about,” he said. “I need to get home.”
War frowned. Pestilence stopped shuffling. Famine took a bite from a Victoria Sponge.
“Home?” War said.
“Yeah, I don’t want to be too late – my mum will get worried,” Drake told them.
Pest cleared his throat, but didn’t say anything. War’s leather armour creaked as he leaned back in his chair.
“You are home, boy,” he said. “Your old life – you have to leave that behind. You are no longer Drake Finn, you are the Fourth Horseman. You are the rider on the pale horse. You are Death.”
“For the next ninety days,” Drake reminded him. “After that, I quit, remember? So, in the meantime, I’m going home, OK?”
None of the horsemen moved to stop him, so Drake left the shed and pulled the door firmly closed behind him.
A few seconds later, the door opened again. “I’ll see you tomorrow after school,” he said, then he clicked the door closed for a second time, and slipped off into the high grass.
Next morning, Drake walked down the front path, swallowing the last bite of his breakfast. He swung the gate open and strode out, then almost tripped over someone sitting on the pavement.
“Hi. Didn’t expect to see you here,” said Mel. Her back was leaning against the fence, her legs straight out in front of her, feet together.
Drake’s mind raced. His mouth dropped open.
“Now you’re supposed to say, ‘What, exiting my front garden just before school time?’,” Mel prompted.
The vaguely awkward school-gates conversation from yesterday replayed in his head. “Yeah,” he mumbled. “What are the chances?”
Mel popped to her feet and brushed some little stones and muck from the back of her skirt. “Mind if I walk you to school?” she asked. “You can say no if you want, but I’ll just follow you anyway, shouting abuse.” She put a hand to the side of her mouth. “ABUSE ! ” she cried. “See, like that?”
“OK, yeah, that’d be great,” Drake said. He began walking, and Mel followed along. “How do you know where I live?” he asked.
Mel shrugged. “I have my sources. But the reason I came – I remembered what I was meant to tell you yesterday.”
“Oh, right,” said Drake. “What was it?”
“Dr Black.”
“Dr Black?”
“Dr Black,” Mel repeated. “He came to Mr Franks’s class yesterday after you’d left, pretending to be all worried about you.”
“How do you know he was pretending?” Drake asked.
“Because he doesn’t worry about anyone,” Mel said. “So, straight away my suspicions are aroused, I’m like, ‘Dr Black, worried about someone? No chance.’”
“Right,” said Drake, a little uncertainly. “Was that it?”
“You think I’d walk all the way over here just to tell you that?” Mel scoffed.
“What, then?”
“He started accusing you of stuff. Well, not exactly accusing, but pointing the finger of suspicion, let’s say.” She prodded him in the chest. “At you.”
“What did he say?”
“That you were the last one to see the missing kids.”
A frown creased Drake’s forehead. “Well, he’s lying, I don’t even know who they are.”
“He said something about... outside the toilets?”
Drake felt his stomach tighten. He stopped walking. “Wait, they’re not those three little spotty guys, are they?”
“Yeah, that’s them. So... what? You were the last to see them?”
“Yeah,” said Drake absent-mindedly. “I mean, no, no, I wasn’t. He was. He took them away after that. I saw him taking them through a door in his classroom.”
“So then he was lying,” Mel realised. “Why would he be lying?”
“I don’t know,” Drake said. He thought about the floating sphere, and about the fact it had come from within the history teacher’s classroom. “But I think we’d better try to find out.”
HE CASTS HIS wretched gaze across the sands that stretch into infinity on all sides of him. The whirlpools of his eyes tilt down, down, before finally coming to rest on a rectangular indent on the desert floor. Somewhere, far off to his left, a purely vocal arrangement of Queen’s Another One Bites the Dust drifts across the plains.
He turns, once more, and slips through the barrier between that dimension and the next.
Again.
WHEN THE BELL rang for morning break, they both knew what they had to do.
Drake had practised the route in his head all morning so he wouldn’t waste time finding his way. Even so, Mel made it to Dr Black’s room before he did. She was standing by the door, keeping guard, when Drake finally came clattering along the corridor.
“He’s out on patrol,” Mel told him. “He does it every break and lunchtime, just strides around scowling at