Jessa hurried into the cafeteria to see Maggie’s books sprawled across the table as she fit in some early morning revision between spoonfuls of shredded wheat and sips of orange juice. Annora bustled in next, cheeks flushed with pink and her gentle mouth exclaiming apologies for her tardiness. Then Tonia and Flynn walked in casually, trying much too hard to make it look like them walking in together was merely a coincidence.

“Thanks for coming in early, everyone. I wanted to talk to you about the video surveillance idea that Jessa and Flynn had yesterday. I’ve been looking into it, and it’s definitely possible to access all the footage. But the problem is, there are roughly half a million CCTV cameras in London. There’s also no eye-witness accounts of Emmeline on her way home, which is usually what the police use to start a search like this.

I checked Emmeline Victor’s address, and it seems that her walk home from school was about a mile or so. And we don’t know which route she would take, so we’d have to just take a chance on different files to view. I narrowed the results down to within a ten-mile radius of the school, but that still leaves us with close to a couple of thousand video files.”

They all waited for a solution, but it didn’t come. Maggie handed out a wad of paperwork to each of them.

"What's this?" Flynn asked, thumbing through the pile handed to him.

“I divided the number of video files by five, which gives us about 370 each. In these papers are instructions on how to access the selection of files that I’ve allocated to you. You just type the web address, then find the day we need. Then you just hit the play button and fast forward to the time we think Emmeline would have been walking home. Each viewing should be about twenty minutes. I don’t recommend watching it on fast-forward, because we need to be diligent about this. By my calculation, if we each work through all of these in our spare time, it’s possible to be done in about a month.”

“A month?!” Jessa exploded.

“If we’re lucky,” Maggie said, handing out another sheet of paper to everyone. “I also printed out copies of my revision schedule for everyone. In case you didn’t already have one.”

“How does she have time to do all this?” Flynn muttered under his breath.

"Is there really no way to do this quicker?" Jessa griped.

"Not that I can see," Maggie answered. "If we're going try and find out exactly what happened to Emmeline, this is the only way that makes any logical sense. It might even turn out that none of the cameras managed to capture the moment she was attacked."

"But we won't know until we look," said Annora.

"Exactly. It's all we have right now."

#

The quiet murmur of chitchat pervaded Mrs Sullivan’s English room.

“We’re allowed to discuss, you know,” Maggie said quietly to Jessa, setting her poetry book face down on the table to hold its place.

“I know,” she didn’t look up.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing, I’m just working.”

“Jessa.”

“What?”

“Are you mad at me?”

“No.”

“You’ve barely spoken to me since this morning. You look really annoyed.”

“I’m not annoyed at you, I’m just annoyed. I can’t believe it’s going to take us so long to look at all those videos.”

“Oh. Yeah. I’m sorry about that. It’s a huge project, though, and we spend so much of our time with school and homework, I just don’t see any way we can get it done quicker.”

Jessa checked Mrs Sullivan wasn’t behind her. “What if I took some days off school?” she whispered.

“Are you crazy? You can’t do that!”

“It wouldn’t be that bad.”

“Of course it would. We’re two months away from end-of-year exams; you can’t go skiving now.”

“It’s not skiving.”

“Yes, it is. Taking time off when you’re not sick is skiving.”

“Do you have any better ideas?”

“Yes, my idea is to work through at a reasonable pace that doesn’t have the possibility of you getting suspended. But evidently, you don’t like my idea. As usual, you want to do it your way.”

Jessa clenched her fists under the table. Her face rushed with heat. Her eyes suddenly felt like she hadn't blinked in an hour.

"Excuse me, Mrs Sullivan, I have to go to the toilet," Jessa's chair screeched on the linoleum in her haste to exit the room.

She leaned against the mirror and tried to breathe deeply. The air escaped her nostrils and fogged up the glass. With every inhale the metallic remnants of body spray stuck in her throat. Through the walls, the sound of lessons continued to rumble away like distant traffic. The whitish glow of neon light mocked her with its uncaring electric flicker.

Jessa gripped the edges of the cold ceramic sink and desperately tried to calm herself, but her tongue was already wet with briny phlegm, and she barely made it into a cubicle before the contents of her stomach retched up through her lips.

The next thing she knew, she was curled around the toilet. A group of gawping students gossiped above her.

"Jessa? Oh my goodness, are you all right?" Tonia and Annora pushed through the onlookers and helped her up.

"What happened?” said Jessa. “Why are all these people here? What’s going on?” She blinked hard through the blurry film on her eyeballs.

"It's break time—English is over."

"What? How long have I been here?"

“She looks really bad,” Annora said to Tonia indiscreetly.

“Come on, we’re taking you to the school nurse. Maggie's packing up your books and stuff.”

#

"My poor baby," Jean Baxter cooed as she delivered a mug of hot water and lemon despite Jessa's protesting that she hated hot water and lemon.

"Mum, stop fussing, I feel fine."

And she did. She felt totally fine.

Jessa grimaced into the mug. She watched the lemon wedges swim around in the cloudy water. A rogue pip pulsated on the liquid skin.

She breathed a sigh of relief when her mother left the room, and put the cup down without taking a sip.

Her mind flew back to Mrs Sullivan’s English lesson. She remembered sitting next to Maggie. She remembered the semicolons on the board. She remembered hearing Claire Adams and Jodie O’Connor talking about the latest episode of Teen Digs. She remembered the faint smell of eggs that wafted across the room when Thomas Stevens’ lunchbox had accidentally come undone. She remembered everything more clearly than she’d lived it.

She had wanted to take time off school. She remembered Maggie’s outrage.

She remembered the storm that started to brew inside her veins. She remembered having no control.

She remembered it taking over her body.

The lights that became brighter. The quivering in her muscles. The bitter heat that spewed out from her oesophagus.

And she was home by lunch time.

Jessa pulled out the batch of papers Maggie had given her earlier. On top of the pile was Maggie's revision timetable, which Jessa quickly pulled off and discarded onto her bedside table.

She flipped through pages upon pages of the printed information. It was a mammoth list of web addresses, varying only by the sequence of numbers at the end. She pulled the netpad off its charger and began typing the one at the very top of the page.