The school's walls were screaming with so much information that they gave Kari a headache. No matter where she looked, they were covered in bulletin boards, posters, number lines, timelines, art projects, poetry projects, interactive calendars, pictographs of children; no thought was given for a place to rest the eyes. But it didn't seem to bother Haralda or Lizzie, who strode through the corridor with purpose.

They came to the Year 6 classroom, which was similarly slathered in letters and numbers and colours — there were even paintings hanging off clothes lines straight across the middle of the room. Children sat dutifully at tables in rows, watching three of their cohorts at the front, who had hijacked the teacher's computer and were using it to project a video of a dancing cat onto the one blank wall in the room.

As soon as Haralda walked in, the childrens' heads snapped towards her like magnets, and most of them gasped, while others burst silently into tears. The three kids at the front shut off the video, standing there sheepishly, arms behind their backs.

"And just WHAT is going on here, exactly?" Haralda bellowed.

It wasn't the sort of question that elicited a response. The class sank in their seats, becoming intently interested in the smooth surfaces of the tables in front of them.

"Well?" she said. "Would anybody like to tell me what Ricardo, Richard and Brick were doing?"

The three boys stiffened at the mention of their name, but otherwise maintained their staring contest with the floor.

"Very well," said Haralda. "Boys, come with me."

They trudged out behind her, abandoning Kari to an audience of twenty children and one teacher. A collective sigh spread across the class, but it died as soon as it came on, because their teacher silently and calmly wrote up the itinerary on the whiteboard without so much as acknowledging them — and there are fewer things more indicative of trouble than a silent teacher.

The children, more children her age than she'd ever seen before in her life, stared at her. Kari shuffled in place, keeping a hand on the knife. Some of them were as big as adults.

"Alright," said Lizzie, once she'd finished drawing up the timetable. "Good morning, class."

"Good morning, Miss Bell," said the class, bemusedly. The sheer motion of twenty children fidgeting and wriggling in their seats was overwhelming to behold.

"As you can see, we have a new student with us today," said Lizzie, setting twenty sets of eyes upon her. "Would you like to introduce yourself?"

Kari went bright red.

(I AM KARI, DESTROYER OF HOUSEHOLDS, SLAUGHTERER OF MEN, BLADE SHARPER THAN THE NIGHT).

"I am Kari Gunmetal," she said.

The children in the front row noticeably sat up straighter, and the ones who hadn't got out their journals did so.

"Could you say it a little bit louder so everyone can hear?" asked Lizzie, smiling.

Kari noted the happiness was only directed at her.

"I am Kari Gunmetal," she announced, hating every second of the attention. "Niece of the Madame."

The class stopped wriggling. A couple of them whispered to each other, but as soon as they saw her looking, they pressed their fingers to their lips in a bizarre display of good behaviour. Some bowed in respect.

"Would you like to write your name on the board?" Lizzie handed her a pen.

Kari took it, clenching it in a fist, and awkwardly brought it up against the writing square, her hand wobbling as she traced her best approximation of a K. Then it was onto the A — a tricky capital, and she ended up making the hole way too big, so then she had to extend the legs, and then it was bigger than the K, so she had to extend that as well. The curve on the R was a tricky one, so she made do with straight lines, and it looked good enough by her reckoning, and the I was just one flick of the pen downwards, so no trouble there.

She stepped back to admire her name. It had only taken two minutes — a new record. But when she turned around, the pride on her face evaporated, for most of the children regarded her with absolute derision, giggling to each other. Whatever respect they'd had for her vanished in that look; the only look the estate had ever given her, a look that said she was de-facto subhuman.

What was it she'd done wrong?

"Thank you, Kari," said Lizzie, wincing. "Why don't you go over and join the Slither In group in the corner, there?"

Kari went to sit where she was told, and as she walked further and further to the back, the class turned and watched her. No, she decided, she wasn't going to tolerate this. Haralda earned respect through power, and Kari wasn't going to let her down. She clutched the knife in her pocket, sought out a target — some curly haired boy who was snickering into his hand — and...

Haralda came back into the class, with Ricardo, Richard, and Brick trailing behind her, eyes wide with trauma. They approached Lizzie.

"I'm sorry, Miss Bell," said Ricardo. "Rule 1: Listen to and follow instructions."

"I'm sorry, Miss Bell," said Richard. "Rule 2: Treat students, staff and the classroom with respect."

"I'm sorry, Miss Bell," said Brick. "Rule 3: Leave the world better than you found it."

"Thank you for apologising," said Lizzie. "And thank you, Madame Gunmetal."

They went to fill the empty seats and crashed down into them, completely shell shocked.

"I trust nobody else needs a reminder of the rules," said Haralda, tapping the writing square with a pointer. "You're off to secondary school next year, and we’ve never had less than perfect feedback from the institutions we send you to. If we don't think you’ll leave a positive impression, then you will repeat Year 6 until we do."

"Well said," said Lizzie. "For our Numeracy today, we'll be continuing our work on algebra, so please could everyone get out their maths folders?"

Kari sat, dumbfounded, as the class exploded into motion, walked over to a row of trays, took out yellow folders, then returned to their seats. Lizzie came over to drop a paper copy on her desk.

"Five minutes to finish off your homework," she announced, then kneeled down. "Have you done algebra, before, Kari?"

"No."

"Where did you go to school? How much numeracy have you done?"

"What's numeracy?" Kari stared at her. In her peripheral vision, she saw that most of the class was watching.

"Maths. Math? Mathematics. Uh, addition, subtraction, multiplication, division... have you done any of those?"

"I don't know. This is my first day at school."

"...Ever?"

Kari nodded.

"Just a minute," smiled Lizzie, scurrying off to talk to Haralda.

Kari looked at her sheet, then at the sheet of the curly haired boy next to her. He was scrawling all over his, writing down a combination of letters and numbers. Well, it looked easy enough; she wasn't stupid.

4x + 4 = 20 | x =

She squinted. How could 4 and 4 make 20? She imagined you'd have to add 12 — 4, 12, and 4 make 20, after all, so that's what she wrote down. And within seconds the boy had seen it and spread a cascading whisper across the room:

"She wrote 12!"

“She wrote 12!”

“She wrote 12!”

Enough was enough. She brandished her Djinn, the limelight enveloping the classroom in an emerald tint, and shoved it down into the curly-haired boy’s table. She'd only intended to cause a dent, but tore a hole straight through to the other side, and the table shattered, breaking in two.

The curly-haired boy screamed.

She slapped him, then held the knife up to his neck.

WHAT'S SO FUNNY, LITTLE MAN? she asked.

The boy froze in her hands — literally froze — and so did all the other children, stuck mid-gasp. Her anger vented into dead, eerie silence. She wheeled around, and there was Haralda, tucking the remote back into her pocket.

"You said that school was different," said Kari, levelling the knife at her instead. "You said it was a safe place where children cooperate."

"It is," said Haralda, approaching her, "And sometimes it isn't."

STAY BACK, screeched Kari. "Your school is no different from the estate. Everyone, everywhere is the same. To live is to exploit, to mock, deride."

"You made a good effort," said Haralda. "I'm proud of you for trying. You were very brave."

"I didn't come here to be made a fool."

Haralda tore a page off of her clipboard, scrunched it up into a ball, and slam-dunked it into the wastepaper bin.

She said, "I'm the one who's been a fool. It happened with the shower, and I should have been more vigilant, but here it's happened again at the school. I underestimated how different the place you've come from is to here, and it's my fault for putting you in this situation. Rule 3: Leave the world better than you found it. Well, today I broke rule 3. I'm sorry, Kari."

Kari said, "We are bound by the fate we share. But I will no longer pretend to be someone I am not. I am not your niece. I am no schoolgirl, and me becoming one is a fantasy. I am Kari, Nine of Nine, and that is all."

Haralda nodded, and held out her hand. They shook on it.

"What shall we do now?" asked Kari. "We are no closer to finding this Frenchman."

"Relive the day," said Haralda, leafing through a new page on the clipboard. "Find out the truth. I have to follow the remote, which means I’m going to observe this class for the morning."

"I'm not staying here," said Kari.

"Right. Then perhaps you could work your way through the school and ask the French children for descriptions of their fathers. That would help to narrow it down."

"Okay. As long as there is none of this algebra."

They exited the class, Haralda pressing play as she did so, chaos erupting behind them. The deputy head led her to a classroom void of decoration, where there were only three children and one young teacher. The door was marked SPECIAL EDUCATIONAL NEEDS.

They were singing a song in a tongue unfamiliar to Kari, grins stretched across their lips, and when the teacher saw them, he left the kids to sing and walked over.

"Yes?" he asked. "One more for the flock?"

"Kari, our exchange student is doing an assignment," said Haralda. "She'd like to talk to Olivier about his family. Send her back to me when she's done."

"Of course," he said, shooting her a big wink. "Come on in, my lost child, and tell me, do you speak any French?"

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