Chapter Text
They are Leo's words: "This has to be goodbye. We can't ask them to put themselves in danger for us anymore."
It's Mia's slow nod, the flicker of an argument that passes across her face, but doesn't surface. She knows it's for the best.
It's Max, between the two of them, who puts an arm round each, because leaving the Hawkinses behind is just the first difficult step of this journey. But it's one they have to take.
There's a silent consensus - Leo gets them all new phones, untraceable by Hobb, and doesn't copy Mattie's number across. Mia doesn't add Laura's, either.
Max only smiles. It's as if they're both pretending the other is incapable of remembering a string of eleven digits.
Mattie stops expecting Leo to call her sometime in the third week.
She's not upset, or anything. It's like he said, she didn't really know him. He barely even said goodbye to her.
And she's happy for him - he's got Max and Mia back, and that's what he wanted all along. He never pretended he had any other motive. Mattie had been useful, for a bit. So what if he didn't think she was stupid? Didn't mean he thought she was anything great, either.
She buries herself in whatever she can find - coursework, headcracker forums, pages of code that scroll past her eyes for hours on end but never transform into trees, never show a hint of life. In the last week of the spring term, two idiots from WAP come and do an assembly for the entire sixth form, and Mattie spends the whole time gritting her teeth, hands curled into fists so tight she ends up drawing blood in little crescent shapes across her palm.
"You need to cut your nails," Harun jokes as they walk out of the lecture theatre, and then adds quietly, "You alright?"
Mattie growls an affirmative and swings her bag over her shoulder, glad that their next lessons are in opposite directions.
Her Ethics teacher is probably going to faint dead away from shock if she actually turns an essay in for once, but Mattie spends her free period that afternoon typing one. Partly because the last place Harun will look for her is in the library. Partly because they asked for a response to this morning's presentation, and Mattie has a lot she'd like to throw in the faces of We Are People.
She almost deletes it once she's purged her anger into .docx form, but ends up printing all four pages and marching them up to the Hums staffroom. She plants them on the desk nearest the door, wondering what Brooksy will make of her vehement defence of Synthetics and their potential, amid the regurgitated WAP bile she's already heard most of her classmates rehearsing.
Leo Elster might have forgotten she exists already, but she can't go back to how she was before they met.
Laura gets the photo album down to show Joe, eventually - he talks softly about how alike the children are around the eyes, how Toby's nose has an ancestor after all. He tells her about his own sister and their childhood beach holidays, coaxing her to share memories too, but Laura's only got snippets left. You don't keep it as long when there's no-one to remind you of the details you missed.
She's in a melancholy mood for the rest of the evening, but then, at a quarter past nine, her phone pings. It's one of those location shares you can send, a little arrow on a map, marking a spot a few miles east of London. It's accompanied by a smiley face and a kiss. She doesn't need to text back to ask who it is.
Glad you're safe. Look after yourselves x
It's the first of many texts Mia hides under the long sleeves of her jumper, where Leo can't see.
you, too. X
As it turns out, Brooks never finds that essay. Mr Lundstrom, the head of the department, snatches it up first and - for reasons Mattie can't fathom - enters it into a competition run by a scientific journal. Mattie has no hopes to get up, so when the letter arrives saying 'Congratulations', she can't think at first what it's about.
The essay causes such a stir in the research community that a few national newspapers print it too, along with Mattie's name and a square picture cropped from her year 11 school photo. Thankfully, none of the articles make any mention of the fact that her family once harboured a group of fugitive Synthetics. That secret's safe, even if the whole country now knows she started her GCSE year with acne all across her forehead, and really, they couldn't have airbrushed that out?
To Mattie's disdain, Laura insists that they all go out for a meal to celebrate her success. "You choose where we go," her parents say, but Mattie can't bring herself to care, so she defers to Sophie.
Joe spends a while Googling, to find out which of the nearby McDonaldses has the biggest PlayPlace.
"You could leave me one thing to be the best at," Toby laments, jokingly, in the car on the way. "You've always had maths and computers, and now you're a writing genius too?"
"It wasn't about the writing," Mattie says stonily, eyes on her phone screen.
Toby rolls his eyes.
"I'm the best at drawing," Sophie pipes up. Nobody argues with this self-evident truth.
Later that night, exhausted from the pretence of not being Very Over her tremendous success, Mattie retires to her room even before Sophie's sent to bed. Her email inbox is full of notifications about people writing rubbish on her Facebook wall, as if she cares that they think she's clever. They wouldn't know clever if it walked up and slapped them in the face.
Her phone buzzes in her pocket: unknown number.
told u so !
From this Mattie learns two things: 1) He hasn't forgotten her. 2) He still texts like an old man.