‘Allie.’
She turned around to see a girl studying her expressionlessly as the sunlight highlighted her long red hair and illuminated her milky white skin.
‘Oh,’ Allie put her hands in her pockets and tried to look casual. ‘Hi, Katie.’
Katie seemed uncomfortable – she fidgeted with the hem of a dark blue jumper that Allie was certain must have been tailored to fit her so annoyingly perfectly. ‘Can I talk to you for a minute?’
Allie and Rachel exchanged an intrigued look. ‘I’ll hold your place.’ Rachel nudged her.
Allie followed Katie to a quiet corner.
‘You know what happened last term, with you saving everybody and everything?’ Katie said.
Thinking of a thousand sarcastic responses, Allie nodded and kept her face blank.
‘And we worked together and it was all good?’
Another nod, this one suspicious.
‘Well, it was important, and I’m really glad we did it, but I don’t think we should be friends, OK? I mean … despite that stuff. It was great, and you weren’t as big a moron as you usually are but I can’t really hang out with you. I don’t really like you, to be completely honest. Well, most of the time, anyway. So what I wanted to say was, please don’t expect us to be best mates or anything.’
Speechless, Allie tried to decide how to respond. An unwelcome thought crossed her mind that it seemed wrong that someone could be so pretty and so … awful.
A long uncomfortable silence passed. Then finally, shaking her head, Allie turned and walked away. ‘Whatever.’
When she returned to her place in the queue, Rachel’s eyebrows shot skyward, but Allie shook her head in disgust.
‘Anyway,’ Rachel said, ‘where were we?’
‘I think we were talking about what amazing workers we are,’ Allie said, but then the absurdity of her conversation with Katie overwhelmed her and she burst into a sudden bout of uncontrollable giggles.
Rachel looked puzzled but soon was laughing along with her. ‘I don’t know why I’m laughing exactly but I have a pretty good idea.’
‘She’s just,’ Allie gasped, crying with laughter, ‘such a bitch.’
That sent them off again. They were still giggling as they walked up to the registration table a minute later, but Allie’s smile faded when she saw Zelazny sitting rifle straight, flipping through papers on the table in front of her.
‘Sheridan. Patel,’ he barked, glowering at them. ‘Keep it down. Patel, here’s your course schedule and reading list.’
‘Thanks, Mr Zelazny.’ As she took the papers from him, Rachel’s tone was just a little too polite to be believable.
‘Sheridan,’ he snapped before Rachel had finished thanking him. ‘Your schedule.’ Allie started to thank him but he fixed her with an icy glare. He continued, ‘You have been assigned extra-curricular classes this term. You are expected at twenty-one hundred hours tonight. The location is on your sheet. Tardiness is not acceptable.’
Glancing at the paper, Allie saw the words ‘Training Room One’ scrawled across the top. A cold finger of fear brushed her spine. She wasn’t taking PE, and she’d signed up for no extra activities. There was only one reason they would want her in a training room.
It’s all starting, she thought. It’s really going to happen.
Just after noon, Allie raced into the dining hall, stopping suddenly as a wall of noise hit her. The room was packed. The tables were all evenly spaced, filling it from one end to the other. Each surrounded by eight heavily carved chairs. The noise made by the mass of exuberant students was daunting.
Jo was waving at her enthusiastically from a table near the massive stone fireplace.
‘Over here!’
Allie made her way across the room to the table where Jo sat ignoring the students around her, none of whom Allie recognised.
She patted the empty seat next to her. ‘I saved you a place so you wouldn’t starve. It’s mad in here.’
Feeling a bit stunned, Allie swung her arm to take in the room.
‘Where did they all come from?’
Jo laughed. ‘I know! How different is this from summer term? The place is packed. The cheeky buggers even took our table.’ She pointed at the spot in the middle of the room where they usually sat, now occupied by fresh-faced fourteen-year-olds eating in awkward silence. ‘I didn’t have the heart to move them.’ Jo’s smile was beatific. ‘They’re just babies. I’ll get Lucas to break the news to them later. Gently.’
‘You mean you’ll have Lucas threaten them,’ Allie said, sliding into her chair.
‘Of course.’
Mindful of Rachel’s belief that Jo was faking normality, Allie had been watching her closely for days, but she seemed completely herself – bubbly, chatty, silly – just as she always was.
Maybe Rachel’s overreacting.
Jo dipped her spoon into a china bowl filled with soup of an oddly deep red colour. ‘As long as they’re out of there by tomorrow they get to live. How’s it going with you anyway?’
‘What is that? Tomato?’ Allie was still trying to figure out Jo’s soup.
‘Yes, but I think it has beetroot in it.’ Jo wrinkled her pert nose. ‘It’s the colour of carnage. And it tastes of dirt. Or maybe poison.’
Cimmeria’s kitchen staff were usually good but sometimes their experiments didn’t work out. Nonetheless, after taking half a sandwich off the tray in the middle of the table curiosity won out and Allie ladled some of the soup into a bowl. Dipping a spoon in it, she sniffed its contents suspiciously before taking a careful sip.