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There’s another one on my left side. I put that on too. I feel like a tethered chicken. This is absurd. I’m starting to despair of getting things straightened out. What if the head teacher is as unhelpful as everyone else has been?
    I close my eyes and breathe in through my nose. I tell myself that everything will be fine. This madness has to end. I can’t see the other students because of the partition walls around me, but I can hear them tapping away at their computers. My neighbour to my left is so close that I can hear the quiet click-clicking of his stylus on his screen. I look at my own computer. The screen is showing a circuit board. The aim seems to be to drag components into the right position. I pick up my stylus to look as if I’m busy and start to rehearse in my head what I am going to say to convince the head teacher that I’m not crazy.
    ‘What’s your name?’ comes a whisper so low I barely catch it. It’s the boy in the compartment next to me.
    I open my mouth and then hesitate. ‘Blake,’ I whisper. ‘What’s yours?’
    ‘Ilex.’
    ‘Ilex, what’s an impeccable?’
    ‘They work for the enforcers. They’re big mean and—’
    I don’t get to hear what else he was going to say next because he lets out an almighty scream.
    ‘ AHHHHHHH! ’
    I try to jump out of my seat to help him, but it’s so cramped in the compartment that I can’t do it without opening the door and the door seems to be locked. ‘What is it? What’s wrong?’ I say.
    ‘Silence!’ says Enforcer Tong. ‘No talking, new boy. If you talk you will be punished too.’
    Punished? King Hell, how on earth did she make him scream like that without even coming near him? What kind of sick place is this? It’s like she zapped him. Surely he’d have to be wired up to some sort of electric device for that . . . Then I realise.
    An electric device, like the one attached to my wrists.

Hours later a buzzer sounds. The compartment doors click open. Enforcer Tong must control the locks from her computer. The other students are already scrambling out of their seats. They swarm past my compartment, pushing and shoving. I look up at the enforcer. She’s staring down at me.
    ‘Wait here, the head of the Academy, Enforcer Rice, will speak to you.’ She disappears through the door in the wall at the back of her cage. I pull off the silly bracelets and step out of my compartment to stretch my legs. My body aches from sitting in the cramped box and from yesterday’s beating.
    I thought everyone had gone, but a thickset boy with shaggy brown hair is stood looking at me. He gives me a half-smile.
    ‘Hello,’ I say.
    ‘Hello.’
    There’s a long pause.
    ‘I’m Ja— Blake,’ I say. How long is it going to be before I trip up on that one?
    ‘I know. I’m Ilex.’
    ‘Oh, I see. Sorry that you got that shock. I didn’t know we weren’t allowed to talk. Doesn’t exactly encourage free exchange of ideas does it? It’s bad enough that they keep you squeezed up in these pens. Why do they do that?’
    Ilex squints at me. His eyes follow the arm that I’ve gestured to the compartments with. ‘This is the grid,’ he says.
    ‘Uh huh, but why are you in the grid?’
    Ilex shrugs. ‘So we can’t get out.’
    I can’t believe he’s so casual about it.
    Before Ilex can say anything else, the door in the back of the cage at the front of the room opens and a muscular man with close-cut, grey hair appears. He looks annoyed. Ilex shoots another half-smile at me and then disappears out of the classroom door.
    ‘I am Enforcer Rice. I run the Academy. And you are new,’ the man says, as if I’ve done something particularly annoying. I don’t like the way they talk to you here.
    ‘I shouldn’t be here at all,’ I say. I’m about to launch into everything that has happened when I remember P.C. Barnes’ words about slipping through the net. Maybe I shouldn’t tell this man too much.
    Enforcer Rice is staring at me. He’s