Free Nobody Saw No One by Steve Tasane

Subtle-like, but defo shaking his head. The Digit won’t even catch me eye.
    “What…?” I say.
    And the old lady looks at us like I’m scum. She tightens her grip on her trolley, like she reckons I’m after snatching it off her. She looks like Jenny, me foster mum. I stand and gawp at her. She looks just like Jenny looked, on that rotten day. She jabs a finger at me. “Here he is!”
    I glare at the Digit. He looks back at me and shrugs. Tex is looking at his iPod. They ignore me. The Jenny lady looks at Digit, shakes her head, sadly. He shakes his head back, sadly. Then the Jenny lady, Digit and Tex, all three of ’em stare at me, all three shaking their heads. Sadly.
    See? He’s just a lad called Byron, with another lad, waiting for a bus. Citizen Digit and Predictiv Tex have vanished off the face o’ the earth.
    It’s a superpower I don’t have. Never did have it, did I?
    Superfool Spar. That’s why he wants rid of us, the Digit, in’t it?
    “Stop! Thief!” The two cops have spotted me. I puff, pant and run. Keep on running. Running works. Running always works.
    Everyone is staring and trying to trip me. All of Seven Sisters Road is after me, in their bright shirts and bandanas and tunics and bling and hijabs. “Thief!” They’re jabbing their fingers at me. “Thief!”
    Thief.
    Not again. It en’t fair.
    I look behind me. Byron and Tex are stepping onto a bus. They let the Jenny lady climb on first.
    One o’ the cops is almost at me.
    So? Leap. Zig. Zag.
    I’m doing me best, but somebody trips me. Up I go, up in the air, like I got flying power…
    …down I come. No power at all. Hello, concrete. The pavement hammers up and smacks us in the fa—
    Oucherooni! That didn’t go quite as planned.
    We nab the back seats on the top deck and watch as a mob gathers round Alfi’s knocked-out oddbod.
    That boy couldn’t disappear if you gave him a one-way ticket to Narnia and shoved him in a wardrobe.
    “’E’s enough showoff, ain’t ’e?” says Tex. “An’ ’e’s wearin’ your threads. You can kiss them off, Didge.”
    The Citizen can live with that. Topman. I’ve catwalked more stylish. But I’m not too conf how Virus’ll react to us letting New Boy get long-armed on his very first day. This is carelessness itself. Least my fingers got the chance to frisk him clean in that alley. If he can keep his squealer-slot shut, he can at least pretend that he isn’t anybody.
    Of course, if he
does
blab that he’s Alfi Spar, they’ll drag him back to Tenderness House. Call-Me Norman will be waiting for him. He’ll be wanting to know what’s happened to the evidence the Digit gathered on Alfi’s behalf. The evidence that Squealer-Boy gave to his Senior Case Worker.
    So what happens to a whistleblower who’s lost his whistle?
    In Call-Me Norman’s case, the Digit guesses it will involve stitching together Alfi’s squealer-slot, throttling his windpipe and punctuating his lungs.
    Once they get Alfi back to Tenderness, he’s carcass.
    But before they make him carcass, they’ll make him blab. Shouldn’t be hard, as blabbing is his hobby. He’ll lead them all back to Seven Sisters Road. Back to Virus.
    And to me.
    That means I’m carcass too.
    I come round in the back seat of a police car. Handcuffed. Thanks a lot, Digit. Me head hurts like I’ve been hit with a concrete block. Oh, yeah. I have been.
    I wun’t mind, but I never even did owt. It were that Tex lad. How come I allus get blamed?
    It hurts so much, it makes me eyes water. Through the tears, I can see a policeman peering at me forehead. “He’ll live,” he says, like I just bashed me elbow against a cupboard. I need a hospital, a nurse to rub on some anti-bump cream. But that en’t going to happen – it’ll be the cells for me, and then—
    No. Don’t even think it. Don’t tell ’em owt, and maybe they’ll let you go. Whatever you do, don’t tell ’em –
    “What’s your name, son?”
    – your name.
    Uhh, wake up