Voices in Stone - Emily Diamand Page 0,11

as soon as he saw it. The rock in the quarry looked ordinary too, and we all thought the dust was just dust.

“You’d be amazed at the quantity of ore-bearing mineral we have to mine, to get usable quantities of metal,” shouted Dr Harcourt over the noise of the digger. “Wouldanyoneliketoguesshowmuch?”

Her words were really fast and close together, her voice high-pitched like a recording sped up. I stared at her. Was she mucking about?

“Areyouallrightthere’snoneedtomakeafussit’sonlyabitof dust,” Mr Watkins said, also at super-high speed.

I stared at them through the dust and tears. What was going on?

Then everything went black.

I read once that black holes have such strong gravity they pull everything towards them, even stars, and if you were in a spaceship you’d just plunge in and nothing you could do would stop it. It was sort of like that. I couldn’t see where I was, but I still had this feeling of falling, like I’d dropped off the top of a skyscraper, at night, with no lights on anywhere, not even stars.

It was really quiet.

My dad always complains during sci-fi films when they have sounds of explosions and spaceships whizzing by.

“It’s a vacuum,” he shouts at the TV. “How can you have sound without air?”

Well this was silent, like a vacuum would be. I had my mouth open, screaming, but there wasn’t any sound. Only silence and blackness and me falling. On and on, so I thought it would never end. Then – bang! – I was back where I’d been standing.

I stumbled forwards and fell over.

“What are you doing, Gray?” shouted Mr Watkins.

I lay on the ground and thought, Am I having a stroke? Maybe I’m going mad, right here.

Then I saw everyone else.

Zack had his eyes wide open, and was standing stock-still. Jayden was letting out these squawking noises and Ruksar was sitting with her head on her knees. Three metres – but what felt a thousand miles away – Jared threw up.

The digger engine cut out, and in the sudden quiet I could hear Gav shouting, “Help me! Help me!”

Mr Watkin freaked out, at a super-fast speed.

“What’sgoingon?” he speed-squeaked.

“What’swrongwithallofyou?”

He was shouting at us, shouting at everything, telling us to do one thing, then something else completely. I managed to sit up, my body feeling all strange and stretchy like it wasn’t mine, and then I saw the shapes.

Shapes? What do you mean?

At first I thought it was my eyes, or an earthquake. The ground seemed to be shimmering, something drifting out of it like a heat haze, except the haze was piling up into small pillars instead of drifting away, each one as tall as a person. You know how snowmen don’t look anything like people, not even the right shape, but if you see them at night they’re still spooky, like they might turn their head as you walk by? Well the shapes were like that. I could feel them watching, even though they had nothing to watch with. I was sure they were closing in on me.

“Mr Watkins,” I croaked, but he didn’t pay any attention because Hayley was screaming. A lot of people were screaming by then, and Mr Watkins was flapping around shouting contradictory instructions.

Only Dr Harcourt seemed calm. Not even a bit worried that we were all going mad and being sick. She was examining us; she looked like she was taking mental notes. It’s weird how now I can remember her being like that, really clearly, but at the time I hardly even noticed because the shapes started making this noise, over and over.

Yooooo… Yooooo… Yooooo… Yooooo…

Your friend, Isis. I wonder what she would have made of what you saw?

Isis? She was in 4F, the class that was supposed to go in first… oh. Is that why Dr Harcourt was so put out about the change in order?

Now don’t try to put things together. You only want to talk, and tell me everything.

Well Isis didn’t see anything, because no one else got taken into the quarry after us. They couldn’t, could they? Not with all the ambulances and angry parents.

As I said, Dr Harcourt was wrong to assume that a single exposure to the rock dust would have no effect on untalented children. She was only thinking of one child, instead of all of you.

‘One child’? Are you saying Dr Harcourt arranged a whole school trip just to get Isis into the quarry? But anything could have happened to us! Why did we all have to be involved, if Isis was the