One thing was certain, though. Whether the skeleton had been Judit or someone else, Kate had known them personally.
The arrival at Spitfire’s Rise was the end of Kate’s personal story of Takeover Day, but as time went by she had pieced together a nationwide picture based on the accounts of other survivors. The very first place Grant had attacked were the barracks and RAF bases, disabling any military force on British soil that had not belonged to him. (Even Ewan’s dad had only narrowly escaped with his life.) After that, his armies had focused on places where children could be found – schools, nurseries, theme parks and so on – because once he had the children, he had the parents too. All it had taken was a television broadcast with the words ‘your children will be waiting for you in your local habitation complex’, and resistance among half the adult population was gone.
Not long later the National Grid had been taken down, Grant using his own power sources to run his Citadels, and the invasion of city centres had begun. Rural villages had come afterwards, and places with immobile populations – mainly hospitals and care homes – had been saved for last. Kate imagined that Oakenfold had been pushed further down the priority list because of the disability levels of some of their students, allowing them to hear the news of Grant’s armies before they arrived.
It was another thirty metres or so to Paul’s office. When they arrived, Mark poked his head around the glass built into the door, and leapt back as if from an electric shock.
He had seen something inside.
Without a word or anything beyond a finger held out to silence Kate, he whispered into his radio. Really whispered.
‘We’ve found someone,’ he said.
‘Where?’ came Ewan’s immediate answer.
‘Paul’s office. One clone in front of a laptop… bloody fast asleep.’
‘Actually asleep or just pretending?’ asked Raj.
‘His radio’s at the other end of the desk. He’d have to climb to reach it. If he were pretending, he’d have it in his hand.’
So this was their trap, thought Kate. One clone in the headteacher’s office with a panic button. Once he presses it, a whole clone army descends on Oakenfold and makes sure we never get out.
But if that’s true, what’s the laptop for?
‘So,’ she asked, ‘what do we do?’
Mark had already drawn out his knife.
Before Kate could breathe another word, Mark had silenced his radio and pressed against the door.
For a huge figure, Mark was stealthy when he needed to be. He crept through the door, holding it open for Kate behind him, and took tentative steps across Paul’s old carpet. He positioned the knife in his hand with the blade facing inwards.
He’s going to slash the clone’s throat.
The sleeping figure’s face was clear in the glow of the laptop screen. Mark stepped around the other side of him so he would not cast a shadow across his face, and in the blink of an eye his left hand had gripped a batch of hair.
Kate wished she had closed her eyes: by the time the victim had opened his own, the knife had done its work. Mark had cut deep enough for the creature in the chair to be beyond saving, and the sheer panic in his face showed that he knew it. There was enough energy left in him for a gargled groan, and then he was dead.
Kate started to breathe again. Mark’s attention went straight to the laptop.
‘This technology’s pretty complicated by clone standards,’ he said. ‘It’s not the usual numpty-proof system they use in New London.’
Kate had noticed. She had also noticed the lack of a panic button on the man’s radio, and the fact that he had used his vocal cords to let out his final groan. She chose to say nothing. Mark would put the clues together by himself, and react in his own way.
‘Now this is really weird,’ he said. His voice quivered, suggesting to Kate that he had worked out what he had truly done. As predicted, he was trying to ignore it.
‘What’s weird?’ she asked, trying to ignore it too.
‘The AME shield is ready. Just a tap of this button and it goes up.’
Kate walked over to look, careful where she stepped. The carpet beneath grew redder, stickier and more soaked with every heartbeat. There was a progress bar on the laptop screen, 100 per cent complete, waiting for someone to click ‘OK’ and raise a metal-proof shield over Oakenfold Special School. They were one click away from achieving a feat never before seen in the realm of science, and proving that Nathaniel Pearce’s technology could make Grant invincible forever.
But its controller had fallen asleep. In fact, the progress bar said the task had been finished at 12:09 a.m., so he must have been asleep for the last three hours.
It can’t be that simple, can it? She thought. Heroes don’t just win because villains fall asleep, right?
‘I won’t lie,’ said Mark, reaching for the laptop’s power button. ‘I thought this one would be harder.’
‘Don’t switch it off,’ snapped Kate. ‘We need to take a look. This might tell us what we’ll find in New London.’
Mark grunted, and stepped aside. Kate minimised the progress bar – checking, double-checking and triple-checking she was not about to press ‘OK’ – and started to search.
There was surprisingly little to search through. The most interesting result was a list of coordinates – about fifty of them – in a program that clearly had something to do with the AME controls. Curiously enough, the GPS coordinates were all nearly identical, with just a few differing numbers at the end of each one. Whatever these things were, they were in almost exactly the same place.
‘Guys,’ she whispered into the radio. Mark saw her, and turned his own radio back on. ‘I think I know what those land-mine-shaped objects are for.’
‘Oh,’ added Mark, ‘and the guy we mentioned is now dead. Good job he fell asleep on duty – the shield was one button away from going up.’
The others expressed surprise, but Kate stopped listening. She scanned through the contents of the man’s laptop, and found nothing more of use. In the background, Raj said something about an interesting find in the library.
‘Can’t see anything useful here,’ she whispered.
‘Right then,’ said Mark, raising the butt of his assault rifle, ‘if you’ll allow me…’
‘No, don’t just smash it. They’ll be clever enough to put the pieces back together. This needs to be really destroyed… whisky’s flammable, right?’
‘What, so I should pour my precious single malt over a computer and set it alight? Besides, we’d have no way of putting out the fire once it starts. Let’s get some acid.’
He headed for the exit, not bothering to check the corridors as he walked into them.
‘Acid?’ asked Kate.
‘Yeah, from chemistry.’
‘They never had anything that could melt a computer…’
‘No, they didn’t. But if you do your research, you can combine the boring stuff to make a corrosive solution. And it’s corroding, not melting.’
Kate followed Mark around the next corner, wondering what kind of person Mark could have been in a different life. He was capable, intelligent, determined and had no diagnoses that she knew of. Oakenfold wasn’t designed for people like him, even though life had led him there.