CHAPTER ONE

‘What’s your name?’ the red-haired girl asked, smiling at Kieron.

‘K-Kieron,’ he stammered. ‘What’s yours?’

She sighed and tapped the name badge pinned to her shirt. ‘Beth. And I just needed your name so we can call you when your coffee’s ready.’ She ostentatiously wrote Keiron on a Post-it note and stuck it on the side of a cup with a Sharpie. ‘Like, when it’s ready, you know?’

‘Oh. OK.’ He wondered whether to mention that she’d spelled it wrong, but decided to keep quiet. Everybody got his name wrong. Either they spelled it the way the girl had, or they put an ‘a’ instead of the ‘o’ at the end. He’d got used to it. Once he’d asked his mum why she and his dad had given him the most unusual spelling of his name they could manage. ‘Oh,’ she’d said vaguely, ‘did we? I think it was the name of one of your dad’s friends. He might have been at the wedding.’ She’d frowned. ‘Or am I thinking about Keely? No, she was the one he ran off with.’ And then she’d reached for the bottle of rosé wine on the kitchen counter.

‘Anything else?’ the red-haired barista asked brightly. ‘Something to eat, maybe?’

Kieron scanned the shelves of the refrigerated area to his right. ‘Er … what do you recommend?’

‘The gluten-free lemon drizzle cake is very nice.’

Which means they’re not selling enough of it and want to shift some more slices, he thought cynically.

‘Just the coffee, please,’ he said.

He handed over a five-pound note, grimly surprised at how little change he got, then moved to the end of the counter where the coffee would magically appear with his name on it. Spelled wrong. Well, as long as they pronounced it correctly, he didn’t really care.

He glanced around. The cafe was new, in a side street close to the shopping mall he usually went to. Bex had taken him there a couple of weeks ago, when they’d got back from America. This was where the more unusual shops lurked – the ones selling black or purple women’s clothing with a lot of lace or embroidery on it, or men’s clothes that seemed far too tight and probably required you to have a hipster beard before you even tried them on. Oh, and there was a comics and gaming shop. Someone he knew from school worked there. Sometimes Kieron managed to score a staff discount, if the manager wasn’t watching.

‘Kieron?’

‘Yes?’ He glanced around.

It was Beth. ‘Your coffee is ready.’

‘Thanks.’

He’d put his stuff on a small two-person table, just to secure it. His bag was there, with his laptop inside. And his schoolbooks.

He stared at the schoolbooks, feeling a wave of despair wash through him. He’d started the new school year just after getting back from America, but it hadn’t worked out well. Within three days the shouts of ‘emo!’, ‘greeb!’ and ‘loser!’ had begun, along with ‘Why don’t you get a proper haircut?’ Someone had even painted his locker matte-black while nobody was looking – which he would have quite liked, except that the paint had dripped down onto the lockers below and the floor, and it had taken him a solid hour to convince the principal that it hadn’t been him that had done it. ‘Look for someone with black paint on their clothes!’ he’d protested, to which the principal had just looked at Kieron’s black trousers, black jacket, black boots and black T-shirt.

He’d stood it for a week, but the next Monday he’d been unable to get out of bed. He just lay there, curled into a ball, trying to force himself to go back to sleep for the rest of the day. His mum had found him there. To her credit she took the morning off work to talk with him, and by the next day she’d negotiated with the principal that they would email his work through and he’d do it at home. Sam, of course, had been furious. ‘Why can’t they do that for me?’ he’d asked. The obvious answer was Because when people call you names you hit them and they stop, and Kieron had told him that. Sam had seemed to be caught between wanting to say, Then why don’t you hit them then? and, If I do hit them, will I get excluded? but the strain of trying to say two things at the same time just made him splutter.

Studying at home had seemed like the perfect way out, but the flat was empty with his mum working, and he felt uneasy there. He’d tried to cover the uneasiness with loud screamo music, but the neighbours banged on the walls, so he’d got into the habit of heading out to a coffee shop mid-morning. It was costing him a fortune, despite the fact that he could make a macchiato last for an hour, if he really tried.

So, back to attempting to prove the derivation of the magnetic field of a solenoid from a current loop. It involved integrals. He hated integrals.

As he sat down, his gaze slipped to his rucksack. In there, in a hard case, were the ARCC glasses that he’d found, months ago now, on a table in the food court of the shopping mall. Those glasses had opened up a world of adventure, excitement and danger for him. They’d also introduced him to Bex and Bradley – the two MI6 agents (well, freelance contractors, Bex would always point out) who had changed his life. Given him confidence. Trusted him with their lives. And those ARCC glasses could access any computer anywhere in the world – not just the obvious ones, like the Internet, but secure databases as well. Secret ones.

So why did he have to painstakingly prove a mathematical equation when the sum of all human knowledge was right there, in his bag? Why did anybody have to learn how to do anything when they could just ask about it and get an answer in a few seconds?

He sighed. He knew why – kind of. Because intelligence came from knowing these things and being able to apply them and extend them, or at least that’s what his teachers would have said. What if he was on a desert island or, God forbid, the Internet had failed because of a zombie apocalypse? How would he be able to survive then?

Still, if his survival during a zombie apocalypse depended on his being able to prove the derivation of a magnetic field of a solenoid from a current loop, then he was in serious trouble.

He opened up his laptop, sighed, leaned back in his chair and took a sip of his coffee. Just a few weeks ago he’d been flying through the air with what could only be called a high-tech military jet pack, risking his life in order to stop an insane billionaire from selling biologically engineered viruses that could target particular types of person based on their DNA. A few weeks before that he’d been helping Bex prevent the detonation of a series of neutron bombs around the world. And now, here he was, sitting in a cafe that smelled of burnt coffee beans trying not to look at the cute red-haired barista.

Life sucked. And he couldn’t tell anyone apart from Sam why it sucked. It wasn’t the bullying per se. It wasn’t the fact that he felt like a loner, an outsider – he was quite proud of that. No, it was the huge gulf between the life that he’d experienced over those weeks and the life that, for want of a better word, life seemed to want to push him back towards.

Helping Bex and Bradley wasn’t sustainable. He knew that. He was a temporary solution, a last resort while Bradley was medically unable to use the ARCC kit. Bradley was meant to support Bex while she was on missions by passing her useful information, like blueprints of buildings or identities of people she was looking at. Once Bradley had recovered sufficiently to work again, and once he and Bex had discovered who in their MI6 parent organisation was working with the fascist group Blood and Soil, then they wouldn’t need him any longer. That was why he didn’t want to go into school any more. That was why he was depressed. It was like being in a car on a motorway and seeing the exit ramp you wanted to take, needed to take, passing by, and knowing that the road you were stuck on just kept on going into the distance, monotonously, forever.

‘A horse goes into a bar,’ a voice said from behind him, ‘and the barman says, “Why the long face?”’

He recognised Sam’s voice instantly. Without turning around, he reached out with a foot and pushed the other chair away from the table so his friend could sit down.

‘So, why the long face?’ Sam asked, sitting. ‘It’s long even from behind.’

Kieron shrugged.

‘A white horse walks into a bar,’ Sam went on. ‘The barman says, “We’ve got a whisky here named after you!” and the horse says, “What – Brian?”’

‘Shouldn’t you be in school?’ Kieron asked.

Sam shrugged. ‘You know what – I probably should.’ He sniffed. ‘They’ve burned the coffee beans. You can tell. My mum’s into all that. She’s been watching videos on YouTube on how to make the perfect cup of coffee, from selecting the right bean from the right country all the way up to choosing the absolutely optimal steam pressure on the machine. And she’s got one of those fancy machines as well. Dad bought it for her for Christmas last year.’ He nodded his head at the counter. ‘Like the one they’ve got. Well, I say bought, but it might have come out of the back of some van in a pub car park. You can never tell with my dad.’

‘That joke, by the way,’ Kieron pointed out, ‘only works if you know that there’s a brand of whisky called White Horse.’

‘I thought everyone knew that.’

‘In your world, maybe.’

Sam shrugged. ‘It’s all my Uncle Bill drinks. He gets a bottle for Christmas from everyone in the family – I mean, a bottle from each person, not just one bottle from everyone. Same on his birthday. That pretty much sets him up for the year.’ He paused. ‘OK, a horse walks into a bar and says, “Pour me a pint of beer, will you?” The barman rubs his eyes in disbelief and says, “Did … did you just talk?” The horse says, “Yes, why?” and the barman goes, “It’s amazing! I’ve never seen a talking horse! You know, you should really go talk to the local circus – they would love to have someone with your skills!” The horse replies, “Why? Are they short of plumbers?”’

This time Kieron sniggered. ‘Yeah, OK, that’s good. I like that.’

‘I’m thinking of setting up a website – all the best “horse walks into a bar” jokes in the world.’

‘How many have you got?’

Sam winced. ‘You’ve heard them.’

‘Just three?’

‘I could expand the website to other animals. “A bear goes into a bar –”’

‘Don’t,’ Kieron interrupted. ‘Just … don’t.’

‘Just let me do this one. A bear goes into a bar, right, and says, “I’d like a pint of … beer,” and the barman goes, “Why the big paws?”’ He stared at Kieron. ‘Big paws. Like, bears have got big paws. And he paused before finishing the sentence.’

‘Yes, it was funny when you told it and it was funny when you explained it.’ Kieron looked properly at Sam for the first time, and sat up straighter in his chair. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘Nothing’s wrong.’

‘Yes, there is.’

‘No, really. Nothing’s wrong.’

‘I can tell. I know you, and I know the way your face goes when there’s something wrong, and it’s gone there now. It’s gone there so much it might just as well pitch a tent and stay there for the night. So, come on – what’s wrong?’

Sam sighed. ‘Get me an iced latte and I’ll tell you.’

On his way up to the counter Kieron surreptitiously counted the change in his pocket and checked the price on the board fastened to the wall. He just about had enough.

‘What’s your name?’ the barista – Beth – asked him brightly.

‘Still Kieron,’ he said. Her smile faltered slightly.

After a lot of faffing about with a blender, ice cubes and a double shot of coffee, Kieron took the drink and returned to the table. ‘So?’ he asked, putting it down in front of his friend.

‘So …’ Sam sighed. ‘You know my dad, right?’

‘Yeah. You described him to Bex once as, “a lifelong drifter who can’t hold down a job for more than a week”. I think those were your exact words.’

‘Yeah, that sounds about right. I counted up once: he’s had just under a hundred different jobs, some of them overlapping. Longest he’s ever stayed at one is three months; shortest is three days.’ Sam stared out of the front door of the cafe at the bright street outside. ‘Thing is, he’s actually found himself a real job now. A proper job.’

‘That’s good, isn’t it?’

‘It’s in Southampton. Loading stuff onto the cruise ships before they leave – food and drink and stuff. Still, at least that means we’ll be OK for lobster and champagne at Christmas.’

‘Oh.’ Kieron frowned, trying to work out where this was going. ‘How does your mum feel about that? I mean, I know she gets irritated at him – I’ve heard the arguments from halfway down the street when I go round to your place – but I don’t think she’d want him to go away for weeks on end.’

‘She doesn’t – mainly because she doesn’t trust him not to find a girlfriend down there and spend all his money in the pub.’ Sam hesitated. ‘That’s why she’s talking about all of us moving down there with him. “Make a new start,” she says; “All of us, together. It’ll be wonderful.” But the thing is – it won’t.’

‘All of you? Including Courtney?’

Sam shook his head. ‘No, not Courtney. She’s sorted. She’s got a good job and her own flat. And a boyfriend, although Mum doesn’t know about Bradley yet. But Caitlin and Amber still live at home, so they’d go down to Southampton. And so would I.’

Kieron suddenly felt as if he was standing in the middle of a minefield. Whichever way he stepped, something might explode. ‘How do you feel about that?’ he asked carefully.

‘I think it’s stupid.’ Sam took a gulp of his iced coffee. ‘I mean, yes, it’s a new place, and if anyone could do with a new start, it’s us, but –’ he shook his head – ‘I don’t want a new start. I may not love Newcastle, but I’m used to it. I know where everything is. And –’

He stopped, but Kieron thought he knew what Sam had been going to say. And you’re here.

He felt a lump in his throat, and he had to blink quickly to get rid of the prickle in his eyes.

That feeling he’d had earlier, of life being like sitting in a car going nowhere forever? That landscape the car was driving into was looking bleaker and bleaker now. Just dry earth and the occasional cactus. He only had one real friend in the world – Sam. Bex and Bradley felt like friends, but they were older and he knew in his heart of hearts they were temporary. In a few weeks, or months at the most, they’d be gone. But Sam – he’d assumed he and Sam would go on and on, to the end of their schooldays and beyond.

‘Maybe,’ he said carefully, ‘your mum would let you come and stay at my flat. I mean, changing school at this late stage is bound to affect your grades. There’s space on my floor, and I’m sure my mum won’t mind.’

‘Do you think that’s an actual possibility?’ Sam asked plaintively.

‘Yeah, course. Do you want me to ask her?’

‘Please.’ Kieron noticed that Sam’s throat was working, as if he needed to swallow. He handed his friend his glass of water and Sam took a grateful gulp.

‘Just bear in mind,’ Sam said, ‘I’m not going into school and leaving you studying at home.’

‘Don’t worry – we’ll find a way around that.’

‘When school’s over,’ Sam asked suddenly, ‘what do you want to do?’

‘I dunno. Just hang out.’ Kieron suddenly caught up with the conversation. ‘Oh, you mean, after we leave school!’

‘Yeah.’ Sam shrugged casually. ‘You ever thought about going to college?’

‘Kinda. Difficult to think of any subject I’d want to do though. I wondered about film studies. Or maybe psychology.’

‘Psychology – good idea. Try to explain our dark teenage thought-processes.’

‘Why are you asking?’

‘I’ve been thinking …’ Sam sounded unusually hesitant, ‘… maybe we could, like, set up a company together. Do something that’ll make us some money.’

‘Secret agents?’ Kieron laughed. ‘Or maybe private detectives.’

Sam scowled. ‘I was thinking more like website design, or repairing computers and tablets and mobile phones, but if you’re just going to laugh –’

‘No.’ Kieron forced himself to sound serious. ‘Actually, that’s not a bad idea. We could get ourselves a little unit on an industrial estate maybe.’ A vision of how all this might work started unfolding in his mind. ‘We’d need to learn to drive, at least on a moped, so we could pick up the broken stuff and bring it back for repair. No, scratch that – we’d definitely need a car. We might just get a small PC CPU on the back of a moped, but definitely not any of the high-end gaming machines. We’d need some money, to set up and buy circuit boards and tools and stuff. Maybe we could apply for a loan. I’ll ask my mum about that.’

‘Actually,’ Sam said, ‘my mum’s got all the information. You can get things called Enterprise Loans.’

Kieron nodded. ‘Sorted. We’ll get one of those.’

‘Sorted,’ Sam said, and extended a fist. Kieron bumped his own fist against it.

They chatted for a while, reminding each other of things that had happened to them over the past few months and marvelling at how their lives had changed so much while apparently, to anybody else, having stayed the same. Eventually Kieron’s macchiato was as cold as Sam’s iced latte and he couldn’t in all conscience keep sipping at it, so they left.

‘You want to come back with me?’ Kieron asked. ‘We can get some lunch. There should be something in the fridge.’

‘Might as well,’ Sam replied. ‘It’s not as if there’s any pressing need to save the world today, as far as I know.’

Kieron punched him on the arm. Hard.

The walk took them three-quarters of an hour. It would have been quicker, but they had to divert twice to avoid gangs of chavvy teenagers standing outside the off-licences. They both knew from harsh experience that they’d get called names, shoved and spat on if they went too close. Bitterly, Kieron thought the kids ought to have signs around their necks, like in a zoo: Please do not provoke the chavs – they are liable to bite without warning.

‘We’re nearly grown-up,’ Sam pointed out darkly as they headed down a side street on one of their detours. ‘We shouldn’t have to be scared of them!’

‘You adopt the moral and logical high ground,’ Kieron replied, glancing back over his shoulder to see if they were being followed. ‘I’ll visit you in hospital and bring you grapes.’

‘Why do people always bring you grapes when you’re in hospital?’ Sam frowned. ‘When I broke my arm, I had so many bags of grapes by the side of my bed there wasn’t room for anything else. What I wanted more than anything else was a Chinese takeaway, but nobody thought to bring one. Just grapes.’

‘Something to do with the European Union,’ Kieron said vaguely. ‘I think there’s, like, some kind of rule about fruit and hospitals – only grapes are allowed. And maybe tangerines.’

When they got to Kieron’s flat, he noticed that his mum’s car was outside. ‘That’s unusual – she should be at work.’ He checked his watch. ‘She’s not due back for another couple of hours.’

Sam shifted uneasily. ‘If you want me to go …’

‘No, come in. It’s probably fine.’

He slid his key into the lock and pushed the door open.

‘Mum – I’m home!’ he called. ‘I’ve got Sam with me.’

‘I’m in the living room,’ his mum called. It sounded like there was something wrong with her voice, as if she was choking on something.

‘You go to my room,’ Kieron said to Sam. ‘I’ll check on Mum.’

‘All right if I get a can of drink from your mini-fridge?’

‘Yeah – just make sure there’s one in there for me.’

As Sam headed along the corridor to Kieron’s room, Kieron stared at the doorway into the living room. He felt suddenly sick. Something had changed, and not, he thought, for the better. It was as if his life had suddenly lurched sideways, unbalancing him, but he didn’t know how or why. An emotional earthquake with no obvious cause.

He took a deep breath and headed into the living room.

His mum was sitting on the sofa, staring at the TV screen. Well, not so much sitting as slumping. The TV was off, but she was staring at the screen anyway. Two bottles sat on the table beside her, next to a half-full glass, but they weren’t the usual prosecco or red wine. One of them was a bottle of gin; the other a bottle of tonic water.

Well, at least she’s not drinking the gin neat, he thought.

‘Hi, Mum.’

‘I thought you were supposed to be doing your schoolwork today?’ she said, staring at him and frowning.

‘I went to the library,’ he said automatically. It was a lie, but if he told her he’d gone to a coffee shop to work she would have asked why, and the explanation would have taken far too long. Better just to avoid the truth entirely.

‘The library?’ she repeated. ‘Can’t you find out whatever information you need on the Internet?’

Fine time for her to become technologically literate! he thought.

‘The Internet’s great for superficial stuff, like names and dates and equations, but if you want to get into a subject in-depth you need books.’

‘Oh. OK. Good to know that libraries are still useful for something.’ She reached out for her glass and seemed surprised to discover that it was empty.

‘Mum – what’s wrong?’

‘Nothing. Nothing at all.’

She wriggled around on the sofa so she could reach out for the gin bottle and poured a substantial amount into her glass. Then, putting the bottle back, she picked up the glass and took a gulp without bothering to dilute it with any tonic water.

‘There is something wrong. Please – will you tell me what it is?’

She sighed. ‘OK. Sit down.’

He sat in the armchair facing her. Suddenly he didn’t want her to say anything. He didn’t what to know what was wrong. If he didn’t know, then nothing was wrong. It wasn’t logical, but that was how he felt. Knowing would make it real.

‘Sam’s here,’ he said. ‘He’s gone to my room.’

‘Sam? Sam Rosenfelt?’

‘Yeah.’

‘I saw a post from his mum on social media. She said they might be moving to Southampton. Is that right? Southampton?’

He nodded, wincing inside. ‘It’s … a possibility. I want to talk to you about that, but –’ he took a deep breath – ‘first you need to tell me what’s happened. It’s something bad, isn’t it?’ A sudden thought grabbed him by the heart and squeezed. ‘Is it Dad? Is he … is he dead?’

‘Not as far as I know.’ She took another gulp of straight gin. ‘Although I wouldn’t put it past him to die without telling us.’ She shook her head. ‘Sorry – that was uncalled for. No, as far as I know he’s fine.’ She seemed to realise that there was something wrong with her drink, and reached for the tonic bottle. ‘It’s work,’ she said, topping her glass up until it was in danger of overflowing.

It’s called a meniscus, Kieron thought, staring at the way the gin and tonic mixture clung to the rim of the glass all the way round the edge but rose up slightly towards the middle. It’s to do with surface tension. I learned that last year. At school.

‘I’ve been – made redundant,’ his mum said, not looking at him. ‘Laid off. Fired. I am officially “surplus to requirements”.’ Her face seemed to be twisting more and more with each phrase. ‘I have been “downsized”. Dismissed. Sacked. Given the boot.’

Kieron felt like he’d suddenly been hollowed out. ‘What happened?’

‘I can’t remember if I told you at the time, but we merged with another company a few months back. We were given all kinds of assurances that nothing would change and that our jobs were secure, but it was all hot air. They’ve decided to let the human resources department in the other company handle all the HR issues, and they’re fully staffed. So – they’ve had to “let me go”.’

‘Do you get some kind of payoff?’

She nodded. ‘“Some kind” is about right.’

‘Can you get your union on the case?’ Kieron wasn’t entirely clear what unions were for, but he vaguely recalled that they were good things to have in this kind of situation.

‘I never joined. The company I was with was a good place to work. The bosses really cared about us. I always meant to join a union, but in a way it would’ve seemed like I was being disloyal.’

‘But you can find another job, can’t you?’

‘I hope so. The marketplace is really difficult at the moment though, and there’s a lot of qualified HR people younger than me out there, looking for jobs.’ She laughed bitterly. ‘All the times I had to counsel people who had been fired, for whatever reason. All the things I used to say. They all seem meaningless now. Just … reassuring platitudes. Ways of getting them up on their feet long enough to get them out of my office.’ She gulped from the over-full glass. Trickles of clear liquid splashed onto her blouse. ‘And to add insult to injury, they’re sending me on a course to help me “acclimatise” to the new situation, work out my strengths, construct an impressive CV and find a new job. It’s like someone’s stolen your TV and then the burglar sends you a leaflet telling you where the best bargains are so you can buy a new one.’ She sighed. ‘I’m sorry, but I’m not going to be around for a few days. It’s a residential course, somewhere down in the Midlands. I’ll do an online supermarket order tonight so you’ve got stuff to eat. If there’s a problem, call me and I’ll come straight back. I mean, it’s not like I actually want to do this stupid course. You’ll be all right, won’t you? I mean, I know what you kids are like these days. You quite like being alone, don’t you?’

I’m supposed to help. The thought made Kieron feel cold. I’m the man of the house. It’s my responsibility.

‘I’ll get a job,’ he said. ‘An apprenticeship maybe. Or I’ll stack shelves in a supermarket.’

His mum smiled and leaned her head back against the sofa. ‘You’re a good son, Kieron. I don’t tell you that often enough. We’ll be all right. I’ve got some savings, and there’ll be other jobs out there. It’s just – a blow to my self-confidence, you know? Suddenly not being wanted – it’s just like … just like when your dad left. You think you’re loved, but it turns out you aren’t. Not at all.’ She closed her eyes. ‘You go and play with Sam. I’ll be fine.’

Kieron watched her for a few moments, but she stayed that way – eyes closed and head back. Eventually he got up, moved across to her and took the glass from her fingers. She didn’t even seem to notice. He put it on the table beside her, then picked up the bottle of gin and took it out into the kitchen. After a moment’s thought he put it in the fridge. It wasn’t exactly hiding it, but then again it wasn’t in plain sight either.

Sighing, he went down the corridor to his room.

Sam was playing on Kieron’s PC. He glanced up when Kieron entered. ‘Everything all right?’

‘Mum’s lost her job.’

Sam shrugged. ‘Like I said: my dad’s lost loads of jobs. It got to the stage where he’d come in the house and say, “I’ve lost my job,” and we’d say, “Have you looked behind the fridge?” like it was a ritual or something.’ He paused. ‘Things’ll work out. Don’t worry.’

Kieron shook his head. ‘She’s been in this job for years – not days, like your dad. This has never happened to her before. I’ve never seen her like this.’

‘Maybe this is life telling her that it’s time for a change.’

Kieron held up his hand. ‘Maybe this is me telling you to shut up before I slap you.’

‘Fair point. Grab a spare controller and join me on this thing – I’ll put it on two-player mode.’

Kieron was about to pull up a chair and join Sam when his mobile beeped. He pulled it from his pocket and glanced at the screen. ‘Message from Bex,’ he said. ‘Give me a minute.’

‘I haven’t seen her for a while. How’s Bradley?’

‘I’ll find out. Hang on.’ He checked the message.

Kieron – can we meet up? We need to have a serious talk. That cafe in Hooley Street, 4 this afternoon?

The cafe he’d been in just a few hours ago. Funny, the way life seemed to loop back around on itself sometimes.

‘Everything OK?’ Sam asked, eyes still fixed on the screen.

‘I don’t know,’ Kieron said carefully. ‘I think I’m about to be dumped.’