Mitchell scratched at his heel. The itch was a constant reminder that Miss Bennett was watching him. There was nowhere he could go that she wouldn’t find him. He felt towards her almost the way he would towards a very strict teacher. Facing her without having done his homework was out of the question. But there was a difference. Mitchell wanted to complete his assignment. For the first time in his life he felt like he had a real future. He couldn’t wait until his eighteenth birthday. By then his conditioning would have taken over his entire being. And he’d never again be haunted by the face of his brother.
Mitchell drove those thoughts out of his head. They would destroy his concentration – and Miss Bennett’s task demanded total concentration.
He traced his finger along a line on the map. It represented the road that joined the farmhouse and Beuvron. Jimmy and his friends walked along it every day. Here? Mitchell wondered. A traffic accident? He pictured the narrow carriageway, the muddy ditch and the poplars that bordered it. He shook his head. That would be enough to kill a normal human, but Jimmy Coates was faster, stronger, with reactions that would see him through almost anything.
Where then? Mitchell’s finger wandered around the farmhouse in a spiral, searching the fields. It paused over a small collection of buildings. What’s this? Mitchell asked himself. He peered closer. It was some kind of industrial site. The perfect place for an accident, he thought. But I have to get closer to the target. How?
He leapt off the bed and crouched low by the window, watching but invisible. He saw Jimmy in a heated discussion with the manager of the crêperie about the broken umbrellas. Felix was stumbling about trying to help clear up the mess. He wasn’t doing terribly well.
Then two girls arrived. Mitchell knew it was Georgie and Eva. He knew too that they were about his age and that they spent most of their time in the Internet café round the corner. They had obviously heard that something had happened and come to check that Jimmy and Felix were OK.
Mitchell nodded gently, an idea trickling into his head. Yes, he thought. It’s time to make my move.
JIMMY LAY IN the dark, staring up at the intricate cobwebs that decorated the ceiling. He was replaying over and over the accident at the crêperie. He tried to bring up exact images. That way he could search them for details he hadn’t noticed before. He wanted to be able to zoom in as if his memories were photographs. Unfortunately, he wasn’t doing very well, but something inside him wouldn’t let him sleep until he’d examined every moment.
“You still awake?” came a whisper through the darkness. It was Felix.
“You can see I’m awake,” Jimmy replied. The curtains at the window weren’t doing a great job of keeping out the moonlight.
Jimmy and Felix were in neighbouring beds in one of the two upstairs bedrooms of the farmhouse. The other room was just for Yannick’s mother. On the other side of the room were another two beds. In one, Yannick’s bulk heaved up and down to the rhythm of his snoring. The other was empty.
“Do you think Chris will be back soon?” Felix asked. “With my parents, I mean.”
“Oh,” Jimmy answered, distracted from his thoughts. “Oh yeah. Sure. If anyone can do it, he can.”
“Or you,” Felix said quickly. “You could do it. You could do anything.”
“Maybe. I dunno.” Jimmy turned on to his side to face his friend. He smiled and closed his eyes, but opened them again almost straightaway.
“Felix,” he whispered hesitantly, “do you think that was really an accident in the village today?”
“That was so funny. The manager couldn’t believe it when he saw that all of his umbrellas had broken!”
“The thing is, though, I don’t think I believe it either.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, don’t you think it was a bit, kind of, funny that they all broke? And that the ends were all so sharp? That was really dangerous.”
“Yeah,” Felix replied, the moonlight catching the enthusiasm in his eye, “but you were so quick, you dodged out the way like, like…” he wriggled about in his bed, acting out some of Jimmy’s moves.
“And did you hear the noise just before each of them fell?”
“What noise?” asked Felix, completely tangled up in his bed sheets.
“That sort of pinging noise. As if something was knocking them over deliberately.”
Felix stared at Jimmy, trying to make out whether his friend was serious.
“You mean,” he started, “there was some invisible man, sent by Miss Bennett, who sharpened the ends of the umbrellas then knocked them over, aiming for you?” He pulled a face that stretched one of his nostrils almost up to his eye. “You’re crazy.”
Jimmy let out a deep breath. Maybe Felix was right. There was no rational way to explain his suspicion. But there was a voice in his head that blared out like a trumpet. It told him over and over that when that many umbrellas, with sharpened points, all come within a centimetre of your head, it’s more than a coincidence.
“What about my chair?” Jimmy insisted.
“What about it?”
“The leg snapped. How does the leg of a metal chair snap, unless somebody has weakened it?”
“Wait a minute,” Felix said, sitting up. “How did this invisible man know you were going to sit in that particular chair?”
“He could have done it to all the chairs.”
“Oh, all the chairs,” Felix repeated sarcastically. “Then the invisible man does exist.”
Jimmy huffed a little to disguise the fact that he was about to laugh. How could he take his worries seriously when Felix was there to make light of them?
“Thanks, Felix,” he whispered. “I suppose I’m just paranoid.”
“Yeah, and don’t tell your mum any of your crazy theories or she won’t let us go out again.”
They both turned over in a fresh attempt to get some sleep. Then Jimmy spoke again, quieter than ever, as if he was talking to himself.
“Felix,” he muttered, “sometimes, just before I go to sleep, I feel like my programming takes me over completely. I don’t feel human at all because I don’t feel anything.”
Felix was silent for a second. Yannick’s snorts filled the room.
“Jimmy, don’t worry,” Felix replied eventually. “You’ll always seem human to me. You smell human anyway.”
With that, he burst out laughing – and so did Jimmy.
“That wasn’t me!” Jimmy grinned. “It was Yannick!”
A few days later Jimmy and Felix were hanging out at the lake. In fact, Felix was literally hanging out. He was dangling from a tree trying not to fall in the water below him.
“Jimmy!” he shouted, the branch dipping drastically under his weight. “Get up here!”
Jimmy closed his eyes for a fraction of a second to feel inside himself for that powerful sensation. It washed over him so easily now, and for the time being he was still able to hold it in check. He ran three strides towards the tree and bounded upwards. His hands scurried up the bark and his legs kept running as easily as if they were on the ground. It was only