Through the scratched and grimy van window, Luke saw Millmoor squatting under a cloud of its own making. He slid back the tiny pane for a better look, but it didn’t make much difference. The muck wasn’t on the glass. It was in the air itself. The light was pallid and unclean.
They were a twenty-minute drive from home, but even back in Manchester you could taste Millmoor when the wind blew in the wrong direction. Sometimes it was an acrid chemical stink from the industrial zone. Other days, the whiff was foul and rotting, from the meat processing plant. If you were really unlucky and the breeze was strong, it was a gut-churning cocktail of both. On those days, Mum would keep all the windows shut.
There’d be no shutting out Millmoor now. The road dipped and rose, and there was the slavetown again, twice as large, filling the horizon. Chimneys lanced the sky, poking cruelly at a sagging belly of smog. A distant flare stack haemorrhaged flame.
The van was waved through an outer sentry ring then stopped at a second checkpoint, where they all got out. A blank-eyed young soldier with a gun strapped conspicuously across his chest asked Luke his name.
‘Luke Hadley,’ he replied, but the final syllable came out as a gasp as Kessler’s baton drove into his midriff.
‘You are Hadley E-1031,’ the man barked. ‘Now tell him your name.’
‘Hadley E-1031,’ Luke repeated, stunned by more than just the pain of the blow.
From the checkpoint they filed across the car park of a vehicle depot. On the other side was a low, wide building faced with grubby white plastic – a medical centre.
‘I’m really not looking forward to this,’ said one of the blokes who’d arrived with Luke, an overweight guy, pale and stubbly. ‘It’s gotta be the worst thing.’
‘What is it?’ Luke asked.
‘Didn’t you read the booklet?’ the man said. ‘Blimey, don’t you know nothing about this place, kiddo?’
‘I’m not supposed to be here,’ Luke muttered, realizing not quite in time that this wasn’t the best thing to say.
‘That’s right,’ said Kessler, who was there again, his baton prodding Luke forward. ‘Hadley E-1031 here thinks he’s too good for the likes of you. He thinks he should be down south, mixing with his Equals. He thinks there’s been a mistake.’
He mimicked Luke’s words, making them sound prissy and girlish, and the pasty guy laughed, all sympathy gone.
The ‘worst thing’ was pretty sick-making, but Luke already had a hunch that Millmoor would throw a few things his way to rival it. A nurse rolled up his sleeve, prodded the skin of his forearm, then picked up what looked like a staple gun. Except it didn’t shoot out just one needle, but stabbed a dozen of them deep into Luke’s flesh. When the device lifted away, there was a neat matrix of welling blood. Kessler wasn’t around, so Luke risked a question.
‘It’s your ID chip, pet,’ the nurse replied. ‘Sits nice and deep in the meat. So they know where you are.’
She bandaged a square of gauze over his arm then scanned it with a small rectangular wand. Luke couldn’t see the readout panel, but he heard it beep and saw a green flash.
‘That’s you done. Here, have one of these.’ The woman pulled a small jar of sweets from a drawer in her nursing station. ‘I usually keep them for the little kids, but I reckon you deserve one. Only sixteen, and here without your family. I didn’t think that was allowed.’
Luke took one, thinking of his little sister as he did so. Daisy’s skinny arm would barely be big enough for the chip gun. He would have watched over her night and day in this place. He knew Abi would do the same in Kyneston.
From the med centre, Kessler herded them on foot through Millmoor’s streets. There were no vehicles other than trundling buses and gleaming jeeps blazoned with the slavetown’s insignia and ‘Security’ written in vivid crimson. Uniformed men stood on street corners, palms fondling the handles of their batons and the butts of their stun guns. Everyone else wore shapeless tunics and boilersuits and walked with their heads down. It was difficult to discern either age or gender.
Even when Luke succeeded in catching someone’s glance, they turned away quickly. He couldn’t believe this place. Mancunians were a feisty bunch – how was it possible they could be this cowed? However long he spent in Millmoor, Luke swore, he was never going to stop looking people in the eye.