‘Of course I’m afraid,’ she said. ‘I’ve had friends die in this room. I watched Callum die when his insulin ran out, and Roy with his cancer. I’m not cutting you up for anything, and especially not for you to go and get yourself killed in battle!’
The last couple of words distracted Ewan from remembering thirteen-year-old Callum Turner’s existence. It had been a long year, and even at Oakenfold they hadn’t talked much.
Battle? He’s not…
‘Lorraine can operate, right?’ asked Thomas. ‘Wasn’t that her job in the old days?’
‘She was a nurse, not a surgeon,’ said Raj. ‘Massive difference.’
‘…Do operations hurt?’
‘Not really. They put you to sleep first. I had an operation on my spine when I was twelve, and I didn’t feel a—’
‘Shh.’
Silence fell again, but it was too late. Lorraine had started to sob, and her voice became a whisper.
Ewan had never seen Lorraine cry, but had heard her a couple of times. Most recently when Roy had passed away, from a type of stomach cancer that could have been dealt with easily in a real hospital. She had not been seen outside the clinic for two or three days after that.
But she never really talked about her troubles. Ewan wondered whether this habit came from the fact that her housemates were often her patients too. Lorraine had gone for so many years hiding her emotions while on the wards that perhaps she naturally hid them at Spitfire’s Rise.
But it must have been more complicated than that. Emotions always were.
Because Roy had been her friend. Just about the only man her age to have made it to Spitfire’s Rise. And underneath her bossy exterior, she probably cared about the teenagers a great deal. She had certainly cared about Shannon when they first met.
Maybe she sees herself as more than ‘ the nurse ’ . She has responsibility over who lives and who dies here . The pressure on her is enormous, and she ’s probably already crushed by the memories of people she couldn’t save.
No wonder she doesn’t want to operate on McCormick.
*
According to Ewan’s watch, only two hours had passed. He had to check Kate’s watch at his side to make sure his batteries weren’t dying.
Lorraine had surfaced long enough to shout the words ‘meeting, downstairs’ into the boys’ bedroom, and allowed the news to spread by itself. The living room was full now: ten people in total. All the surviving residents of Spitfire’s Rise minus the two in the clinic.
Ewan looked across the remaining Underdogs. It was rare to see all of them in the same room at the same time, and with so many Oakenfold students together it almost felt like being in a classroom again. Alex was perhaps the least comfortable person present, the only twenty-something in a room where nobody else had reached eighteen.
Suddenly, the unexpected happened. Dr McCormick, who had been face-down and unconscious on the same carpet hours earlier, walked into the living room with a broad smile. Perhaps he had misjudged the atmosphere, or maybe he was trying to reassure people. Either way, the rest of the Underdogs had no idea how to react. Thomas had his hands up as if ready to applaud. Silent Simon had his jaw gaped open, his breathing audible. Raj shifted forwards to the edge of his seat as if being closer would help him to hear. Lazy Gracie gave the most generic reaction possible, trying to blend in with everyone else. Mark looked up in vague curiosity, either unaffected by the day’s events or pretending to be.
‘Afternoon,’ McCormick said softly. ‘First things first, I’m feeling much better and you don’t need to worry.’
‘Cough-cough-load-of-rubbish-cough,’ said Jack. A ruder set of words had crossed Ewan’s mind, but he chose not to say them.
‘But you obviously deserve an explanation,’ McCormick continued, without offering Jack any response. ‘My cyst has been acting up. I’ve had it in my abdomen for the last thirty years, and normally the pain is bearable. That said, my lifestyle hasn’t exactly been healthy this last year, and something-or-other must have changed in there.’
‘Is there a… more scientific explanation?’ asked Alex.
‘I’m a mathematician, not a biologist. Even Lorraine is struggling, but we both agree I’m better off without it inside me.’
Concerned faces in the crowd began to look at each other. A couple looked at Ewan, as if he could do anything. They only reminded him of his own powerlessness, and as with everything else in life that lay beyond his control, it grated horribly against his nerves.
‘Didn’t sound like you were agreeing,’ said Raj.
‘We didn’t agree on how to get it out, as I’m assuming you heard. Lorraine’s idea was to hold out until the end of the war, and leave it to a real surgeon once we have hospitals again. But I think that’s just avoiding the issue. In the end, we came to an agreement. Anyway, this meeting isn’t about me. There are more urgent matters at hand.’
Ewan blinked himself back to reality. For several minutes, he had forgotten anything existed outside of McCormick and his health issues. The man leaned back against the nearest wall, the way he sometimes did when yielding the floor to another speaker.
‘Kate,’ he said, ‘could you describe what you saw this morning?’
‘We’ve been told already,’ muttered Gracie.
‘In multiple conversations, with varying details, from different people. Let’s all be told the same thing. Go on, Kate.’
Kate shuffled forward to the front of her sofa, hands clasped as if in prayer.
‘Raj and I saw a bunch of missiles flying towards New London. The Cerberus system destroyed them before they got there. But it means—’
‘If they wanted to wipe out Grant,’ Alex interrupted, ‘they should have just detonated a nuclear device in the upper atmosphere and caused an electromagnetic pulse. Would have fried all their circuits forever.’
‘You watched too many movies in the old world,’ Jack interrupted, flicking his fingers together to aid his thinking – ‘stimming’, as he called it. ‘If an EMP attack were close enough to affect their circuits, it’d be close enough to just wipe out—’
‘Alex, Jack, let her finish,’ Ewan said. He noticed a little smile of gratitude on Kate’s face.
‘So none of the missiles got through,’ she continued, ‘but it means someone’s declared war on Grant. Might be more than one country, we don’t know. That’s it, really.’
The room fell quiet, until Ewan noticed McCormick nodding at someone behind him. When he turned, Shannon had lifted a finger to speak.
She repeated everything she had told Ewan on their journey home: how nobody with any sense would attack her father unless the task would become literally impossible later. With AME just days from being operational, the world had launched a last-gasp attack on her father. And they had failed.
Naturally, the conversation led to the test centre at Oakenfold. The other teenagers – Ewan’s last surviving free schoolmates – looked understandably emotional. For some of them, that building had been the one place in the world where life had made sense. Where Silent Simon had been treated as more than just ‘the Down’s kid’, and recognised for the pleasant, nonverbally sociable person he was. Where Gracie had been more than the girl with Global