Free Alias by Tracy Alexander

flooding my body combined with a lack of food put me off tackling the timing plan. I gave up and went to make a toasted sandwich and a cup of tea, which I took outside. Sitting on the patio in the sunshine, still wearing my pyjamas, I finally faced the inevitable.
    The minute there was even a sniff of a drone being hacked or missing, Dan would know it was Angel and Hugo would know it was me. For all I knew, GCHQ were also on my tail – I’d certainly made enough noise to get on a watch list. Angel had been careful, but Samiya had left footprints belonging to yetis. Therefore, one way or another, I’d be caught.
    So, assuming I didn’t fancy life in prison, I had to leave home. It wasn’t the first time I’d thought about it, but it had always been in the future …
    I sat, staring at the sandwich, which was suddenly too hard to swallow. My brain wouldn’t compute the pain I’d cause to Mum and Dad if I disappeared …
    Or what it really meant …
    Hiding in squats? Always moving on?
    There was no point getting emotional – no one ever claimed that being an activist was easy. Either I took my A levels and went to Cambridge, or, I took a stand and spent the rest of my life looking over my shoulder.
    I pretended to think it through, but there was only one answer.
    When it first happened, Mum had said the murder of Jaddah and Lamyah was a mistake. If that had been the case, maybe I could have grieved and then slowly got over it. But that ‘mistake’ had been repeated again and again. It couldn’t be allowed to go on. If I did nothing, nothing would change. That reminded me of another quote Sayge liked:
    ‘All it takes for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing.’
    He might have been fake, but he was a good teacher.
    The sun started to dip and a chill crept over the garden. I threw my sandwich in the wheelie bin and went back up to my room.
    The only way I could steel myself to thrash out the timing plan that would take me one step closer was to think of it as homework. I made a list of tasks, put them in order of priority and then selected the ones that needed to happen at specific times before working backwards to determine how quickly I could put the plan into action. Even building in a couple of days of slack, two weeks was all I needed. I closed the file, terrified by how easy it all looked.
    Mum and Dad came back and soon the smell of roast lamb started spiralling up the stairs.
    I put the drone’s GPS co-ordinates – taken from the HUD – into Google Maps and had a good look around, then emailed my video guy. I described the ‘terrain’, which was mostly German woodland – attaching some screen shots, and begged him to hurryso I didn’t miss the deadline for my project. He promised to get me a video within the week.
    Mum called me down before I could get started on the next job, which was a bit of a relief, because it was all moving way too fast.

21
    For the next few days, I went to school, took my laptop, used a VPN tunnel to get past the firewall so I could do what I liked, came home and shut myself in my room.
    Running away was a huge job. I had to think about the short term – laying low until after the missile strike – and the long term – a new identity.
    According to the internet, there were two basic ways to reincarnate. Adopting the details of someone who’d died – undercover police liked to use dead babies – or being someone’s double. Either way, the consensus was that with one good piece of ID, the rest, with patience, would fall into place.
    I didn’t use either method. Because someone else did it for me. I was too frightened of leaving a trace. Once Samiya had left Buckingham, the trail needed to be ice cold. As Angel, I bought a name, a copy of a birth certificate and a National Insurance number from an anonymous creature that inhabited the dark web. And then, because I couldn’t imagine being called Georgia, I bought a second one. It was pricey, but I’d made