THE FEARLESS

HOPE:CHAPTER 7

                                                        CASS

Captain Denning jumps up, his chair screeching against the floor. 'What?'

'We have a breach,' Patroller Fleet gasps again. A chill creeps up the back of my neck.

'A Fearless?' Captain Denning comes round the table, drawing his gun.

'No, just a guy, but we don't know how he got here – there are no boats anywhere.'

Patroller Cary grabs the clipboard he's been writing our marks on, and the Patrollers hurry from the room.

As soon as they've gone, Rob goes round the table and flops down in one of the chairs. 'Goddammit. Why can't this be over already?'

A silence falls, broken only by the sound of him stabbing one of the Patrollers' pencils repeatedly into the table. Tock . . . tock . . . tock.

'Do you think it is a Fearless?' Shelley says, sounding anxious. In all the years I've lived on Hope, we've only ever had one breach. It was in the middle of the night, a few months after we got here. My memories of it are jumbled: lights flashing, shouts and gunfire, and Jori, who was just a tiny baby then, screaming and screaming until I went to pick him up. Mum lay on her bed throughout the whole thing, her face turned to the wall, and I thought she was asleep until, in the moonlight coming through the window, I saw her eyes were open.

I never found out the full details of what happened that night, or how the Fearless managed to get on to the island, but after that, the Patrol doubled their numbers and traded for more guns.

Outside, we hear shouts.

Rob chucks the pencil down. 'Screw this. I wanna know what's going on.'

He stomps over to the door. 'Anyone else coming?' he says over his shoulder.

Sol shrugs. 'Yeah, why not?'

'I'm staying here,' Shelley says. 'Captain Denning'll go ballistic if he sees us.'

Andrej nods in agreement, hanging back. Marissa looks around at me, eyebrows raised.

We follow Sol and Rob to the door.

A crowd has gathered outside the Meeting Hall. No kids, I'm relieved to see – the Patrol must have told the teachers to keep them indoors – but plenty of adults. In the middle of them all, Captain Denning and Patroller Cary are struggling with someone.

Someone doing the shouting.

Sol, Marissa, Rob and I go closer. I see, with a shock, that it's a boy about our own age, dressed in faded combats, a patched blue hoodie that looks damp at the cuffs, and battered black boots. He has thick black hair with a long fringe falling over his face like a curtain and an eyepatch over his right eye.

'Let me go!' he yells, still struggling. 'I'm not here to steal anything, I swear!'

He has a Scottish accent, a broader version of James Craig's, our head Maintenance Engineer.

'Shut up,' Captain Denning says. The boy bucks and twists, and despite the fact that Captain Denning is almost twice his size, nearly gets free. Patroller Yuen steps forward and points her gun at the boy, who goes still, his face twisted in a scowl and his eyes – or rather his eye, because only his left is visible – glinting with anger.

Captain Denning turns to Patroller Fleet. 'Where did you find him?'

'In the Shudders. We heard shouts. A wall had collapsed, and he was trapped.'