1

I rose early, an old habit, crept downstairs to make coffee, correct the exam papers I hadn't got to the night before. It was back when people still got up and made coffee and went to work, led what they tried to imagine were normal lives. I guess we were all doing our best to maintain the illusion of a past we couldn't quite bring ourselves to let go of.

By the time I left the house, dawn was hinting pale against the autumn trees. My wife Maybelline - May - was still in bed. I'd gone upstairs to kiss her goodbye, but when I whispered her name, she hadn't moved. The morning was cold. Dark clouds massed in the west, obscuring the mountains. Out of the gate and left towards the river, my usual route, past ragged picket-fence gardens and modest wooden houses, lights coming on in kitchen windows. It was that kind of neighbourhood. The last vestiges of the middle class, still hanging on to that dream, still pretending.

I taught my morning class, chemistry 11, and had begun physics 12 - just another Thursday among fifteen years of Thursdays. I was standing at the blackboard describing the radiative forcing effect of carbon dioxide and methane on Earth's climate when the letters arrived, placed ceremoniously on my desk by Radley, the breathless deputy principal, a short, recently-appointed administrator whose sole joy in life seemed to be the delivery of bad news. No calamity was too small to send him into paroxysms of excitement: whispered news of a recent divorce, the latest teen pregnancy, the now-ritual distribution of draft cards at the senior assembly. The kids, predictably, called him Ratley.

I knew what my letter would say, had anticipated it for months. I finished the class, left the letters unopened on my desk, acted as if nothing had changed. At lunch I sat with a few colleagues, talked about the usual stuff - the war, the shortages, the chronic lack of mobile-phone and internet service.

Later that afternoon, after the kids had settled into the physics 12 exam, I opened my letter. It was no surprise. Except the date. What I had initially thought must be a mistake, a typo of some sort, right there in ragged black ink: the last digit of the year exactly one lower than it was supposed to be, than had been repeatedly communicated by the government over the radio and the TV for the last six months.

It made no difference to me. I had always been well within the cut-off. I was clearly one of the responsibles, as they were being called - the old ones, those the viruses hadn't managed to kill off. I'd accepted it long ago. But for May, it made all the difference in the world.

I looked up at the kids, heads bent to their exam papers. Kazinsky with his newly razed skull of stubble, Smith with the tip of one of her long braids in her mouth, concentrating. Good kids. No, not kids anymore. Young men and women, now. Women and men, young, with a future even more uncertain than mine.

I looked at my watch, gave them all a few extra minutes. Then I stood and cleared my throat. 'Ladies and gentlemen, time is up.'

Groans from the usual suspects, eyes looking up at me, refocusing, the afternoon sunlight in each of those uniquely patterned, uniquely troubled pairs. A few smiles - Smith, inevitably, beaming at me with that beautiful mouth, those unnaturally enhanced eyes, the Cantor dust of freckles across the bridge of her nose, that haunting intermittency. I scanned the rest of the faces, raised the letter in my right hand. 'I have some good news, for some of you at least.'

Quiet, now. Thirty-two faces directed toward me.

'This will be the last class we will have together,' I said.

Even the new kids in the back row were paying attention now.

'I am being relocated.'

A guffaw from the back, Hernandez and Richards high-fiving.

'South.'

Then silence, blank stares, information being processed. All the new kids, the ones who themselves had just been relocated, knew immediately. You're going where we just came from.

I considered saying more, offering some sort of defence perhaps. Instead, I said: 'I hope you've learned something during our time together. Even you, Richards, Hernandez.'

Nervous laughter from a few.

'Remember, wherever your lives take you, that science and rational thought have always been a beacon for humanity. In reason and truth lie hope.' As I said it, I realised how old-fashioned it sounded. I hoped one day they would understand.

More sniggering from the back.

'Now, if you will please turn in your exam papers. I wish you all good luck.'

Students began shuffling to the front, placing papers on the corner of my desk. Krusch, Robertson, Ravindran. DeVilliers silent, hoisting his bag onto his shoulder; a grunt from Rouse that could have been goodbye; a clear 'good luck, Teach' from the intelligent Blewett; a tended hand and a good, firm shake from Glass, captain of the school football team. A few thankyous. Most walked out without a word.

Soon it was only Smith and Kazinsky, the two who'd been with me the longest. Smith in her trademark short skirt and black Doc Martens, fiddling with a braid, Kazinsky hovering near the back window. Smith put her paper on the pile, looked at me. She was crying.

'I don't think I did very well,' she sniffled. 'I.' She stalled, stood looking down at her feet.

'You always say that, Maddy. And you always do well. Don't worry.'

She looked up at me. The tears in her eyes refracted the low-angle light from the windows, prismed out through the yellow part of the spectrum from those cat's-eye contacts she had been wearing for a few months now, 4.7x1014 cycles per second, that beguiling, prescient frequency.

'Yes, but.' She stopped herself, let the end of her braid fall to her side. 'What if our new teacher is, like, a troll?'

'Don't worry, Maddy. Miss Fenyman will take over for the rest of the term. She's a lot younger than I am. I'm sure she'll be fine.'

She stood there a moment, head bowed. 'But I want you, Teach,' she said, fiddling with her braid again. 'I want to do physics at MIT. You know that. I need you.'

That's what everyone calls me. Teacher. Everyone who knows me. The kids just call me Teach.

I picked Maddy's paper from the pile, scanned the first answer, her invariably neat script moving across the page, building from first principles, the unit analysis helpfully displayed and balanced, the answer perfect. 'You're ready, Maddy. You'll get in. Believe me. You don't need me anymore.'

She stood there with her legs crossed above the knees the way she did. 'You're just saying that,' she said, wiping her eyes. 'Anyway, it doesn't matter. I don't want you to go.'

'I'm sorry, Maddy,' I said, struggling for words.

She straightened, glanced at Kazinsky and picked up her bag. 'Thanks, Teach. I'll never forget you.'

And then she was gone and it was only Kazinsky, half a foot taller than he'd been at the start of term, standing by the window, looking out across the mud-scarred playing fields. I stood and walked a few unsteady paces towards him, the room suddenly empty now that Smith was gone, as if all the air had been sucked from the place. The late-afternoon sky burned that bewildering shade of alder that still made me dizzy, as if the gravity of the world had been inverted, transducing earth into sky, atmosphere into ocean. Which in a way, of course, it had.

For several minutes we stood there by the window in the empty classroom, saying nothing, each looking out at whatever we could see.

After a while, Kazinsky spoke. His voice was deep, resonant. 'I've been called up for the army.'

I said nothing. The latest draft of seventeen-year-old males had just been announced to replace the catastrophic losses in Africa. There had been the earlier experiments with females, of course, but those had been an unmitigated disaster, and now, with the population plummeting, it was ridiculous to send healthy young women to be slaughtered on the battlefield.

A long silence stretched out, pierced only by the occasional shout from the hallway. 'I don't agree with what we're doing over there,' Kazinsky said. 'I don't want to kill people.'

I put my hand on the boy's shoulder, held it there a moment.

Kazinsky glanced back towards the hallway. 'I'm thinking of running away.'

'It would be dangerous, Matthew. You know what they're doing to draft evaders.' My words sounded fake, an insincere apology.

'There's no way I'm going to go over there and kill a bunch of people I don't know, have nothing against. We're only there for the food. We're stealing.'

I had been against the war from the beginning, demonstrated...