 The Astounding Broccoli Boy by Frank Cottrell Boyce Red by Ewan Goddard While the city sleeps, an unknown hero watches over it from his lonely outpost in the rooftops. Every story has a hero. All you have to do is make sure it's you. On my first night in Woolpit Royal Teaching Hospital, I thought my chance had come. The boy in the next bed sleepwalked. Hands straight down by his side, head held high like a piece of spooky playmobile, he sleepwalked right up to the ward door which is locked with a security code. I didn't want to bother the night nurse, so I followed him. He typed some numbers into the keypad. The door opened and off he went along the empty hospital corridors through a staff canteen where I was distracted by cheese and out of the fire door. I thought we'd walked onto the street. I'd forgotten we were twelve floors up. We were standing in the doorway of a kind of hut thing right up on the hospital roof. Miles below, the city twinkled like a massive Christmas tree. The boy did the spooky playmobile right to the edge of the roof. One more step and splat! He would be a splodge of jam on the pavement hundreds of feet below. I thought about shouting his name, but what if he woke up, got scared and fell? Name, by the way, was Tommy Lee Comiskey, though everyone called him Grim Comiskey. And mine is Rory Rooney. We were in the same class at school. He was the biggest and meanest. I was the smallest and weakest. I could tell you stories about the times he squashed my sandwiches, the times he threw my bag off the back of the bus, the times he threw me off the bus, but I wasn't thinking about that now. I was thinking, this is it. This is one hundred percent my chance to be a hero. All I have to do is save his life. As long as he doesn't take another step, it'll be easy. There was a flash of lightning. He flinched. I blinked. There was a rumble of thunder. I took another step. Then Grim Comiskey fell off the roof. The next thing I knew. I saw him fall. I was standing in the doorway on the far side of the roof. There was nothing I could do to help him, but the next thing I knew. I was standing next to him, on the ground, between a row of wheelie bins and a skip. I'd saved him. I looked up at the roof, twelve stories above us. How had we got from there to hear? How? Well, the truth is, I am astounding. And this is the story of how I became astounding. We had fallen off the top of a twelve-story building. We didn't splatter into pavement jam. We didn't crash through the pavement. We didn't bounce. We weren't even scratched. Our fall had left us completely unharmed, though it had woken Grim up. He looked around, stretched and growled. What's going on? Where are we? Are you trying to dump me in a wheelie bin? This might seem an unusual question, but while we were at school, Grim Comiskey had once dumped me in a wheelie bin. He probably thought I was trying to get revenge. He shoved me into the corner so I couldn't dodge past him, but I wasn't scared. Tonight, for the first time since I met him, I was not scared of Grim Comiskey. Tonight, I was not scared of anything. What are we doing here? How did we get here? I looked up at the top of the building, way, way above my head, so high I could hardly see it. We jumped, I said, from up there. He looked up too. You laughing at me, Rory Rooney? He pulled back his fist, ready to thump me. No! We can't have jumped. We'd be dead. But we did jump, and we're not dead, and... Sample complete. Ready to continue?