bottle of clear liquid, and she readied her syringe.
‘I never thought I’d use expired drugs on a patient,’ she mumbled with a weak tremor.
McCormick had a couple of humorous comebacks in mind, mainly about how he never paid attention to use-by dates on food. But he knew the process would be more tolerable if he only spoke when asked a question.
‘So how much do you weigh?’ she asked.
‘Still eighty-four kilograms.’
‘Not eighty-three or eighty-five?’
‘Well, we might have all weakened the springs on the scales by weighing ourselves too much,’ he said with a chuckle.
‘Do you definitely weigh eighty-four kilograms?’
‘Yes. I do. So one kilogram makes a difference, does it?’
‘If you give the wrong amount of anaesthetic to a patient, you could kill them. If you give a child an adult’s dose they won’t wake up. I have to calculate how much to give you based on your age, height, weight, body mass index and general state of health, and I can’t afford to get it wrong. A teaspoon too much will cause permanent brain damage.’
She poked the syringe through the bottle’s foil cap, and spent nearly a whole minute measuring the correct amount, tapping the syringe to get any bubbles to the top, then squirting and re-measuring. Eventually she seemed satisfied, and turned to McCormick with the loaded syringe.
‘And all of this,’ she continued, ‘so you can go running around in New London and probably get yourself killed!’
‘If I get killed and we destroy the AME project… I know you don’t want to hear this, but that’s a win. An extremely good one.’
‘It’ll be a better win if the shield dies and you don’t.’
‘Obviously,’ said McCormick, suppressing the nerves in his voice. ‘And that’s the result I’m aiming for. I don’t want to die, Lorraine. I want to go out on the nineteenth, run around and shoot clones, get out alive and make it home again. But that involves risk, as war always does.’
‘Has it occurred to you that you’ll be under the same roof as Nicholas Grant? Marshall and Pearce? Oliver Roth? And just days after an operation?’
‘It’s crossed my mind,’ McCormick answered, staring up to the ceiling to avoid Lorraine’s glare. ‘But have you read the AME report? It’s terrifying. I have to be there for this, Lorraine. I can’t just sit at comms while the young ones do the dying. That’s what cowards and presidents do.’
‘There’s no shame in recognising your limits.’
‘No, but there’s shame in accepting them.’
Lorraine did not reply, and McCormick breathed a sigh of relief. Tired of conversation, and fatigued from debating the issue, he stretched out his right arm and invited the needle towards his skin. The inside of his lower arm was still dotted with miniscule scars from forty years of blood donations. He was no stranger to needles.
‘Just… promise me you’re not looking for trouble,’ said Lorraine.
‘I promise I’m doing the right thing. That’s enough.’
‘No, it’s not. If I do this, you have a duty to keep yourself alive and uncaptured!’
McCormick gave a warm smile. Their two principled minds had done nothing but clash ever since his collapse, but beneath their differences they were the closest of friends.
‘I’ll do everything I can to stay out of trouble,’ he said. ‘And believe me, I won’t just be doing it for you. I’ve got my own vested interest in staying alive!’
Lorraine took a deep breath, and in the seconds it took to find a vein and insert the needle, McCormick tried to forget the enormity of the operation. His friend was using expired anaesthetics to send him to sleep, and then she was going to carve him open with a sharpened kitchen knife. All this without any surgical training, and a selection of memories that remained from her nursing years. And at the end of it all, there was the soldering iron that lay at the back of the room. The very sight of it made him shudder. When the time came…
A prick in his arm caught his attention, and he turned his head just in time to see the last of the colourless fluid vanishing into him. McCormick’s nervous system began to numb itself, and his last conscious sight was of Lorraine’s eyes as she began to cry.
Chapter 5
A year and a half ago, during one of his worse meltdowns, Ewan had found a way to escape Oakenfold. It had been a ridiculous strategy: in his unthinking rage he had run outside, lumbered up to the gate and just pressed the buzzer – an idea which the rational Ewan would never have considered. The receptionist assumed it was a class heading out for a PE lesson, and had buzzed him out without checking the CCTV screen.
It had taken the rest of the day for anyone to find him. Maybe they had assumed he had run into Harpenden to take a bus somewhere, but Ewan hadn’t been stupid enough to surround himself with the general public. All he needed to do – all he had the mental strength to do – was find a hiding spot on a nearby hill that overlooked the school, and stay there until transport home arrived at the end of the day. It had seemed like a good idea at the time.
Once he had calmed down and realised how much trouble he had got himself into, he had spent the afternoon searching for the perfect vantage point: one where he could watch the panicked staff running in and out of the gates, the entertained students looking on from the windows, the police cars coming and going, and his mother’s arrival when the school finally called and admitted they’d lost her son.
It had taken long enough, but that day’s troubles were finally worth it. Ewan and his team knew exactly where to hide outside Grant’s AME test centre.
He hadn’t liked the prospect of walking the whole way around Harpenden rather than through it, as it added miles to his team’s journey. But it wasn’t like they were short on time. They had about ten minutes’ walking left to do, and several hours of waiting would follow.
Ewan turned around to look at his friends, expecting them to be weary and exhausted. It was nearly midnight, after all. Instead, he found them just as determined as they had been at Spitfire’s Rise, but without the additional layer of worry that McCormick had given them. Out of sight really was out of mind.
Raj and Kate were at the back of the group, whispering to each other. Ewan decided to keep away from them when he noticed their hands were joined. Mark was towards the front, overtaking Ewan whenever he got the chance. Whether he was hurrying the group or trying some kind of power play, Ewan neither knew nor cared.
In the middle was the trio Ewan almost didn’t notice: Silent Simon being straight-faced and apprehensive – a world apart from the smiling humorous boy he had been at Oakenfold. Lazy Gracie, who did and said as little as possible, allowing herself to be led by people she considered superior to herself. And Jack, who was stimming his fingers and most likely daydreaming again. Or planning for all possible outcomes. Sometimes the line between the two was blurry for him.
‘Ewan,’
