Voices in Stone - Emily Diamand Page 0,8

bit of rowdy behaviour before we left school which resulted in the class losing their first place.”

Dr Harcourt’s smile got even faker. “Oh. I see.” She didn’t seem very happy, like she wasn’t used to things going differently to how she’d planned. She threw an annoyed glance at us, like we were the ones who’d played up, and led our class to one of the Portacabins, where one of the men in hi-vis jackets gave us each a fluorescent tabard and a red safety hat. He did a test of the warning siren, which sounded like a foghorn.

“If you hear that, you need to get out of the quarry, straight away,” he said. “We let off three blasts, two minutes apart, before any blasting, and also if there are any safety issues anywhere in the quarry. So if you hear the siren, get back here, and don’t mess about, okay?” Most of us nodded. The ones not listening, well I reckoned it was only evolution if they got blown up.

Dr Harcourt led Mr Watkins over to a computer while that was happening, and they starting checking our names again, this time to an on-screen list. She still didn’t look happy.

“I think we should get the other class, the ones who were meant to be going first,” she said.

“Don’t worry, my lot won’t mind going out of turn – they’re happy about it, just look at their faces.”

She didn’t.

“That isn’t what I meant. We have everything organised and this change of events is not…”

But Mr Watkins was shaking his head. “It won’t be possible,” he said. “We can’t go back on discipline in that way. The class have to take their punishment otherwise there’d be…”

“Anarchy,” whispered Jayden, grinning at me.

“Revolution,” I whispered back. “The breakdown of society as we know it.”

Mr Watkins didn’t go quite that far, but there was no way Dr Harcourt was changing his mind. Teachers can be like that, I guess, because they’re so used to bossing everyone about.

We had to wait in the office for ten minutes while she argued at him, but he wouldn’t budge, and eventually Dr Harcourt was the one who gave up, saying that she’d be writing to the head teacher about it.

We lined up at the door, and Mr Watkins came along, checking we all had our hard hats and stuff.

“What is her problem?” he muttered to himself. “What does it matter which class goes in when?”

It mattered a great deal. Dr Harcourt should have worked harder to ensure things were kept in order. And she should not have assumed that you would all emerge unscathed.

Chapter Four

Gray

When everything was checked, they led us out through a door on the other side of the Portacabin. Now I could see what was hidden from view when we’d been in the car park.

The hill sloped away from us, and the grass and soil had been cleared off a wide strip of it. There were big mounds of earth piled up at the bottom of the slope, and broken trees stacked into tangly heaps. The rumbling clattery noise was from a couple of massive diggers, busy scraping up more soil and uncovering the grey-white, clay-looking layer beneath. The big teeth on their buckets had left scratch marks, like the hillside was being gnawed on by giant rats.

“Wow,” said Jayden, “look at those!” He was pointing at a couple of huge dumper trucks, the biggest you’ve ever seen, wheels as high as a house. But I didn’t care about them; I kept staring at the diggers, chewing away at the hillside.

When I was younger I was really into bird spotting, and Dad used to take me out to places to look for them, wooded valleys like this one. There couldn’t be any birds living here now, not even an insect, probably.

“It’s such a mess,” I said, and I got why Dad hated the quarry.

Mr Watkins heard and glared at me, but Dr Harcourt only smiled her phony smile.

“Yes, I suppose it might look a bit of a mess, if you don’t understand what you’re seeing. But of course our environmental controls are to the highest standard, and after we finish here, in around 2050, we’ll be reseeding the site with grass and planting new trees.”

“Isn’t that great?” said Mr Watkins, sucking up again. I didn’t say anything, only looked at the long grey trunks of the piled-up beech trees. They would’ve towered over us when they were standing. They would’ve taken a hundred years to grow