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“Do the gravy,” I said. He was just standing there with the steaming kettle in his hand.

“Do you know Rose?” He advanced on me, the kettle—still bubbling around the element—at chest height in between us, clouds of cooling but still hot steam around his face.

“No,” I said. “I don’t.” I stepped back, suddenly feeling threatened and raising the masher as if it might somehow stop me being scalded. “Dude, have you taken something?”

Aamir, one of the two evening live-in supervisors, chose that moment to come in. “Dinner ready? We’re starving out here!”

We called him “Hungry” most of the time—he was always in the kitchen eating the stores. Thin as a rail. He tried too hard to be one of us, which just got him made fun of, because he was nearly thirty. But right then and there I could have kissed him, sketchy beard and all. Something in Greg’s eyes wasn’t right, and in the heartbeats before Hungry wandered through the door, getting scalded had changed from a possibility to a near certainty.

The eating part of the dinner wasn’t much better. Sophie hadn’t come back, and since it was her first day out since the headbutt, it didn’t bode well for her getting out again anytime soon. It didn’t make sense to me, though I appreciated the instinct to tell them where to stuff their rules and their timetables. They’d locked up my mother and they’d locked us up too…because of what she did. How did that make sense?

I said nothing and just ate my food, though I’d lost most of my appetite. Sophie’d be out with the local kids whose parents were trusted to look after them and let them run riot till late at night. The only curfew that really worked in Werton was the one imposed by the weather. Rain would drive teens indoors, and not much else. I’d rather be shivering on a street corner than warm in my “approved accommodation.”

I went to my room after shoveling down the last of my mash and lay on my bed, reading An Alien Heat. An odd little book and more sci-fi than anticipated. Given a choice between laser pistols and swords, it’s the sharp edge for me every time.

A nonapproved cardboard wedge under the door guaranteed me a little privacy and some security in case whatever Greg had taken was still in his system and he tried to come in with more questions. I didn’t know any girls named Rose. It felt like an old-fashioned name, more likely to belong to one of the ladies with the blue rinses and pensioner passes waiting for the bus to Brackley.

Time slipped by. Part of my mind was set to listening for my sister’s return, likely to be heralded by a loud discussion at the bottom of the stairs. On weekends, lights out was at eleven p.m. By eleven, Frank Om and Stacey-Ray were on duty, and both were, excuse my language, dicks. I went down to ask what they were doing about Sophie, but Frank was more interested in me going back to my room, whereas Stacey-Ray—a solid woman in her thirties who managed to exude less sympathy than your average house brick—was more interested in the punishments she was lining up for my sister than in actually finding her. They’d bombarded her with texts and calls of course, but if she’d decided to stay out, then she wasn’t going to answer those.

I retreated to my room. Sophie wasn’t mega-late, and she was sixteen. She’d probably laugh at the idea I was worried about her. But I was. All sorts of things can happen on the streets. There’s bad people out there. Plus, I’d had a weird day, and part of me was anxious that when I’d run all the way home, I’d left some of that weirdness out there for someone else to step into. In the end I sent her a “Where are you?” text. There was more chance she’d answer me than respond to the duty staff, but I didn’t expect her to. She didn’t. Which meant she was either having a really good time or a really bad one.

Sleep, which normally dropped from the ceiling like an ambush predator, did not come. I lay, remembering the vagrant and all the crazy he had packed into that one eye, more than I’d ever seen in two before. I cracked before midnight. Neither of us was going to win a sibling-of-the-year contest, but Sophie was basically all I had. I finally resorted to calling. It went to voicemail.

The front door had to be unlocked from both sides, and I didn’t have the outward-going key. Which made the house a bit like a fish trap. Easy to get into. Hard to leave. I have to assume it was fire safety compliant, but it really did feel like the place should be renamed from the Togetherness Trust to the Burn Together Trust.

Fortunately, only the windows on the ground floor and first floor had locks. Which meant my window opened easily enough. And I’d long ago broken the limiter that only gave me a few inches’ gap. Unfortunately, this did leave me two stories up with nothing but a corroding cast-iron drainpipe to cling to, and that only if I was prepared to lunge for it.

My life thus far had proved to me that I had quite a lot of bounce to me, and that broken bones healed in the end. I lunged, slithered, and landed with a painful jolt behind the wheelie bins. I didn’t hang about. The CCTV camera’s feed was hardly ever watched, but if they heard anything in there, I didn’t want still to be standing by the bins when they thought to check.

Minutes later, I was hurrying along the mainly sleeping streets, sending the occasional fox scurrying for cover. More worrying was a large stray dog, blacker than black under the streetlight on the corner of Wright Street, but it just watched me go by, giving the distinct impression that, like the foxes, I was too small for it to bother with.

I had no clue where Sophie would be, but the high street was the place to start. If she was coming back, she’d probably come through there, and if she was going from one place to another, it was also a likely route. I didn’t think they’d let her into any of the pubs, but I would try to get a look-in through the windows of the Red Lion and the King William IV, just in case.

Mere yards from the high street, with nothing on my mind but where my sister had got to, something dark lunged from a doorway. The hand that caught my shoulder felt like an iron hook, and the surprise of it made me scream.

My own momentum swung me around to face my captor. Enough light reached us from the shuttered shops to show the one-eyed vagrant’s face and his gloating smile.

As I said, I’m not a fighter. Or a lover, sadly. But terror works wonders. I punched him with everything I had. Stupidly, I hit him in the chest. Even in the current extremity I just didn’t want my hand anywhere near his face. I put every ounce of my strength into the blow, punching through, like they tell you. The jolt that ran through me made it feel as if I were the one that had been hit. I felt something snap. Somewhere. Something deep that wasn’t meant to break. Something important.

“Ha!”

I’d punched walls with more give in them. He was laughing at me. Still with the claws of his fingers digging in around my shoulder bone.

“Ha! You can’t crack me, boy. I’m already cracked.”

In desperation, I tore at his face. The eye patch came away, and, though it may have been a trick of the light, the hole behind was larger, wetter, and much, much deeper than I’d thought possible. Certainly ugly enough that, given just a little more illumination, I could have lost the dinner I’d had earlier.

“You can’t crack—”

Suddenly he was falling. He nearly took me with him. He yanked me to my knees before letting go to save himself. The street did its best to swallow him. The utility panel he’d been standing on, a piece of cast iron, gave way, and down he went. I wanted him to be gone entirely. To drop to the center of the Earth, or at least to a handy magma pit. But chest-deep was all I got. It was enough to lunge backward out of his reach, sprawl on my backside, scramble to my feet, and run like hell.

The way I crossed that street, I deserved to get hit by a car.

But it still came as a surprise when I was.

Chapter 11

Red