The boys were out again, Edward could feel it. Perhaps it was because it was just a little bit too quiet. Or maybe it was the way the boys who were indoors were looking at him – as though they all had a guilty secret they couldn’t say about, but that they desperately wanted him to discover. What ever it was the boys were outside again.
Edward understood the attraction of it. Of being out of bounds. When he had been a boy it had been smoking they had all wanted to do. And in those wonderful summer days hiding in bushes, running through meadows and accidentally setting fire to Colin (an eminently combustible child) the teachers were always after them.
But now it was different. The world was cold. Everyone knew that. The ground had been frozen solid ever since scientists had tried to reverse global warning in the early twenties. Well they had succeeded in their own way but only by creating global freezing. And now it was minus seventy in the summer. And nobody even went outside anymore. Nobody who valued their extremities anyway.
So why were these boys doing it? Why were they going out? Edward know there was only one solution. He’d have to follow them outside.
