The Declaration

trouble.
    ‘Sit there,’ Mrs Pincent instructed him, pointing to an empty desk. ‘Next to Anna.’
    Anna tried to look straight ahead as he walked towards her, but her eyes were drawn to him, and as she looked at him she felt her heart begin to beat loudly in her chest. He was staring right at her, like he wasn’t scared of anything, like he didn’t Know His Place at all.
    And as soon as Mrs Pincent left, having made it clear that no one was to pay the new Surplus any special attention, he leant over to her, like it was perfectly OK to talk to someone in the middle of a training session.
    ‘You’re Anna Covey, aren’t you?’ he said, so softly Anna thought she might have imagined it. ‘I know your parents.’

Chapter Three
    The new Surplus, Anna decided almost immediately, was going to have trouble fitting in and Learning His Place. And if he thought that it was funny or clever to tell lies and to talk about people’s parents as if they weren’t selfish criminals, then he would learn soon enough that those kinds of things led to Solitary or a beating.
    She had ignored him completely after his inappropriate comments about her parents, which had made her both irritable and uncomfortable. But whenever she turned a corner, he seemed to be there, looking at her with those challenging eyes and making her feel awkward, even though he was the new one and if anyone should be feeling awkward it was him.
    And so she wasn’t particularly pleased when, a few days later on her way to Female Stockroom 2, she found him waiting in the corridor outside the sanatorium, which was also on Floor 2, along with most of the female dormitories.
    Grange Hall corridors were long, covering the width of the building. There were five storeys including the basement – Floor 0 housed the training rooms, Central Feeding and Mrs Pincent’s office; Floor 1 housed the boys’ dormitories with ten large rooms accommodating between ten and twenty occupants each (you could fit more Middles in a dormitory than Pendings, particularly the younger ones) and two bathrooms; Floor 2 housed the girls in a similar way; Floor 3 housed the Smalls and the Domestics, who were Legals that performed any cleaning and cooking tasks that weren’t taken care of by the Surpluses, and whose job it was to care for the Smalls, although ‘care’ didn’t come into it much. Every room and corridor was decorated in the same way – pale grey walls, darker grey concrete floors, fluorescent lighting and thin radiators which had been fitted when Grange Hall served a different purpose; now they were permanently turned off because Surpluses, Mrs Pincent said, had no right to central heating. The low ceilings and triple-glazed windows, each covered by a long, grey vertical blind, kept in the heat as well as excluding the Outside; security cameras on the perimeter walls screened every visitor to the Hall and ensured that no one could leave unseen.
    When Anna came across Peter, she was on her way to replenish the stock cupboard, one of her jobs as a Prefect, and in her hand she was carrying a detailed list of exactly how many tubes of toothpaste and bars of soap had been used in the past month by the Surpluses in her dormitory. One tube or bar too many, and they would all be made to work extra hours to make up for the squandering of essential resources. Anna’s dormitory never went over their quota, though, she made sure of that.
    She looked at Peter, narrowing her eyes slightly as she passed him, and it was only when he said her name that she reluctantly stopped.
    ‘Anna,’ he said softly. ‘Anna Covey.’
    She stared at him angrily.
    ‘Surplus Anna,’ she corrected him. ‘Please don’t use words from the Outside in Grange Hall, and please don’t pretend that you know my parents, because as far as I’m concerned I don’t have any.’
    Peter looked at her uncomprehendingly, his eyes making her shift uncomfortably on her feet because she wasn’t used to anyone scrutinising her like that.
    ‘So what goes on in here, then?’ he asked, looking at the door to the sanatorium.
    ‘Health check,’ Anna said curtly. ‘You’ll be checked for any weaknesses and given vaccinations against diseases. And weighed. Surpluses have a duty to maintain their health so as not to burden the earth further with illness.’
    Peter raised his eyebrows. ‘I thought Surpluses weren’t allowed drugs. I thought they wanted Surpluses to die off as quickly as possible.’
    His voice