Slated

Chapter 15

*last chapter until Monday -xoxo*
"Hi, Kyla? I'm Mrs Ali. I'm the teaching assistant who will be helping you get settled over the next few weeks, starting with a tour." She smiles and actually looks in my eyes with her dark ones, holds out her hand. I shake it.

School might be more interesting today.

I follow her out the door and around the school grounds.

She chatters and points out buildings: English block, library, agricultural centre. Maths, fields for sport and sixth form projects – growing new crop strains in the spring. The school's ancient brick buildings mix with newer additions scattered about the large site, with grass and a maze of criss-crossing paths between.

"Don't worry if you get lost to start with; everyone does. I'll be shadowing you for a few weeks, and can show you around."

No. I won't get lost. The map is firmly in my mind, laid out in a grid of paths and buildings. But I just smile.

She takes me to the admin building from the far side of the school grounds, through other buildings and past class after class of students, to the main office. There is a jumble of desks and cabinets, computers; ringing telephones; half a dozen harried workers.

"This is Kyla Davis, here for processing," Mrs Ali announces to the room. Moments later a tall, unsmiling man with thick glasses appears from behind a row of filing cabinets.

"Come this way," he says, and we follow him through another door.

Processing? I look at Mrs Ali.

"Just getting your school ID sorted," she says.

But it is more involved than that. First my fingers are pressed one by one on a small screen for digital fingerprint storage. Then my head is held firm and I am ordered not to blink; a bright light shines endlessly in my right eye for a retinal scan. My eyes tear and vision blurs when it is over. A ghostly afterimage like the branches of a tree lingers, black on the white wall, white on the dark floor, then gradually fades. Finally a normal photograph is taken. Then he fusses with a computer for a moment, and a plastic card spits out the other end.

"You must wear this at all times," he says, and slips it into a holder and puts it around my neck.

I hold it up, and there I am. "Kyla Davis" it proclaims under the photo, and there is a red S after my name. An uncertain smile on my lips that Mrs Ali managed to elicit just before the flash.

"There. You are officially a student of Lord Williams' now," she says, like it is an accomplishment, or a choice. "Now we must go back to the Unit."

We go out the front door of Admin this time. Nestled alongside the building is a large stone monument, rose bushes around, with 2048 carved on top: six years ago.

"What is that?" I say.

"It is a memorial. To some students who died."

I walk closer, somehow drawn to see, and Mrs Ali follows.

There is a list of names carved into the stone, with ages after. So many, from Robert Armstrong, 15, to Elaine Weisner, 16, and thirty or so names between. All my age or near enough. Stopped, still, silent forever.

"What happened to them?"

"They were on a class trip to the British Museum in London, and there was an AGT attack. Nothing to do with them; there were traffic diversions that put them in the wrong place, and the bus got hit. Not many survived."

I stare back at her, unable to take it in. "AGT?"

"Anti Government Terrorists: Fodders." Her lip curls when she says the words, as if they taste bad.