asleep?’ Ed asked, as he dragged the unfortunate kid off his bed. ‘You know you have to watch the movie.’
Sam smiled wickedly. ‘Now you’ve got to go out on your own and face the Devil.’
‘Are you really an angel? Only an angel can survive the night out there alone.’
‘If the Devil sniffs weakness he’ll get you, you’ll spend the whole night in agony.’
‘Don’t make me,’ Martin bawled desperately.
Sam slid open a glass door, while his partner dragged the gangly youngster across the floor and shoved him outside on to the roof terrace. Martin screamed as he clambered to his feet and banged on the glass door, begging to get back inside.
‘Sleep tight,’ the lads said in unison as they laughed.
As Martin gave up banging on the glass and slumped into the gravel with his bare back pressed against the glass, Sam noticed a glistening streak across the floor.
‘Oh man,’ Sam giggled, before kicking the glass behind his sobbing victim. ‘You pissed your pants, you dirty boy.’
Ed grabbed the pillow off Martin’s bed and used it as a foot rag. ‘Don’t worry, mate, we’ve found something to wipe up with.’
Most of the older lads in the room were smiling, but the little guys looked scared. Sam and Ed were nothing special and James reckoned he could easily have battered them, but getting in a fight now might ruin his chances of being accepted into the Survivor boarding school.
James felt bad as he looked at Rick’s tense fingers digging into Paul’s shoulder. The Survivors closely controlled everyone’s lives and James didn’t see how this bullying ritual could have become established without people in high places turning a blind eye.
Once the lights went out, Rick scrambled back to his own mattress. James pulled his duvet over his head and tried to block out the muffled sobs of the petrified boy sitting out on the balcony.
*
Martin was allowed inside at sun-up. His skin was puckered from a night curled up on gravel, but the Devil seemed to have left him alone.
James’ Sunday started with five brisk laps around the mall parking lot and a cool shower. Breakfast was honey puff cereal and orange juice, which set up a little sugar rush for the twenty minutes of chanting and singing that followed. At the end of this carefully designed emotional tune-up, James found that he’d shaken off his tiredness and was feeling alert and fairly happy.
But he didn’t need any of Miriam’s thought-control techniques to douse his spirits. The prospect of another four-hour shift as a picker was enough. He smiled at Paul as they crossed the road between the mall and the warehouse.
‘Each book is a brick for the Ark.’
Paul smiled half heartedly. ‘Elliot would be proud of you.’
As soon as they entered the warehouse, the foreman looked at James. ‘Are you Prince?’
James nodded. ‘Yeah.’
‘I just got a call. You’re due over at administration for an induction test.’
James smiled at Paul, well pleased to get out of the warehouse. He headed back to the mall and an open-plan office inside a shop unit on the ground floor. There were a dozen paper-strewn desks, but nobody was working at them.
James spent a couple of seconds thinking he’d come to the wrong place, until a head bobbed up behind one of the cloth-covered partitions. It was Judith, a fit-looking woman in her early twenties who worked as Elliot’s assistant. As he walked to the back of the room James passed by Lauren and Dana, who both sat at desks scribbling away on a photocopied question paper.
‘I didn’t realise there were three of you,’ Judith explained, as she handed James a paper: Survivor Aptitude Test – Ages 13–15. ‘I should have called you at breakfast. You’ve got two hours, starting as soon as you sit down.’
Judith pointed him to a desk near the front of the room, a good ten metres from Lauren and Dana. The space was already set up with a couple of sharpened pencils and an eraser. James sat in an office chair and flicked through the pages. It looked like a reassuringly straightforward mixture of maths, spelling, a short creative story and an IQ test.
21. PASSION
James Prince was supposed to be withdrawn and decently behaved, but James Adams hadn’t found any time for homework during his hectic weekend and got ratty when his Geography teacher demanded it on Monday morning. He earned a thirty-minute detention for his trouble.
After detention he headed to the deserted bike shed and rode to the North Park care