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Chapter 5

Adam looked down at his test for the umpteenth time and crossed off another question. Don't be obvious,
he kept repeating to himself. Don't be obvious. He could do this. Maths was easiest. There was one single right answer for almost every question. He knew exactly what he'd get for each section.

None of the questions were hard, but the challenge was getting wrong answers that looked deliberate. He had to make the same kinds of mistakes every time, and follow the same line of faulty logic to look just as fallible as anybody else would be.

Putting random numbers in might give him away. It had to look like a mistake. If he answered too many right, he'd draw attention to himself. If he answered too many wrong, he'd also draw attention to himself. For the next few hours, he had to do and say absolutely nothing to arouse any suspicion.

That morning he'd already been guided around by a tall, curly-haired girl with a prefect badge. She'd told him that he'd just be tested to see what he knew already and if he could finish at the same time as the rest of them, and then she'd lead him to a private, secluded room to take some tests to find where he had to be placed. It had all felt fairly routine, as far as these things went. She hadn't forced him to speak too much, and she hadn't looked particularly suspicious either. It could have gone worse.

An hour later, he fed the final test into the grading machine. It gave him a seventy-four percent and directions to a classroom of year fourteens. He knew that Quinn was somewhere in the same class, so at least it wasn't all strangers.

He could only be grateful for the amounts of textbooks dropped off in the scrapyard every week and try not to think about what it said about him that he did all his homework yet until that day had never once set foot in a school. Either way, he'd read them all countless times before so wasn't worried about catching up. That was one thing he wasn't worried about. Perks of having an over-active mind and too much free time, he supposed.

He'd been given a timetable for the week. It seemed like many of the lessons were the archaic ones he'd read about; maths, physics, physical education. However, for every normal lesson he had planned, there was an hour of something called "Survival." It wasn't in any of the thrown-out textbooks. The ones he'd been handed for the subject were unfamiliar.

The first class was survival. He didn't know what to expect, but given the way his week had been going, it could prove useful to him.

He'd already made the decision not to talk to anyone as long as he could avoid it. A lot of the time, his brain seemed to work faster than his tongue, and when he panicked it only got worse. There was a good chance if he started talking, he'd be trying to form the same word for hours, and he couldn't afford to distinguish himself like that.

The classroom felt different. Hot and cold at the same time. He noticed a definite sense of unease as soon as he stepped through the door, but he had to ignore it. Maybe it just him. Maybe it was just psychosomatic. He had never been surrounded by people before, and it was definitely unnerving to know that they could block the exit and seal him in at any second. To their credit, nobody was speaking to him at that moment, but he still couldn't relax.

Quinn gestured for him to sit by her but he ignored her and rushed to sit down as close to the door as he could. He knew that if she found out, she probably wouldn't do anything to protect him. He towered over her, but she was stocky, and much stronger than he was. All her height meant was that she could beat him unconscious easily but still look like the underdog. A short, freckled redhead with a round face and a friendly expression. Put that image on the cover of a newspaper and nobody would care that she'd had almost a decade of training and he'd had nothing. He had never been particularly afraid of her before - she was usually the only person he almost trusted - but he was starting to get wary in the new environment. He had to assess everyone as a potential threat.