Disharmony (2 page)

Luke Black slid his face out of the way at the last minute, smudging his cheek across the triple-layer flexi-glass, but Toad’s sledgehammer fist still clipped his ear before smashing into the shatterproof door. Luke dropped. Toad followed, using him to break his fall.

Luke tried to take a deeper breath: not easy with Toad sitting on his rib cage. Right now, Toad was dead weight, taking a breather, tired out by the exercise of giving Luke a flogging.

Through the one eye not pressed into the lino of the recreation hall floor, and to take his mind off being unable to fill his lungs with oxygen, Luke used Toad’s rest-break as an opportunity to check out everyone watching the fight. Well, not that it was a fight exactly, unless Luke’s one punch to Toad’s thirteen could technically be classed as a fight.

Luke didn’t understand the lustful glee in Jason Taylor’s eyes, any more than he could comprehend the tears in Hong Lo’s. Why did Hong always cry when someone got hit? It wasn’t like he was the one with Toad’s knee in his neck.

Luke’s vision narrowed as he felt his eye swell. Already.
Oh well, at least that was gonna look impressive in the morning. And then he thought he spotted something crazy. He tilted his head a little.

What the hell?

Oh no, don’t do it, Zac.

Zac Nguyen had been here just two days; had only just completed orientation. He would have weighed – wet – around as much as a well-fed cat. Luke could feel him pumping up, tensing, readying to jump in. His face was blank, but his eyes were locked on Toad. For some incomprehensible reason, he was about to have a go at truck-boy Toad Wheeler. And that was suicide.

God, where are the screws? thought Luke. They should have been here by now to break it up. He licked his lips, spat out a dribble of blood and maybe part of a tooth.

‘Hey, um, Toad,’ he said.

‘What do you want, pussy?’ said Toad, using the name with which he addressed pretty much everyone. Luke suspected that this was because he’d already exhausted all downloadable space in his pea-sized brain and there was no room left to remember things like his fellow inmates’ names.

Luke could sense Zac preparing to spring.

‘Um, have you ever thought about cutting out the carbs?’ Luke said, as loud as he could with a knee in his neck.

His right shoulder was really beginning to ache now with his arm jammed up against the door.

‘It’s just that you’re pretty fat,’ he continued, ‘and what with you breathing so hard all over me I feel like I’ve got my head down a toilet. There’s this chemical overload thing that happens when the kidneys can’t break down excess carbs fast enough. Um, you stink, man.’

Although the shouts of laughter from the other forty-six inmates of Dorm Four were far louder, Luke heard only the shuddering intake of Toad’s breath. He could feel the energy of the anger above him and he found it quietly puzzling even as he prepared to roll before Toad could strike again.

Luke filled his lungs when Toad moved his knee and straddled his chest.

Wrong move, thought Luke, smiling up into Toad’s piggy eyes. Toad had time to blink once when he realised his mistake before Luke’s right fist, now free, slammed into his crotch.

‘Eww,’ said Luke, rolling out of the way as Toad fell, wailing, clutching his bruised bits.

Luke gave himself a moment on his back. He peered up at his world, sucking air. Shoe-view. It seemed he’d had this perspective often. Why did everyone want to put him on his arse? He’d never figure people out.

Although Jason Taylor he could pretty much figure out right about now.

Jason Taylor was not happy. Jason had expected his best bud, Toad, to get in at least a couple more good head shots, and he would have been hoping for a bit more blood. Instead, his show was cut short and he wasn’t yet sure what to do with all the adrenalin he’d accumulated for the anticipated viewing time.

It was coming to him, though.

Luke watched Jason move from shock to confusion to frustration to … there it was, rage.

Luke knew these words. He’d been on the receiving end of all these emotions, especially the latter. He’d just never played host to any of them.

Jason wanted his turn. And Luke had nothing left. Everything hurt, but that had never really mattered. It was just that Jason was all fresh, fat, furious and fifteen, and Luke, well, Luke was not. Okay, Luke was also fifteen, but right now – as usual – he was too thin, he felt like he had moths batting about behind his eyes, and he was pretty sure he had a cracked rib. The way that each breath tasted a bit like swallowing crushed glass reminded him of the time his foster mum’s boyfriend had thrown him into the garage wall.

He sat up. Coughed. Yep, just like that. He put out a hand to help himself to stand. Always best to have one’s head above kicking height in these situations, he’d found. He knew he wasn’t going to be fast enough, though. Jason Taylor had a scarlet-faced, bull-like charge thing happening and he was going to slam into him, right about now.

Except he didn’t.

Wow.

Luke plopped backwards onto the floor as a black blur flashed across his vision, the whir of movement raising the hairs on his arms. One moment Jason Taylor was all red-faced and charging, the next he was white and seated and quiet, his arm folded funny. Half of the now-silent crowd had their eyes on Jason; the other half stared, open-mouthed, at Zac.

While Luke observed the others, hungry for their reactions, he allowed a small screen of his consciousness to try to replay the move Zac had made. But even on slow speed it was too fast. Was that some sort of cartwheel? A roundhouse kick? He’d never seen anyone move that fast in his life.

He found Zac’s eyes. And everything became quiet.

Zac had been to the same places he had. Hell, almost
everyone in Dwight had been there: dark, hungry, angry places. Homes in which no kid wanted to be, with people who should never have had kids. But he had a feeling that Zac’s eyes had seen things Luke had never seen.

Zac grinned, and Luke felt something weird. Like a kind of jolt in his stomach. He felt his smile match Zac’s, except
his
grin tore his split top lip right open. Warm blood gushed down his chin.

He allowed himself to lie down as the screws busted into the rec room.

Luke found that focusing on his running shoes stopped the soccer field gyrating quite so wildly. Foster mum number three always said that it was best to just stare at one thing when you were drunk or really hungover. Luke had never been drunk, and therefore never hungover, but right now he really felt a lot like his foster mum looked when in one of those states. Which was pretty much permanently.

Not that he hadn’t been banged up and busted down before, but at least one of Toad’s punches seemed to have done something funky to his eardrum. Lying in bed last night had been like trying to catch some sleep in a cement mixer, with the world spinning round and around. Closing his eyes was worse – he’d lost dinner, lunch and breakfast trying that. He’d finally fallen asleep, pretty much sitting up, to take the pressure off his rib cage. But even as he’d drifted into sleep, he’d been aware of Zac Nguyen in the next bed. He could have sworn that Zac was wide awake, watching him.

Right now, Zac’s duct-taped running shoes stood next to Luke’s in the icy, morning-wet mud of the soccer field. When
Zac moved, shuffling his feet like everyone else to try to stay warm, his sock-covered pinkie toe peeped out through a split that the tape hadn’t covered. That had to be cold. He wondered why Zac wasn’t wearing the custody-issued sneakers that Matron gave everyone at intake. He also wondered what had possessed this kid to jump in to help him last night. People had jumped in when he was being bashed before, but only to help with the flogging.

Kitkat had warned him in his first week that he should try to change the way he spoke.

‘Like how?’ Luke had wanted to know. ‘Like Chinese?’

‘Like not so smart,’ Kitkat had said. ‘Sometimes you talk like you had dictionary for dinner.’

Luke changed nothing. He’d probably done less school than any of the kids in here, but he couldn’t help it if he had a brain bigger than Ronald McDonald’s.

Next to Zac, who was still shuffling to stay warm, Luke didn’t move. He could hear the ocean in his right ear, and the breakers were crashing hard. But he couldn’t feel the cold.

‘You can sit this one out, Black.’

Luke raised his head. Ms McNichol. Thank God.

‘You should be in the sick bay,’ she said.

Luke heard Toad snigger somewhere behind him.

‘I’d rather be out here,’ Luke said. ‘In the fresh air. It stinks in there right now.’

More laughs. Not Toad’s. Jason Taylor was in the sick bay with a broken arm.

‘Well, you’re not running. Not like that,’ replied Ms McNichol. ‘Take a seat in the stands.’

Luke shuffled up the steeply sloping hill towards the row of wooden benches at the side of the oval. By the time he got
there and gingerly took a seat, he noticed that Zac had almost finished a lap. Between Zac and the next guy, Travis Roberts, was a quarter of an oval. Luke stared. In the four months since Luke had been here, Travis had always been the fastest. Everyone tried to catch him, and sometimes Luke got pretty close. But with Zac out there the others looked like they’d given up. Even Travis was only just ahead of the pack.

Jonas, Kitkat and Barry, Luke’s usual running mates, stamped and steamed through the mud. Behind them jogged the rest of Dorm Four, around forty boys in green T-shirts aged between eleven and sixteen, with Toad shambling along at the back of the pack.

Luke spotted Hong Lo, just ahead of Toad, flicking a nervous glance over his shoulder as he tried to ramp up his jog. Not many people wanted to run with Toad; if you didn’t keep ahead, you always left the track with a few extra bruises. Hong reached for his asthma inhaler just as he rounded the goalposts.

The freezing air felt great on Luke’s throbbing face and he angled it into the wind, towards the rear boundary of the secure complex. His left eye, swollen shut, oozed something, and he wiped it carefully, the moisture cold against his skin. The sensation was bizarre, and not just because the skin stretched over the puff of his eye socket was full of fluid and foreign-feeling, as though it belonged to someone else. Much more strange was the oozing liquid itself – Luke stared at his slightly wet finger. A tear. Huh. So that’s what they felt like. He’d forgotten. He put the finger to his tongue.

Sitting down was definitely best for the vertigo. He watched Dorm Four begin their third lap. And what with the hood up on his green standard-issue sweatshirt and the rushing sound
in his ears, he didn’t even hear Mr Holt approach. His first warning was that vomit-sweet smell that always accompanied the senior warden.

‘Stand, Black.’ The voice was steel-capped boots crunching over gravel.

Luke turned to face the warden, swaying as he got to his feet.

‘Off with the hood,’ said Holt.

Luke peeled his hoodie back. The wind was ice on his brown buzz-cut.

Holt stared down at him silently. For a second Luke saw a smile in the warden’s eyes as he surveyed the wreckage of his face. Then the dead darkness returned. Clad in a great-coat and heavy-weather hat, he towered over Luke like a battleship over a dinghy.

‘Why aren’t you running, Black?’ he said.

‘Sick report, Mr Holt,’ said Luke.

‘What’s wrong with you?’

What do I say to that? thought Luke. No answer was going to work for Holt anyway.

‘Nothing,’ said Luke.

‘Nothing
what
, Black?’

Holt moved a half-step closer. Luke rocked back a bit with the vomit smell and the heat of Holt’s hatred.

‘Nothing’s wrong with me, Mr Holt,’ said Luke.

‘Well then, get your arse down there and run, Black. You’re three laps behind.’

Great.

It was never the pain that was the issue for Luke. He couldn’t explain it to anyone, but it was the injuries themselves that slowed him down. Pain itself was something
much more remote, controllable. He made his way down the hill to the oval, Holt striding before him. By the time he reached the others he was invisible to Ms McNichol, as he knew he would be. He watched her hunch deeper into her coat and turn back towards the dormitories, her face studiously blank.

Luke was rounding the goalposts, a quarter through his first lap, when Zac Nguyen passed him, soundless, springing weightlessly over the sodden grass. Luke stared after him. Zac didn’t seem to kick up mud the way everyone else did. In fact, he didn’t seem to be making any footprints at all. Stupid, Luke told himself. Of course he’s leaving footprints. How could anyone see anything in this muck?

He’d made it to his first halfway point when Zac lapped him for his final circuit. The new kid made no sound. No laboured breathing, no sign of sweat or strain.

‘Can you believe that skinny bugger?’

Luke turned his head – Jonas was coming up beside him. Two years younger than Luke but almost as big as Toad, Jonas was a softly spoken Islander who bunked next to Kitkat and Barry.