Excerpt:

Prologue

There were essays to write. There were always essays. It was one o’clock in the morning and Miranda’s eyes were slowing drifting out of focus as she tried to find one more coherent point to make about the civil rights movement before she fell asleep. It wasn’t working. Hunched over her desk with the window wide open, her head drooped and slowly, slowly, the eyes closed. The pen fell from her hand and, as it hit the desk, the nib broke open. Under the hand of the sleeping girl, ink spread over the paper in a dark cloud.

 
Chapter One

“You don’t believe that.”

“I do, though!”

“You don’t.”

“I do!”

“No...”

Miranda leant back in her seat, shaking her head. The move would have been a lot smoother if the bus hadn’t chosen that second to jolt sideways, throwing her almost off the seat. Grabbing hold of her friend in time, she managed to prevent her fall, Lydia squealing at almost being pulled over too. Before her friend had time to complain, Miranda moved back to the matter in hand.

“Look, just because it was in the Metro doesn’t mean anything. They could have caught him at the wrong time. It could have been his cousin or something. Or it could be from years ago, his parents might have dragged him along.”

“But he’s in school uniform! You can see it as well as I can, it’s Brian all right.”

“It doesn’t matter what I can see, the fact is that Brian would never be in a position to have that photo taken. At an art gallery? Never.”

“I’ve got photo evidence!”

“You’ve got evidence from the Metro, and come on, do we believe anything in there?”

“We believe everything in there. It’s the source of all knowledge, remember?”

“Fair enough.” Miranda sighed, leaning back more carefully this time in order not to be thrown about. She closed her eyes briefly, heavy make-up attempting to disguise the bags under her eyes. It wasn’t doing a very good job.

“How was detention?” asked Lydia.

“Same as ever. I got the essay done, finally. He had a bit of a go at me, obviously, asking me what I’d been doing in that lesson, said I’d had plenty of time to finish it and it was just unacceptable. And he says he’s writing to my parents if I don’t hand another one in on time.”

Lydia winced. “Ooh, that’s harsh. I know my parents would kill me if that happened.”

“I don’t know if mine... yeah, they probably would, I guess. They think I’m doing tons of work because I’m up late. Yours... yeah, I know what yours are like, they’re kind of all-controlling.”

“Yeah...” said Lydia, uncomfortable. “They’re not so bad.”

“I remember the time I came over to your house, for dinner; they really didn’t like the way I ate, did they? And the way they make you tidy your room the entire time; yeah, I can imagine they’d murder you if you got a letter from school.”

“Well... I don’t know, they’d probably be ok with it.”

“You sure?”

“No, it’s just they... never mind. They wouldn’t be too happy, no.” There was a pause. “Oh, look, it’s Brian’s stop. See if he’s getting this bus.”

“Yeah, then you can show him the photo, see what he says. He can’t have been at an exhibition, it’s just so not him.”

“No, we can’t show him! We can keep the evidence, blackmail him so he doesn’t know how bad it is.”

“Don’t be silly, we’ll show him. It’s rubbish anyway. So we can prove that and get it over with.”

It was Lydia’s turn to slide back into her seat, resting her head against the panel of glass. She shifted around a little to look for Brian at the bus stop. He was there; swinging round the pole coming out of the seat, he sat down behind them, leaning down onto the backs of their seats.

“Hi, Brian.”

“Hi, you two.” He saw Lydia glancing oddly between him and Miranda. “What is it?” There was another pause. “What?”

“Lydia’s got something to show you,” Miranda said with a definite note of glee.

“No, I don’t, it’s nothing.”

“You do, come on, get it back out of your file. Oh, don’t be so silly about things,” and Miranda grabbed at the file and extracted a piece of newspaper before Lydia could stop her.

“Miranda...”

“Look at this.”

“It’s the Metro. What’s so exciting about that?”

“Look closer. See that guy, standing in front of that painting? Now, doesn’t he look familiar?”

Brian squinted for a bit. Then he looked up. “Do you think that’s me?”

“See,” said Miranda. “I told you it wasn’t. He wouldn’t be seen dead at an art gallery.” Lydia said nothing. “You know, I quite wanted to go to that one.”

“What was it? Where was it?”

“Like you’re interested. At the National Gallery.”

“Are you going to go?”

“Why do you want to know? I know you hate art, absolute fact. Look, it’s fine, I know you have your interests and I have mine, and I don’t ask anyone to get mixed up in those.”

“It just looked cool, that’s all. Like, ink paintings or whatever. Could be I have a deeper side, and am in fact fascinated by all art everywhere?”

“You?” Miranda stopped suddenly, almost physically moving back. She closed her eyes again, gripping the bridge of her nose and rubbing the corners of her eyes. “I’m sorry. I’m being a total cow this morning. I was to you, too, about your parents. Sorry. I’m just... tired, you know? Don’t feel like me this morning.”

“Hey, it’s ok,” said Lydia, coming forward and giving her a sort of half-hug, as best she could in the cramped bus seats. “I don’t mind, seriously. You look so tired.”

“Yeah, you do, actually,” added Brian. “I mean, not like you’ve got bags or anything. It’s just a look in your eyes. You look... kind of ill.”

“I am ill. I’m wasting away!” She flung her head down onto her palm dramatically. “I’ll be fine. I just can’t wait for half term, that’s all.”

“God, we’ve barely started this term!” said Brian.

“And then straight after that we’ve got exams,” said Lydia.

“Oh, don’t. Seriously, just don’t mention them. I don’t think I can cope with that stress as well. I mean, GCSEs? They actually matter, don’t they?”

“We’re just screwed. There’s nothing more to say on the subject. We’ll all fail and go and work in McDonald’s together.” Brian laughed at his own joke, but Miranda didn’t join in.

“I’m saving money, you know,” she said, slightly dreamily. “If I fail, I’m just gonna leave, I’ll go to America or something and start all over. Maybe I can...”

“Come on, we’re at school. Come on!” called Brian over his shoulder. “Stop dreaming! We’ve got practise papers to do!”

“Oh, god. Biology. I haven’t revised, you know. It’s going to be terrible.”

“Come on, you’ll miss the stop! You can moan about Biology later!”

Groaning, she shifted herself from her seat and left the bus just as the doors closed.

School was just another day of wandering around, not really paying attention. She didn’t dread some of her classes as much as usual, as detention had meant she’d actually done her homework that time, but there was still something wrong. She did feel ill. It might have been the test later, making her anxious; she knew that things like that, tests and important things that worried her, often had a bit of a physical side effect. Maybe it was that.

At lunchtime, she went up to the nurse, using some excuse to get a couple of paracetamol – if you said you had a headache, she recommended running around outside in the fresh air, it was no use saying what was really wrong – and added that to two she’d had in her purse as well. Recently it’d felt like no painkillers were helping at all, as though her system was rejecting them, so when she used them she took more than she should, in the hope they’d have an effect. They didn’t.

After lunch was Biology, where they were doing timed practise papers. Despite revision she couldn’t remember any of it, tried to write down whatever she could think of.

The test dragged on. The classroom was stuffy, not helping her concentration; and she couldn’t remember a thing. It was going badly, so badly, she would fail and there would be letters home and she’d have to cope with that, too. She tried a genetic diagram, that should have been easy enough, but she couldn’t seem to get it right. And she was so tired... Her eyes began to glaze over, smudging the letters she was writing so she could barely see them.

Then her eyes snapped open. It wasn’t her eyes. The letters themselves were barely recognisable, drowned in ink from her leaking pen. Except it wasn’t that. Ink was dripping down her finger.

Pain shot through her torso. Ink was dripping from her whole right hand, beads of it coming right out of the skin. She lifted her other hand, croaked “Nurse?” and at a nod from the teacher, invigilating, bored, she fled, walking to the door and running as soon as she’d reached it.

Instead of upstairs for the nurse, she ran for the toilets, dripping ink as she went. Through sheer luck, nobody was in her path, nobody saw her. They wouldn’t have recognised her if they had.

In the toilets, ready to be sick or to collapse from the pain shooting again and again through her stomach and now up through to her neck, she caught sight of herself in the mirror and fell backwards, scrambling towards a cubicle and locking herself in before falling onto the floor.

In the mirror, she’d seen what had to be her face. But it could have been melting. It had been a liquid mass of blue, oozing out of her pores and making her almost unrecognisable. Ink was pouring out of her now, through every inch of her skin, making a pool around her as she lay slumped in the tiny cramped space she was locked into. Instead of screaming – she couldn’t, someone would come and find her like this – she whimpered, into her sleeve. After a few minutes of watching ink bleed out of her, she passed out.

-

She came to less than a minute later, soaked through, shivering. Putting her fingers to her face, she could feel it was a mask of wet and drying liquid, sticky as blood. She groaned, letting her hand flop back down into the puddle.

And the ink began to retreat. There was a huge but dull ache now in her legs, her arms and especially her stomach; her torso felt strangely empty; her head just hurt, so much so that she barely noticed it at first, until it became obvious – and there was another, sharper pain, in her hand.

Without thinking, she began scratching at it – there had been a small injury, she’d fallen a week or so ago and grazed her knuckles – and now she opened up the wound. The ink poured back in through it. Somehow, somehow, she was directing it, pulling it back into herself, and although her knuckles ached where she’d just torn off the scab, it wasn’t the same deep-down terrifying hurt of something forcing its way back through her skin.

Slowly the pool retreated, centring around her hand. Her torso began to feel less strangely empty, less bereft, and the pain receded. A little while later – no way of knowing how long – it was gone. There was no residue on her clothes; only a tiny hint, almost a shadow, of the curve of where the edge of the ink had been.

Outside of the cubicle, her face looked normal. A little pale, but there was no hint of blue, just a few flakes in her hair which she brushed away. The headache still hadn’t gone. Shaking slightly, she headed for the tennis courts, where there were some benches. She could sit down there in the fresh air and try to get her bearings.

The memory of pain was still very clear, agony to add to that of her aching head. The breeze was helping, a little. But what had happened back there? She’d been... bleeding, ink, it seemed. She didn’t quite know how she knew it had been ink; the colour, maybe, but that didn’t explain it at all. She just knew.

And it had hurt; she’d felt like something was being torn out of her. That hollow feeling in her stomach, as though she’d been sick; the feeling of being empty, of bleeding to death, maybe.

Still shaking a little, she pulled out an ink cartridge she had in her pocket – she’d taken to carrying them around as she got through them so quickly recently – and took out an earring from her ear. With the point of it she poked a hole in the top of the cartridge and held it sideways, a centimetre from the tip of her finger.

A small bubble of ink grew out of the cartridge as she tipped it sideways until it was almost touching her skin. Just as slowly, it moved over to her finger and pooled on the tip before disappearing, making her shudder. Again, she could feel the strange sensation of liquid soaking through her skin – this wasn’t as painful as it had been though. She felt almost like she was directing it, making it slide gently through the surface rather than forcing its way through. After a few moments, the ink cartridge was drained dry. She stared.

Just at that moment, the bell rang. She jumped up, with a half-muttered cry of “Biology”, and raced back to the classroom. Hopefully the excuse that she’d been throwing up, or maybe that she had the flu or something, would get her out of trouble.
 
Chapter Two

“So what happened, then? Did he yell at you?”

They were sitting in one of the five Starbucks’ within easy reach of the school, the one with the comfiest armchairs. Six of them were sprawled over the leather sofas, with at least one asleep and probably several others going that way. A couple of coffees were left fairly abandoned on the table, the excuse for being able to sit in there in the first place. Miranda was on the floor, leaning against the arm of one of the sofas, with her knees drawn up close and a mug of hot chocolate nestled in her hands. For April, it was a cold day; the weather was turning worse and it was windy, very cold outside. She wished she’d brought a coat to school.

“Nah, just a bit annoyed because I’d have to redo the test. He says he’s going to have to put a new paper together as I saw the old one, so I could go home and look up the answers.”

“You wouldn’t, though,” said Lydia from somewhere above her, enveloped in the depths of the sofa.

“Just cause I wouldn’t be bothered to.” Miranda was trying to keep up with the conversation, but she couldn’t really concentrate and like Tony over the other side, she was half asleep already.

“It wasn’t exactly hard, was it?” said Amy.

“Not too bad,” said Lydia, “Genetics isn’t exactly the hardest thing we cover, though.”

“Yeah, I mean all it is, is just genetic diagrams and then working out the obvious stuff. Mitosis is like nothing. You just memorise it and you’re fine.”

“I... well, I don’t know,” said Lydia. “I swear I got the stages mixed up because, like, interphase was the first one on the left, wasn’t it?”

“No, they don’t start with interphase, interphase is normal cell stage, like when they’re just sitting around doing respiration and Mrs Gren and whatever, so they don’t put it on the diagrams. First one they show is prophase. And that’s when you start to see the DNA, yeah?”

Miranda faded out of the conversation. She closed her eyes so they would leave her for a bit, although she wasn’t asleep yet; probably she should be listening and working out the stages of mitosis and whatever, but she couldn’t really be bothered. She’d revise before she actually had to do the test.

Above and around her, her friends moved on to talking about the head teacher and some rubbish he’d been talking about in assembly, to which she wasn’t paying much attention. If they said something interesting she’d join in. They stayed like that for a little while, until someone pulled her mug of hot chocolate out of her hands.

“Oi! That’s my hot chocolate!” she said, opening her eyes with a start and shifting forward indignantly. “Oh, it’s you,” and she leant back again.

“Sorry, I just... you weren’t asleep? Looked like you were going to spill it all over you. Would have been painful, it’s hot. Sorry.” He handed the mug back to her.

“It’s ok, David. David. Thanks.”

The boy sat down on the floor beside one of the armchairs. She could never work out how he wanted his name to be pronounced – he was French, so it wasn’t supposed to be David, it was Daveeeed – and he’d never say or complain if she was doing it wrong. Most people settled on the French way of saying it, putting the emphasis on the second syllable instead of the first; but you had to change the pronunciation of the i as well, it was more like ee as in sheep. Sometimes she’d forget and just call him David, though, and because he didn’t complain when she did, and some people called him that all the time, she didn’t know which was right. Most of the time, she tried to say it the proper way. But today was... she still tried to correct herself, even so. In the year above, she felt some vague need due to that to impress him, or seem a little older than her age, despite the fact they’d known each other for a while and they were practically the same age.

“Hey, how are you? I heard you were ill earlier.”

“Oh, I’m fine, I’m fine now. Just felt kind of rubbish in the middle of the Bio test. It’s been making me feel sick all day, I think.”

“Aw, poor Miranda. I know what’ll cheer you up!”

“Ooh, sketchbook! Gimme gimme gimme!” Miranda loved looking through David’s sketchbooks; he got through tons of them because he used them so much, sketching and painting and writing down snippets of things all the time. He drew almost anything he saw, and anything he could think of, which made them brilliant to look through. But it tended to be difficult to see the whole of one, as he’d move on to a new one so quickly.

“Hey, look at this first.” He flicked through a couple of pages, finally pausing at a page with some paintings he’d printed out and stuck in. “This guy, here, he’s called David – same as me.”

“David? You call him by his first name?”

“It’s his surname. Jacques Louis David. That’s him there, a self-portrait.”

“He looks a bit... sort of grim. He’s got a napkin tied around his neck.”

“It’s a cravat! It’s like a sort of eighteenth century tie. And he doesn’t look grim, he looks serious. But he’s very cool. Anyway, I found him because of the name thing, and I’ve decided I really like him! He’s quite into Romans and that sort of thing, you know, classical mythology, so I’m going to look a whole load of stuff up, might even do a painting of Romans or something like that.” There was a momentary pause.

“Is this going somewhere?” David looked almost shocked for a second.

“I just thought you’d like to see it. Thought you’d be interested, you know.”

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m just...” She briefly put her hands to her face and pressed them there, breathing in. “It’s been a really long day. Sorry. I didn’t mean it. Sorry.”

“It’s ok, it’s fine. Hey, you have some ink on your face, just...” He reached out to indicate where it was, then frowned. “Oh, maybe not. No, sorry, I think I was just seeing things. It must have been a reflection.”

Miranda took a last sip from her hot chocolate, then levered herself off the floor. “I think I’m going to go home.”

“You’re not going to look at my sketchbook?”

“If I stay here any longer I’m going to make everyone angry with me. I can’t seem to stop being... just being horrible, today. I’ll go home, feel better tomorrow.”

“Yeah, ok. Friday, tomorrow, almost the weekend. Don’t worry.”

“Yes, Friday, wahey! Just more work, slaving away behind the till all the weekend. Lots of fun.”

“It’ll be fine. Look after yourself.” She hugged him, and picked up her bag. “I hope you feel better tomorrow.”

“I’m sure I will. I need to sleep it off, that’s all. See you.”

It was actually warmer outside the coffee shop than inside it, as the air conditioning had been on in some feeble hope that summer had arrived. It certainly hadn’t showed up yet. Miranda trudged out and towards the bus stop, without thinking about anything in particular. She didn’t really want to let her mind dwell on things; and there was homework to do that evening, anyway.

The bus journey was uneventful. The roadside went past in a haze of pedestrians and takeaway restaurants and the threat of rain, faces reflected in the bus window. Like that morning, Miranda almost missed her stop because she wasn’t concentrating on where she was. In the same sort of daze, she wandered slowly home. There was nobody in when she turned the key and dumped her stuff in the corridor.

After a few minutes doing nothing, she tried to start doing her homework; everything was laid out on the kitchen table, all the subjects, the Biology revision she’d meant to do the evening before and had never got around to, English and Spanish... There had been detention the previous evening to get things done, but somehow they always piled up again. It was getting serious now, too, with exams coming up, and anything that had been interesting about school was lost in a pile of practise papers, exam technique and revision, always the endless revision. Somehow it didn’t seem exactly worth it.

Trying to shake away her tiredness, she picked up her pen and poised it over a sheet of paper, in a vague attempt to start making genetics notes. She scribbled down a few things, going through the book to find whatever seemed important, before she stopped again.

The fountain pen was resting in her hand. Out of curiosity more than anything else, she put the tip of her other finger against the nib, and... concentrated. Another ball of ink grew from it, settling on her fingertip but this time instead of sinking in, she tried to hold it. Not thinking, but feeling it; she could feel the tiny inkblot rolling around in the air, rotating slightly from the air movement in the room. She pulled it back over her hand, in spirals and twists, and it left a trail of blue behind it, like a tribal tattoo, Celtish or something, the ink marking her. As it ran out and stopped halfway along her thumb, the ink dried; she felt it settle for a second, then sink back into her skin. This time it didn’t feel painful at all; more as though she’d gained something, something that belonged to her had returned. Somehow she could feel it somewhere in her body, spreading out under the skin and settling back into her. As though it belonged there. It was strangely comforting.

She managed to get her concentration back to her work and did a few practise diagrams, trying to memorise the cycles and the images that she had forgotten that afternoon. Eventually they seemed embedded in her head so she moved on, and moved on and moved on, trying to finish everything before she’d become too tired. Time hardly seemed to be passing.

A long while later, she heard the keys turn in the door and the clatter of her mother arriving. “Miranda, I’m home!”

“Yes, Mum, hi, I’ll come say hi in a second. I’m just finishing something.”

“That’s alright, that’s fine, I’ll come through.” Clatter, clatter went the heels. “Oh, look what a mess you’ve made of the kitchen.”

“It’s fine, Mum, I’ll clear it up when I’ve done this. It’ll only take a minute.”

“Miranda, dear, what’s that on your face? Oh, you’ve managed to get ink all over yourself! How did you manage that? It looks like you’ve been rubbing your pen all over your face – and your hands too...”

“Really? Ok, I’ll go and wash it all off. Sorry.” She stood up to go to the bathroom, hoping that the ink wouldn’t sink into her face while her mother was watching; that couldn’t be explained away easily. “No, Mum, don’t tidy away my stuff, I will do it if you give me a second to clean myself up.”

Her mother called up the stairs, “Well, what do you expect me to do? I can’t make dinner with all your rubbish all over the place; come down and clean it up!”

“I will, Mum, but you told me to clean my face so I’m going to go and do that first!” She rushed into the bathroom and turned the tap on, while looking at her face in the mirror and glancing down towards her hands. She hadn’t even noticed that it had got all over the place. Concentrating, she tried to push it back in; but as it disappeared from her face it still swirled underneath the skin, like blue tides. In places over her face it cropped up again.

An idea struck. With a cup in her other hand, she put her palm over it and tried to move all the excess ink; something was telling her that there was too much ink in her system, not that that made any sense at all, but maybe she could drain a little of it. As she watched, drops began to fall from her hand, slowly at first but speeding up until the cup was filled. The liquid rippled, darkly, as the last drop fell.

Quickly she dashed to her bedroom and put the cup down on her bedside table before running back down the stairs again to see her mother trying to push her disorganised bundle of homework into a corner of the table.

“Mum, I did say I’d do it. There is a way I’ve organised it, seriously.”

“Well then can you organise it off my table, so I can start making dinner. It’s not like you’re going to cook it for me, is it?”

“I can if you want me to!” said Miranda angrily, shoving her files back into her bag randomly and creating a huge jam of paper.

“Darling, I know as well as anyone you can’t cook at all, not one bit.”

“I can! When I’m on my own in the house I do sandwiches and stuff.”

“Miranda, you can’t even fry an egg. There’s no point arguing it, there really isn’t.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake. I’m not listening to this.”

“Don’t slam the door!” said her mother after her as she left the kitchen.

It was true, though. The only reason for it was that her mother had never bothered to teach her, saying that she wanted peace in the kitchen and that she’d only get under her feet, as she couldn’t cook anyway. Miranda didn’t really want to learn to cook, she was aware she’d have to do it someday, but the only time it ever annoyed her was when her mother reminded her of it. Apart from that, she didn’t really care. She got fed lunch at school and dinner at home, so what was the point, anyway?

Grumbling vaguely to herself, Miranda lay down on her bed and pulled one of the books out of her bag. It was something or other she was supposed to be revising for Chemistry, and after the disastrous test that day she didn’t particularly want to have a repeat. So she tried her normal tactic when she didn’t really understand something, memorising it. Chemistry she found a little easier than Biology, most of the time. There was something in it that was a bit more logical, or made sense to her, at least. But it tended to just evade her. It didn’t help that David, having experienced the study of Chemistry at a higher level, would break off in any explanation to say “Although that’s not really