iBoy

the lift doors open for him.

'Thanks, mate,' he said, getting into the lift. He looked at me. 'Harvey, isn't it?'

'Yeah ...'

He rummaged through his bag and passed me a couple of letters. 'Here you go.'

I looked at the envelopes. They were addressed to Gram — Ms Connie Harvey.

'They're not for me,' I started to say, passing them back to the postman. 'They're for my —' But the lift doors were already closing. 'Cheers, mate,' the postman said.

It's only a ten-minute walk to school, but it was cold and rainy that morning, with an icy wind blowing around the streets, so I headed for the bus stop opposite the tower and hoped that I wouldn't have to wait too long. And I was lucky. A bus was pulling up just as I got there. I got on, showed the driver my pass, and shuffled up to the back.

The bus moved off.

It was 08:58:11 now, a bit late for going to school, so the bus was pretty empty, and I had the back seat all to myself.

I looked at the two letters the postman had given me.

If, like Gram and me, you don't have much money, and you're used to getting bills and final reminders, you soon get to know what they look like. And I knew straight away that both of these letters were final demands.

I opened them up. It was no big deal, privacy-wise. I mean, I don't open any of Gram's personal letters, but she's perfectly OK with me opening anything else that's addressed to her. As she often says, most of it's just rubbish anyway. But these letters weren't rubbish. And they weren't final demands either — they were final final demands. One of them was from the council, informing Gram that she was three months behind on the rent; the other was a summons to appear at the Magistrates' Court to explain why she hadn't paid her council tax.

The bus juddered to a stop. We were stuck in traffic, and we'd only moved about twenty metres from the bus stop. The traffic was jammed up all the way along Crow Lane, and I knew it would have been a lot quicker to get off and walk, but it was cold and wet out there, and warm in here ... and it didn't matter if I was late for school anyway. No one was expecting me.

I looked through the window for a moment, gazing out at the industrial wasteground that stretches between Crow Lane and the High Street. It was the same as ever: acres of cracked concrete, piles of gravel, the burnt-out carcasses of stolen cars and abandoned skips ...

A dull grey desert under a dull grey sky.

The bus got moving again, and I closed my eyes and thought about Gram's money problems, letting my iBrain do its stuff.

Gram didn't have an online bank account, but that didn't matter. My digitized neurons just hacked into her bank and accessed her account details, and I quickly found out that she was ?6,432.77 overdrawn, her cash card had been cancelled, and that she was no longer allowed to write cheques for anything. I wondered how she'd been managing for the last few months. Credit cards, maybe? I hacked into her various credit card accounts and — yes — they were all maxed out. I checked the statements, which confirmed that all she'd been using the credit cards for was day-to-day living — cash withdrawals, food shop­ping, stuff like that — and when I went back to check her bank account again, I realized that the reason she was overdrawn was not that she'd been spending too much, she'd simply not been getting enough money in. She just wasn't earning enough for us to live on.

It was a big surprise to me. I mean, Gram had never earned tons of money or anything, and we'd always had to struggle to make ends meet, but we'd always just about managed. Now though ... well, this looked pretty serious.

The bus suddenly jerked and shuddered, and I opened my eyes and realized that we'd just pulled up at the school bus stop. I saved all the information about Gram's finances, made a mental note to sort it out later, then shut myself down, grabbed my bag, and got off the bus.

Crow Lane Secondary is a huge sprawling grey place that's always looked as if it's only half finished. Bits of it are forever being refurbished, or torn down, or renovated, and there are so many Portakabins piled up all over the place that it feels like you're going to school at a building site.

Instead of going in through the main entrance, I headed down a side street and went in through one of the workmen's gates. This led me round the back of the main building towards the old sports hall, which wasn't used any more ... well, not for sports, anyway. It was supposed to have been demolished years ago, but for some reason they've never got round to it, and for as long as I can remember it's been one of those places where the bad kids hang out, the kids who don't want anyone to know where they are or what they're doing, the kids who don't want to go to school but can't afford to be caught on the streets.

Kids like Davey Carr.

Davey was what they call a persistent truant, and he'd been caught so many times that his mum was in danger of facing prosecution and a possible jail sentence. And, obviously, Davey's mum didn't want to go to jail, which was why — a couple of months ago — she'd given him her version of a final warning, which basically consisted of heating the shit out of him. After that, Davey would go to school every morning, turn up for registration, and spend most of the rest of the day hanging around in places he wasn't supposed to be. Like the old sports hall.

And Davey, of course, was the only reason I was going to school that morning. I had no intention of bringing home any text books. What did I need with text books? I knew everything there was to know. I could probably pass every exam in the world, at world-record speed ... with my eyes closed. I could win University Challenge on my own. I could, if I wanted to, win every quiz show on TV — Countdown, Mastermind, Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? I could win them all...

But for now, all I wanted to do was find Davey Carr.

It wasn't difficult. My iSenses had been tracking his mobile all morning, and the signal now was telling me that he was in a little room at the back of the old sports hall. And that's where I found him. He was sitting on an old wooden chair, smoking a cigarette, yapping away to a couple of young Crow kids. The kids, who were hang­ing on his every word, clearly thought that Davey was some kind of god or something.

'Hey, Davey,' I said, walking into the room. 'How's it going?'

The two young kids jumped at the sound of my voice, and even Davey looked a little bit startled for a moment, but he soon relaxed when he realized that it was only me.

'All right, Tom?' he said casually. 'What are you doing here? I thought —'

'You can go,' I said to the two kids.

They both stared at me, and although they were only about twelve years old, their eyes were already cold and hard.

'Go on,' I told them. 'Fuck off.'

They glanced at Davey, he nodded, and they reluctantly sauntered out. I watched them go, studying them closely, comparing them to my iMemories of the young kids in the video of Lucy's attack, but I was pretty sure that these two kids hadn't been there. I waited until they'd left the room ... then waited some more. They both had their mobiles on, and I could tell from the signals that they hadn't gone anywhere — they'd stopped outside the room and were waiting to hear what happened.

'Listen, Tom —' Davey started to say.

'Tell them to go,' I said.

'What?'

'The two kids, they're still out there. Tell them to go.'

Davey looked puzzled for a moment, trying to work out how I knew, then he just shrugged and called out, 'Hey! You two ... fuck off. Now!'

I heard muffled whispers, then shuffling feet. . . then, from beyond the room, 'Sorry, Davey ... we was just... we was just going, OK?'

And, with that, they were gone.