my hand, you moron,’ Junior hisses at me.
    I come back to myself, back to the room, the teacher and him. He’s holding his hand out towards me. I take it and weshake. He squeezes so hard my knuckle bones crunch against each other. I don’t show a thing, just squeeze back.
    ‘Take them back to registration. I don’t want to see either of you boys in here again. Do you understand?’
    ‘Yes, sir.’
    We’re marched back down the corridor and join the end of the line. I’m in front of Junior. He leans in behind me and mutters close to my ear, ‘You just made the biggest mistake of your life, Shit-brain.’
    I move forwards a bit to get further away from him and nudge the girl in front.
    ‘Sorry,’ I say.
    She half turns round, a girl about fifteen centimetres shorter than me with streaky blonde hair. She starts shooting me a dirty look out of the corner of her eye, but then she stops in her tracks and her eyes go wide as two dinner plates.
    ‘Oh my God,’ she whispers.
    I know people think I’m weird, the way I look at them and sometimes keep looking. I try not to stare, I do, but sometimes I get kind of locked in, frozen by their numbers, the way they make me feel, like I did with Junior. But I haven’t been staring at this girl. I’ve only just joined the queue.
    ‘What?’ I say. ‘What is it?’
    She’s turned round properly now, and she hasn’t taken her eyes off me. They’re blue, the bluest blue I’ve ever seen, but there are dark circles underneath, and her cheeks are pale and pinched.
    ‘You,’ she says, faintly. ‘It’s you.’ She goes even whiter and starts stumbling away from me, out of the queue, keeping her eyes fixed on mine as she walks slowly backwards, and suddenly it’s as if the rest of the world has melted away.
    Her number, her death, it totally blows my mind.
    More than fifty years in the future, and there she is, slipping out of this life easily, bathed in love and light. I can feel it, all over me, and inside me, in my head. And she’s not alone. I’m there with her – she’s me and I’m her. How??
    She turns away suddenly and starts running down the corridor. One of the guards spots her and shouts out, but she don’t stop.
    ‘Whoah! A runner!’ Junior says behind me. ‘She won’t get far, not without registering,’ and he’s right. None of the doors will open. I watch her rattling one handle after another, desperate. The bugs in the ceiling track her movements. She’s getting into a real state, banging her fist on the glass, kicking out. And then two guards grab her under the arms, one each side, and carry her back towards us, and into a side room, next to the reception desk. She’s struggling and screaming, her face screwed up in a fury, but when she opens her eyes for a second and sees me again, there’s something else, as clear as her number.
    She’s terrified.
    Terrified of me.

Chapter 4: Sarah
    T hey want to know what’s wrong with me, why I was trying to run away. What can I say? What can I tell them without sounding mad? That I’ve just met the boy I see in my