She had watched them every night. Like clockwork, even with the shifting season, she was there. Every afternoon before Curfew locked the dorm they now shared with the other Zam graduates, Kayda had watched Chimma open the toilet window, and place a wedge into the frame, keeping it open. Then every night as they went to bed, climbed out that skibbing window.

  After the first few nights, Kayda had followed her through the window.

  She knew now that Chimma was meeting Denzin. It had to be him.

  Working in the biology lab, the first thing they’d taught her was how the designing happened. There was no way on earth that her twin brother had been designed. It was beyond possible.

  That explained a lot. But it opened up so many other questions that she didn’t know how to answer. The Greymen were disabled people who wanted to serve, and didn’t want to be seen. Denzin might be thick and clumsy and a whole heap of trouble, but he wasn’t disabled. And if he were meeting Chimma each night, he didn’t mind being seen.

  All this she knew when she was this side of the Checkpoint. But as soon as she passed through the cubicle, all that information locked itself firmly away inside her brain. Instantly, because he was a Greyman, she had to fight the urge to avert her eyes from him. Or to even forget everything she’d learnt about Greymen.

  Why did going through the Checkpoint change her thinking? Kayda’s brain was whirring away, trying to make sense of it.

  So she began to ask questions. She was curious, she said, and wanted to learn everything she could to serve her City and her Pendrakon to the best of her ability. When she put it like that, the scientists applauded her desire to learn. And they began to answer her questions.

  A special gas filled the Checkpoint, she learned. Her thumbprint gave her access, and in those seconds she was in there, something was impressed on her, making her lock away certain information. And when she came the other way, the information was unlocked by the same gas.

  She still didn’t understand it. But Kayda was a step closer.

  Not wanting to risk losing her thoughts, she stood as close to the Boundary as she had ever allowed herself – pushing herself one step closer than the six metres she usually kept. It was a strain – she could feel the force almost physically pushing her back. But she also needed to watch this nightly secret meeting between Chimma and her brother while being able to remember what she’d seen.

  After a few minutes, the strain was too great, and Kayda stumbled backwards a couple of steps before catching herself. She saw them look up at her, and she turned her face from them.

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  It was time to show great interest in the Greymen, she decided. She clambered back through the toilet window, being careful to leave it wedged open for Chimma, and went to sleep.

  A notebook was what she needed. But they were obscenely difficult to get hold of. Then one day, she just happened to find an empty one lying around looking lonely on a very messy desk in the lab.

  It now belonged to Kayda, along with the pen she’d found on the floor under the desk. She began to write down the questions she wanted answers to, and the answers she’d found.

  When Chimma had returned distressed for a couple of nights in a row, she decided to follow her again, going through the Checkpoint. Unfortunately, once she reached the other side, she couldn’t make herself read some of the pages she’d written. But some she could.

  She followed Chimma all over the Under. She was obviously searching for Denzin and couldn’t find him. Then at last, they discovered him – Kayda had seen him first, and willed the silly woman to just turn around and find him! At last, she had chucked a stone his direction, and her eyes turned the right way. Kayda watched Chimma frantically trying to distract Denzin from scrubbing the docks so hard with that crazy contraption in front of him that she was surprised there was any wood left.

  So he’d been moved. That’s why Chimma had been upset.

  The other day, she’d learned Greymen weren’t all volunteers or badly disabled people. This page she could still read. Some were criminals. Turning them into Greymen was easier, cheaper and more useful to the City than locking them away.

  But Denzin wasn’t a criminal. An idiot, yes. But not that.

  She couldn’t read what the others were, though.

  “The ... gas” – she couldn’t make herself read that word this side of the Checkpoint – “has mind-altering qualities to it, rather like when a duckling imprints on the first being it sees when it hatches. The chemical that we use comes from that, actually. Very cleverly manufactured,” she’d been told by one of the biologists. “Trials have shown that the Greyman are wonderfully compliant with regular doses, along with ….” She couldn’t make herself read who else they were doing it to. “Reformed characters. Obedient. And most useful, if you ask me.” He had chuckled to himself as he had walked away.

  That must be what was in that mask that Denzin was wearing.

  But she’d watched as Chimma had taken it from him and put it on herself often enough. What did that mean? She wrote the comment down, and then watched her brother slowly drive away. Everything inside Kayda wanted to follow him. But she just couldn’t convince her feet to do it. Her eyes drifted unwillingly away from him, and when she was finally able to convince them to turn back, he was gone. The only way she remembered seeing him when she got back through the Checkpoint was when she read what she’d written while she’d watched.

  Now she knew for sure that the Checkpoint involved the gas. But there was no way to avoid it – she couldn’t cross the Boundary. Six metres either side – what Denzin always called ‘No-Man’s Zone’ – was a chasm that no living soul could cross by any means except through the Checkpoint.

  She wrapped her contraband notebook and pen in a scarf and tied it around her chest beneath her clothes, threw some water on her face and went to work.

  Kayda not only had her job to learn. She had her brother to save. Her crazy, stupid brother was yet again ruining her life.