The Adjusters (9 page)

Fox snatched up the photograph of her and Gabrielle and thrust it into Henry’s hands.

“We’ve been friends since kindergarten,” she said, her face flushed with passion. “Since long before this town had even heard of Malcorp. And I’m telling you that
Gabrielle Henson does not have mental problems. And she is not into drugs.” Her voice choked and she fought to keep talking. “She’s my friend.”

Henry looked down at the photograph in his hand. The two girls certainly looked normal enough.
Happy.
They were several years younger in the picture and he noticed for the first time that
it had been taken in the cafe downstairs. In the background the tables were filled with customers. Henry looked up at Fox. She was glaring, as if daring him to argue with her. It was hard to
reconcile this spiky character with the younger girl in the photo.

“I’m sorry your friend has problems, whatever they are,” he said gently, handing the picture back. “But I’m sure you’ll see she’s okay now she’s
back with her family…”

Fox frowned at him. “Gabrielle isn’t back with her family. I went round her place earlier today and she isn’t there.”

“Well, maybe they’re keeping her at the medical centre for observation…”

Christian removed an item from his pocket and held it up. “What do you say we find out about that? Tonight.”

Henry saw he was holding a Malcorp key card.

“This will get us into the Malcorp medical centre,” Christian explained. “Swiped it from my dad a few weeks ago. He thought he’d lost it. It’s time someone found
out what’s really going on in there.”

Henry held up his hands. Suddenly everything was moving too fast. “Now hold on…”

Fox moved closer to him. “Gabrielle’s somewhere in that centre. If we could just talk to her for a while, we could find out why she ran away. I need to know why she didn’t come
to me when she escaped the first time.”

Henry held her gaze. “I’ve been to the medical centre and it’s just a clinic. There’s nothing going on. And if the students at Malcorp are a little strange… Well,
it’s just because they’re the kids of pushy parents. You know, high achiever types.”

“You don’t believe that,” Christian said. “I heard about the pool. Blake and his friends just walked away when that kid was drowning, right?”

Henry glanced at him. “They just didn’t have life-saving training, that’s all.”

“They didn’t have the programming! They’re…” He struggled to find the words. “Replacements! Robots! They don’t do anything they’re not ordered to
do!”

Henry sighed and walked to the door. He’d heard enough. He couldn’t believe they’d almost got him believing their insane ideas.

“I’m going home,” he said.

“But we’ve got more to show you!” Christian said.

He made to follow Henry, but Fox threw out a hand. “Let him go. He’ll be one of them as well in a week or so. For all we know, he already is.”

For some reason, these last words cut Henry and he paused as he opened the door. Then, with a shake of his head, he flew out and down the stairs, away from the pair of weirdos as fast as his
legs would carry him.

Henry’s first day at Malcorp High began at 8.30 a.m. on Monday. As he walked across the manicured grass in the direction of the school buildings, along with scores of
other kids, the events of the evening before seemed increasingly like a strange dream. He hadn’t told his mom about Fox and Christian’s plan to break into the medical centre, of course,
or any of their strange ideas for that matter. He didn’t want her worrying about the delusional locals he’d somehow befriended just a day after arriving at the complex. Although she was
trying hard not to show it, he could tell she was stressed about the new job. The last thing he wanted was her thinking that he’d fallen in with a
bad crowd
again. And he certainly
didn’t need the hassle of her lecturing him about it either.

The walk to school took less than ten minutes. The other students were dressed in green and gold school uniforms and ambled along like any other kids Henry had seen – not like robots at
all. Henry had yet to receive his uniform, so he was dressed in the smartest pair of trousers he had and a plain white shirt.

“Hey there, newbie!” Blake ran over and fell into step beside him. “Pumped about your first day?”

Henry gave him an exaggerated look of excitement. “Yeah! I can’t wait!”

“I can tell you’re joking,” Blake replied with a laugh. “But seriously, the school is pretty neat. Have you checked out your timetable yet?”

Henry shook his head. “I guess I’ll get that when I arrive.”

Blake pulled a small tablet PC, bearing the Malcorp logo, from his blazer and tapped the screen, navigating to a student list and Henry’s name. He got the timetable up on screen and handed
it across to Henry.

“You’ll get an eDiary,” Blake explained. “All the students have them.”

“Cool,” Henry said, examining the machine. “What games does it have on it?”

Blake gave a snorting laugh and punched him on the arm. “Kidder! But seriously, we’d better get you to the uniform shop before we go to class.”

“That’s okay. I’ll pick it up at recess.”

Blake looked at him as if he was being crazy. “No way! We need to get you in the school colours! You don’t want to stand out, do you?”

With that, he snatched the electronic diary from Henry’s hand and jogged on ahead.

“No, I guess not,” Henry said and ran after him. Blake might be just about the straightest kid on the face of the planet, but at least he wasn’t crazy-delusional like the other
acquaintances he’d made.

And at the moment, that counted for a lot.

The school was divided into three areas: one for nursery and infant kids, another for juniors and finally the high school. The uniform shop was located at the back of the high school area, which
gave Henry the chance to check out the building as Blake led the way. Like everywhere else in the Malcorp complex, the place was spotlessly clean and looked newly built. Clearly things were
replaced the moment they began to wear, right down to the light switches and door handles.

An ear-splitting siren sounded and kids started scurrying for class, although Henry was surprised by the lack of noise within the building. The corridors of his last school had been deafening in
the moments before class began, as students yelled, argued and shouted last minute messages to one another. Seconds after the siren stopped in Malcorp High, complete silence had fallen over the
corridors.

At the uniform shop, Henry was issued with a pair of black trousers, a grey shirt and a green and gold blazer and tie. The woman behind the counter told him that a spare set would be sent to his
lodge and his mom would be billed. Henry took his new clothes and put them on in a tiny changing room, checking the tie in a mirror on the wall. His last school hadn’t had a uniform, so the
blazer and tie felt weird. Henry stared at his reflection and sighed.

“You look
soooo
cool.”

He swiped the curtain of the changing room and jumped to find Blake standing right there, waiting eagerly.

“Man, you look great!” Blake exclaimed and pumped his fist in the air. “One of us! One of us!”

“Right,” Henry said, putting his old clothes into his bag and slinging it over his shoulder. “We should get going. Don’t like being late on my first day.”

“That’s the spirit,” Blake said as they walked alongside one another down the corridor. He consulted his diary. “Hey, we’ve got class together! French.” His
face fell. “Man, what a way to start the day!”

Henry looked at him and smiled. “Have we found something you don’t like about school?”

“It’s just…I’ve been studying that darn language for six whole months and I don’t seem to be making any progress.”

“Well, six months isn’t long,” Henry replied. French was actually one of his favourite subjects. He’d had it at his last school since he was twelve, clearly a lot earlier
than they started here. He’d found, to his surprise, that he had a real facility for language and had been top of his class in both French and Spanish for most of the last two years. To let
Blake know he was no slouch when it came to languages, he added, “
La pratique rend parfait
.”

Blake looked at him and roared with laughter. “Nice accent, Jean-Claude! Where did you learn that, a
Pink Panther
movie? Jeez, you’re a kidder!”

Henry was still puzzling over what that was supposed to mean as they reached the classroom door and Blake pulled it open. The entire class was silent, heads down over thick textbooks while a
prim-looking woman stood at the front, casting her eyes over them. She turned her gaze on Blake and Henry as they entered.

“
Pardon, Mademoiselle Chabrol
,” Blake replied in perfectly accented French. “
J’ai dû prendre Henry pour aller chercher son uniforme
.”

The teacher gave Henry an unimpressed look. “
Et ce nouveau spécimen ne parle pas pour lui-même
?
”
Doesn’t he speak
for himself?

There was a smattering of laughter around the room, which was silenced by a stern look from Mademoiselle Chabrol. Henry had worked out, despite the speed at which the teacher had rattled off her
question, that it was his turn to speak.

“
Je m’appelle Henry Ward
,” he said, trying to sound as fluent as possible. “Uh…
je suis un student nouveau dans votre classe…
”

“
Oui, oui
,” the woman said with a dismissive wave of her hand. “
Asseyez-vous et ouvrez le livre à la page cinquante-six
.
Nous lisons
À
la Recherche du Temps Perdu.” As she turned away, she muttered, “
Mon dieu, il y a du travail à faire avec celui-ci
.”

Blake nodded to two spare desks at the back and they sat down. Henry picked up the book in front of him, which was almost a thousand pages long, and flicked through. It was written in incredibly
complex French – far more advanced than anything he’d ever been asked to read before in class. He looked at Blake who, like the other twenty students, had become engrossed in the French
text. He turned towards the front and saw that the teacher was regarding him with a look of barely disguised contempt.

“
Avez-vous un problème, Monsieur Ward?
” she called across to him. “
Préféreriez-vous quelque chose de plus simple à lire?
”
Would you prefer something easier to read?
She held up the French equivalent of a
Janet and John
book, causing more giggles around the room.

“
Non, mademoiselle
,” Henry replied firmly. He looked down at his book and pretended to read.

“How long did you say you’ve been studying French?” Henry asked Blake at the end of the period, as they walked to the next class, which was maths.

“Six months,” Blake replied. “You were struggling, I could tell. But don’t worry, you’ll soon get up to speed. Mademoiselle Chabrol is the best.”

“Yeah. She seemed like a…really nice lady.”

“How’s your maths?”

“Not bad,” Henry said with a lot less certainty than he might have done an hour earlier. “Do you know what we’re studying this term?”

Blake held open the door for him to enter the maths class. “Nothing too difficult: quadratic equations with integer coefficients.”

Heart sinking, Henry took a seat as the teacher at the front began to chalk up equations on the board that looked as if they belonged to the space programme. He was left behind from the
beginning, while the rest of the class had no problem answering the most complex questions. In fact, they seemed to have the answers even before the teacher asked them, hands shooting into the air,
desperate to provide the solution. Henry surreptitiously looked around for anyone else who was struggling, but saw no one. Every student was switched on, alert and fully engaged. In a normal class
there was certain to be a couple of kids sleeping through things at the back, but this class was nothing like normal. Christian was nowhere to be seen, leading Henry to wonder if he’d been
put in the wrong stream – was this some kind of genius-level group he’d been placed in by mistake? And if so, where were all the normal kids?

The remaining classes of the day were exactly the same.

In History the teacher presented a text written in Old English that Henry might have had a chance of following if the class hadn’t whizzed through it as if it was an easy reader. Science
was an analysis of Einstein’s
e=mc
²
that left Henry behind after about two minutes. It was a relief when the final class of the day came around: Phys Ed.
Finally,
something I can do,
Henry thought with relief as he got into his kit in the changing rooms.

“Tough day, Ward?” a familiar voice asked from a couple of lockers down. He looked round to see Steve, the kid he’d met at the pool. “I saw you in French class. What was
it you said?
Uh…je…suis…un…student…
”

Several of the other boys in the changing room laughed.

“Leave him alone, Steve,” Blake said, appearing at Henry’s side. Steve waved his arm as if it wasn’t worth it and started talking to his mates in low tones. They cracked
up at something he said.
Great,
Henry thought,
even the jocks around here are smarter than me.