The Last Wild

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My story begins with me sitting on a bed, looking out of the window.

I know that doesn’t sound like much. But let me tell you where the bed is, and what I can see from it. This bed is right in the corner of a room only just big enough for it, and the bed is only just big enough for a kid my age.

(Twelve — just about to be thirteen — and skinny.)

The window is the size of the whole wall, made of special tinted glass that means the room stays the same temperature all the time. The room is locked shut and you need an electronic keycard to open the door. If you could open it, you would be in a long corridor with absolutely nothing in it apart from cameras in the ceiling and a fat man in a purple jacket and trousers sitting opposite on a plastic chair. Sleeping, most likely.

This fat man is called a warden. And there are lots of them here. But I think he is probably the fattest.

The corridor with the cameras and the fat warden is on the seventh floor of a building which is like a big upside-down boat made of glass and metal. Everywhere you look there are reflections — of you, other faces, the storm clouds. The curved glass walls stretch all the way down to the edge of some very high cliffs — only grass and mud for miles around, with rocks and sea below. The cliffs are in the north of the Island, in the middle of the Quarantine Zone — far away from the city and my home.

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