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  He was the biggest kid in 9C. But he wasn’t the strongest and at least one tough guy didn’t like being shoved.

  ‘Sorry!’

  Most classes had been dismissed at the bell. But while the hallway had mostly emptied, there was a scrum by the doors at the far end and Julius thought it would be quicker to go out the back way. He almost dropped his board as he barged a door, exiting the school playing fields.

  St Gilda’s grounds were immaculate. Bright blue tennis courts and six all-weather pitches, the largest surrounded by an athletics track. Beyond the track was a shaded grandstand with green and orange seats and a podium used for graduations.

  But donations from wealthy parents couldn’t control Akure’s air. It was thirty-two degrees and it hadn’t rained for a couple of days. With nothing to flush the open sewers in the city’s slum areas, the afternoon breeze brought a strong kick of garbage and human shit.

  Julius jogged through the heat haze around the building housing the school’s diesel generators, then through soccer players walking down from the girls’ school. He thought he’d probably left things too late when he glanced around the school’s main building into a jostling parking lot.

  Kids – especially the little green polo shirts from St Gilda’s elementary school – streamed between parked cars. It was all fancy metal, German or Japanese. A few mothers in SUVs, but mostly chauffeurs, who broke the monotony of their jobs by arriving early and leaning on their dark saloons, gossiping as they ignored No Smoking signs.

  Julius hurried behind a line of giant palms at the back of the lot. His eye caught Simeon, one of the half-dozen driver/bodyguards employed by his mother. Luckily, Simeon faced away, one hand in his jacket, chatting to an older driver in a garishly brocaded shirt.

  He had to slow down on a stepped path, dodging green-shirted terrors running the other way. The elementary school was inside St Gilda’s original, 1930s schoolhouse. Outside, kids swung and clambered through a play area dominated by two wooden turrets, with a queue for the zip line spanning between them.

  ‘Gabriel,’ Julius gasped, relieved to catch his ten-year-old brother before he got to the waiting Mercedes.

  Gabe – as he preferred to be called – was still young enough to spend lunch hour tearing around, and had scuffed shoes and dirty knees to prove it.

  ‘Why are you up here?’ Gabe asked suspiciously as he backed away from a group of classmates.

  Gabe was infuriatingly cool. While Julius loomed over his peers and felt crippled every time a word came out of his mouth, Gabe was a smooth-talker who had half the girls in his year crushing on him. He was the star striker for St Gilda’s U11 soccer team, and a cheeky smile or flick of an eyebrow got Gabe out of troubles that would have had Julius grounded for life.

  ‘Need a favour,’ Julius said, catching his breath and wary of his old third-form teacher standing in the elementary school’s doorway. She was a sweetheart, but he’d never get rid of her if she came to reminisce.

  ‘What’s in this for baby brother?’ Gabe asked, rubbing his palms.

  Julius tutted. ‘Tell Simeon that I’m working on an after-school project. And that he doesn’t need to come back and pick me up later, because I’ve arranged a ride with a friend.’

  Gabe looked incredulous. ‘You don’t have any friends.’

  The jab was close enough to the truth to hurt.

  ‘I’m in a rush,’ Julius said irritably. ‘Can you please not be an obstacle for once?’

  ‘Simeon will interrogate me,’ Gabe snapped back. ‘He’s more scared of Mum than we are.’

  ‘Be vague,’ Julius explained. ‘If I say drama club, or detention, Simeon might try and find me to check before he takes you home. But he can’t search every building on campus if he doesn’t know where I am.’

  ‘What if he calls you?’ Gabe asked.

  ‘I forgot to turn my phone back on after class …’

  ‘Ten thousand naira,’ Gabe suggested.

  Julius tutted. ‘You’re not getting paid. I’ve covered your ass a million times.’

  ‘Finally got a girlfriend to sneak around with?’ Gabe teased. ‘I’ve had four – you’re starting to look bad.’

  ‘You’re ten. You wouldn’t know what to do with a girl if you got one.’

  ‘Price might rise if you keep that up,’ Gabe said. ‘And I’m not covering if I don’t know what this thing is.’

  Julius drummed fingers on his board.

  ‘I know a guy,’ he began reluctantly. ‘He’s taking me to a skating spot he’s found. It’s supposed to be legendary, with ramps, drops and all sorts.’

  Gabe looked wary, moving further from his friends and lowering his voice. ‘There’s kidnappers everywhere. Uncle is state governor. Mum says we’ve got targets.’

  ‘Mummy says,’ Julius squeaked, mocking Gabe’s unbroken voice. ‘I’ve got regular clothes in my bag. I’ll just be another kid on the street. And nothing happens any more. When did you last hear of an actual kidnapping?’

  ‘You’d better not get caught,’ Gabe warned, smiling devilishly at the prospect. ‘Mum will have one of the bodyguards take you in the garage for a beating.’

  ‘That’s my problem, brother. Simeon will be up here looking for you soon. Are you going to help me or not?’

  ‘Still got that New York Islanders cap? I always liked that …’

  Julius tutted. ‘OK. It’s yours, you thief.’

  Gabe cracked one of his winning smiles as the brothers sealed the deal with a fist bump. ‘And if Mum won’t pay your kidnappers, I can have your big bedroom …’

  TWO

  Disused Mr Carpet warehouse – Leighton Buzzard, UK

  Drone racing used to be fun. Georgia was Daddy’s girl, legs swinging off a table, drinking Coke while her crew changed propellers, debated software updates and huddled over her quadcopter like surgeons. Entire days went by, waiting for races that lasted minutes. Georgia would bring her tablet, playing games or churning through entire seasons of Friends and Brooklyn-Nine-Nine.

  Georgia was talented too. UK Open Specification champion at under nine and under ten. Runner-up in the European under-eighteens when she was only eleven. Back then, she practised flying most days after school, and the tournaments gobbled every alternate weekend during the season.

  But Georgia was fourteen now, and over it. She hated the kitschy retro bowling shirts the team wore, with Drone Pack embroidered on the back. She’d evolved from sitcoms to Game of Thrones or Rick and Morty, but unlimited screen time no longer compensated for long drives, fast food and trying to do homework in budget hotel rooms while her dad watched football.

  The worst thing about drone races was the men. From the geeky boy pilots who eyed Georgia up, to Steve, Drone Pack’s bearded technician. He always knew best, even though she was the team’s best pilot and understood the technical stuff as well as he did.

  Georgia broke her dad’s heart when she’d used starting GCSEs as an excuse to get out of a twelve-round season in the UK Drone Racing League. But he’d talked her into a one-off appearance, at the qualifying rounds of the Rage Cola Classic during half-term week.

  Drone racing had grown massively since Georgia had started. The courses she’d raced when she was nine were set up by middle-aged hobbyists, who hired school gyms and car parks and made the gates drones flew through out of garden wire and swimming floats, anchored down with concrete blocks or beer kegs.

  Rage Cola had spent big money, filling the disused carpet warehouse with professionally built air gates, lit with coloured LED strips. There were huge banks of lights, a laser tunnel, cameras covering every angle of the course and even smoke machines for the following day’s final, which would be live-streamed on the Rage Cola website, with highlights on satellite TV.

  ‘Feelin’ the buzz?’ Georgia’s dad – John Pack – asked, as he sat on a tabletop next to his youngest daughter’s outstretched Nikes.

  ‘I guess,’ she answered, yawning as she looked up from her phone.

  John tapped his watch. ‘Fifteen minutes till your final qualifier.’

  Georgia was carefully balancing the way she acted around her dad. He’d had a crap year, with Georgia’s mum walking out, his older daughter having work and debt problems and his survey drone company losing its biggest contract.

  She’d agreed to fly the Rage Classic because she hoped it would cheer her dad up. But since saying she’d take part, he’d not stopped going on about how the event might rekindle her interest in flying. So, Georgia had to make clear today wasn’t her idea of fun, while not being a total shit and spoiling her father’s weekend.

  ‘Steve replaced the wiring to the motor that kept dropping in your first qualifier,’ John said. ‘He’s not happy with the power distribution board either. We don’t have a spare, so your Uncle Phil is trying to beg or borrow from another team.’

  Georgia wasn’t concerned. Her quadcopter could go from zero to a hundred kilometres per hour in four seconds. She’d had a big crash in free practice and it would have seemed odder if there wasn’t some last-minute mechanical drama.

  ‘Has Steve taken back forward trim, like I asked?’ Georgia said.

  The more a drone tilted forward in flight, the faster it would go in a straight line, but a flatter profile would make it more stable and manoeuvrable.

  John shook his head. ‘Steve says …’

  ‘He never does what I ask,’ Georgia interrupted furiously. ‘If Steve knows so much about flying, how come he didn’t make it out of the first qualifying round?’

  ‘He’s always been a better technician than a pilot, Georgia.’

  ‘The quad feels horrible in the twisty section through the trucks. I barely scraped into the third qualifying round. My best lap was two-point-three seconds o
ff that Van Hooten bloke.’

  ‘The Dutchman?’ John said, laughing. ‘He’s a former European champion. Just won the $100,000 prize in the Abu Dhabi Drone Prix. The only reason he’s not an automatic entry for tomorrow’s final is his team lost all their ranking points for using illegal battery packs.’

  ‘I know I don’t practise any more,’ Georgia said, feeling some of the passion of her younger self, who’d sob the whole drive home if she didn’t win, ‘but I’m not two-point-three seconds slower than anyone.’

  John cracked a huge smile. ‘Cookie, since you’re so sure, I’ll get him to make the change.’

  Georgia smirked. It was ages since her dad had called her Cookie and she found it adorable.

  ‘I know we usually fly with more tilt,’ Georgia explained, ‘but the motors are zippier than they used to be and the coloured lights we’ve had to fit for TV coverage alter forward balance.’

  Georgia hoped she hadn’t shown too much enthusiasm as she watched her dad cross to Steve and the drone, which was surrounded by tools at a folding table a few metres away. She checked the time on her phone and decided she had time to stroll to the ladies’.

  Seventy teams and two hundred and fifty-six hopeful pilots had entered the qualifying tournament that morning. Georgia was one of thirty-two who’d survived two qualifying rounds. Only eight would get to join some of the best pilots in the world for the following day’s final, where there was a £10,000 prize pool and places in the million-dollar Rage World Classic, held in San Francisco at the end of the year.

  There was a lot of empty space and litter around the team concourse, since teams with no pilots left in the competition had already headed home. As she crossed the warehouse, Georgia noticed that most of the remaining teams had fancy rolling tool cabinets, better uniforms and swankier laptops than Drone Pack.

  John, Steve and Georgia’s Uncle Phil were still arguing over the trim changes when she got back.

  ‘She’s two seconds off the top runners,’ Phil – a younger version of Georgia’s dad – was saying. ‘What’s the worst that can happen?’

  ‘I say we chance it,’ John agreed, not seeing his daughter approach.

  ‘Why is this a debate?’ Georgia asked sharply, making her dad jump. ‘I bet the best pilots on the other teams get their drones set up how they want.’

  Georgia forced herself between Steve and her uncle, then grabbed a laptop, wired to the drone she was due to fly in less than six minutes. She expertly opened a window for the drone’s operating software, clicked on a box and started typing numbers into a series of trim-setting boxes.

  The three men saw Georgia was close to boiling over. They cast wary glances and feared she’d snap Steve’s finger when he jabbed it towards the screen.

  ‘What?’ Georgia growled.

  ‘You missed a decimal point,’ Steve said. ‘Unless you want to fly a spinning top …’

  ‘Right …’ Georgia said, inserting the point, then clicking an upload box to send the revised settings to the drone. ‘How am I for time?’

  Pilots had to have their drones at the launch line two minutes before the race. Georgia hooked her control set around her neck and grabbed her first-person-view goggles as her dad plugged a battery into the drone.

  Georgia was the last of the eight pilots to arrive but was fine because an air gate was being fixed after a crash in the previous race. While John stepped over a low barrier to put his daughter’s quad on the launch line, Georgia had her ID badge scanned by a steward, before going four steps up to a podium.

  She was still irritated by the argument over trim changes and tried to get her head in the zone by reciting carefully memorised course directions under her breath.

  ‘Launch, hard forward, gate one – full power, three seconds, gate two – sharp left, laser tunnel, gates three, four – climb and right, gate five, sharp left tilt, through the double doors into loading bay – climb to ceiling, gate six, full power for seven seconds – gate seven …’

  ‘Excuse me,’ a cameraman interrupted, almost getting Georgia’s toes as he filmed Niels van Hooten.

  The exuberant Dutch pilot jumped onto the stage, with a smug grin and a bright orange boiler suit covered with sponsor patches. He waved to a crowd of thirty, with his FPV headset balanced atop waves of greying hair.

  If Georgia still cared enough to read her dad’s issue of Drone Monthly, she’d have known Van Hooten and his team’s disqualification had been the scandal of the season in the racing community.

  ‘What does it feel like having to go through three qualifying rounds to reach a final your big rivals have qualified for automatically?’ a scrawny guy holding a voice recorder in Van Hooten’s face asked.

  ‘I practise every day,’ Van Hooten told the recorder. His English was confident, but not his first language. ‘Racing is the best practice there is.’

  ‘But there’s a chance of a crash or a mechanical failure during a qualifier,’ the interviewer pointed out.

  ‘I may get struck by lightning when I go jogging,’ Van Hooten said dismissively. ‘But I live my life. What good is it to lie awake at night worrying about your own shadow?’

  As one of the race stewards hustled the interviewer off stage, a green signal light came on, indicating that the damaged gate was fixed and the course ready to race. As the slowest qualifier, Georgia had to cross the stage to a marked space on the far side. Van Hooten was in her way, shaking hands with another qualifier.

  ‘Ronnie, you massive vagina!’ Van Hooten tooted. ‘I might let you have second!’

  When he saw Georgia, Van Hooten’s booming laugh erupted again. ‘I am aghast! You must be the most beautiful Rage Cola girl I’ve ever seen.’

  ‘I’m not a …’ Georgia said, but tailed off when she figured him out.

  The headset and control unit made it obvious Georgia was a pilot. Van Hooten was trying to wind her up.

  ‘You staying in town tonight, beautiful?’ he continued. ‘Can I buy you a cocktail?’

  ‘I’m fourteen, pervert,’ Georgia growled, loud enough for plenty of people to hear.

  Van Hooten was only flustered for an instant. ‘Hey, Ackroyd,’ he said, smacking another contestant on the back. ‘She’s fourteen, but that doesn’t usually stop you, does it?’

  Georgia shuddered. What a dirtbag … There wasn’t much of a crowd for a qualifying tournament on a weekday, but Georgia still felt self-conscious. The youngest pilot on stage. The only girl. She imagined eyes crawling up her back.

  All those creeps looking at my arse.

  ‘Pilots, one minute,’ a race steward shouted as a bank of red lights began flashing over gate one, twenty metres in front of the launch line.

  Georgia realised how skilfully Van Hooten had messed with her head. She hadn’t switched on her control unit, or properly adjusted the controller strapped around her neck. She’d forgotten to check the batteries on her FPV goggles and it was now too late to change them if they were low.

  Just breathe … The meter inside the goggles said they were good for sixty-three minutes, and the race would last less than six. Drone battery was one hundred per cent, video signal a full five bars, no diagnostic warning lights …

  ‘Knock ’em dead, Georgia,’ John shouted, making her even more embarrassed.

  Georgia felt weirdly sentimental about her dad as she pushed down her headset and moved into another world. Now she saw through the drone’s eye, face sweating, thumbs on the control sticks. Five red lights about to turn green …

  THREE

  As Gabe ran down the stepped path to meet Simeon the bodyguard, Julius rushed back to high school to change out of uniform.

  He emerged from the driest-floored toilet cubicle he’d been able to find in market-stall sunglasses, a long-sleeve no-brand T-shirt, cargo shorts with a torn pocket and Vans with soles worn smooth. He’d bought a ton of fancy skateboarder clothes on his last trip to London, but wearing good stuff in the city was like having a Please rob me sign around your neck.

  Julius’s locker was in the ninth-form common room way across school, so he dumped his backpack on top of a fire extinguisher cupboard. If it wasn’t there in the morning, he’d only lose a sweaty uniform and a pencil case.

  The playing fields were now filled with after-school matches and training. Julius got a what-are-you-up-to look from one of the games masters as he jogged between two pitches. Boys weren’t allowed near the girls’ high school and Julius’s face felt hot as he passed a classroom filled with aproned girls doing pottery.