‘The idea was that Sommer would bring Mila to a spot near the sewer entrance in the dead of night – if any of the soldiers spotted what was happening, he would say that he was taking her to the infirmary. Roman would travel through the sewers and carry her back to safety. The whole plan was a huge gamble, the chance of it working was tiny, and I knew I was putting both of their lives at risk. I could scarcely look at them, as I was so worried that they might change their minds.
‘Roman had agreed with Sommer that he would be by the walled end of the sewer entrance at 3.30 a.m. the next night and he would only come up above ground when he heard the triple knock on the metal cover.
‘I insisted that I should go with him to wait at the other end of the sewers. It was colder than ever that night and the tips of my fingers were numb within minutes. Just after three in the morning, Roman disappeared underground and I waited.’
‘I bet you were scared out of your mind,’ I said. ‘Was it worse than jumping from the train?’
‘Oh, a million times worse, because I was completely helpless and there was so much waiting. Each minute transformed itself into an hour. I got an awful sense of doom in the pit of my stomach and my mind came up with terrible scenarios in which they’d been caught. The panic rose in my throat and I was sick. And that was when I heard the sound. A clatter and heavy breathing coming from somewhere below my feet.’
‘And what was it?’ Julius asked, just as his phone rang. It was his mum, saying that it was late and she had to pick him up. He tried to argue with her about letting him stay longer, but she wouldn’t let him.
‘I’m afraid you’re going to have to be patient,’ said Ania, smiling mysteriously. ‘We’re almost at the “crux of the matter,” as English people say.’
*
‘She’s amazing,’ said Julius, when we walked outside to wait for his mum. ‘D’you think they found Mila?’
‘I’m not sure,’ I told him honestly. ‘I used to worry that she would never find her, but now that I’ve heard more of the story, I’ve started to hope.’
‘It’s a great thing – hope,’ said Julius quietly, as his mum pulled up. ‘I’ve recently started to hope a bit too.’
NINETEEN
Girl 38 walked behind the Vilk, still fearing that he was leading her to a trap. They went deeper and deeper into the forest until, finally, they reached a clearing. There, Girl 38 saw an amazing sight – there were stacks of food of every colour and shape. She saw mountains of juicy apples, much bigger than those on earth: tomatoes, carrots, bananas, figs, pineapples… the food stretched as far as the eye could see.
Just as she was taking it all in, she saw hundreds of Vilks emerge from behind the trees surrounding the enclosure. Had she been trapped? But, no… they huddled around her, pushing the best bits of food in her direction. They had gathered it especially for her. They wanted to be her friends.
‘We’re all set!’ Gem whispered the minute she saw me in the classroom on Wednesday morning. ‘Operation Loser Boy will be complete today.’ She had that look on her face – the same one that she got before one of our teachers announced who’d won the creative writing prize or who had the highest score in our mock maths exam. She always knew that she would be the champion in the end.
‘We’ve sent an email round to pretty much everyone in the class too, so they’ll be there at 1.45 p.m. today. I can’t wait. Make sure you tell me if he sends another message before lunch, yeah?’
I nodded. Gem had been very reluctant to give me back my phone on Monday, and constantly wanted to keep checking it for new messages. I allowed her. Julius knew how to respond to anything she sent.
At lunch, I could see how excited Ruby and Dilly were by the way that they were frantically scanning the room, trying to spot Julius. Gem looked as if she was about to burst. She nibbled on the edge of her crust of pizza and her fingers played a nervous rhythm on the table.
‘I wonder what song he’ll sing,’ she said. ‘I hope it’s something super embarrassing. Knowing him it will be.’
‘Maybe the theme tune from Lord of the Rings,’ Dilly guessed. ‘Although it could be something totally weird that we’ve never heard, maybe something Scottish, like “Auld Lang Syne”. You just don’t know with him, do you?’
‘I reckon it’ll be something romantic from a musical,’ said Ruby, closing her eyes. For a moment, it looked as though she wished she was the person being serenaded.
‘Right, let’s recap what’s happening,’ Gem said. ‘Everyone’s going to gather in the hall and we’ll come in last. That way it will look as if we had nothing to do with it. If somehow Mr Kim or any other teachers hear about it and decide to come along, we don’t want to be caught red-handed.’
‘What if he hears everyone coming into the hall, freaks out and runs away?’ asked Ruby.
‘He won’t, don’t worry. I reckon he’ll think that Kat’s organised a little welcome party for him and invited our whole class.’
At 1.45 p.m. we were hiding out in the girls’ toilets near the hall. The plan had been to hold out until 1.50 p.m., but at 1.47 p.m., Gem lost her nerve and she pushed us into the corridor. There were murmurs coming from behind the hall doors, but no laughter.
‘What’s going on?’ Gem wondered aloud. ‘Maybe he hasn’t started singing yet? He needs to get a move on.’ I could see a flicker of doubt in her expression, but it was gone in an instant. We paused outside the doors. My heart was drumming. Eventually Ruby swung the doors open and we walked into the hall.
We joined the back of the crowd and I breathed out, relieved that Julius had managed to get everything right. Our excuse about wanting to ‘practise the lighting for the school play’ had worked and Mr Millicent had allowed Julius the keys to the lighting box where I knew he was watching from now.
The pink spotlight on the stage looked even more enchanting and mysterious than I’d imagined. Lying in the centre of it was a single rose and a small exercise book wrapped in paper. Of course, only I knew that’s what they were, because they weren’t quite visible to everyone from below.
‘What is it?’ someone in the front row asked. ‘Is it the start of some sort of show?’
We waited for a few minutes and nothing happened. Eventually I heard Arun say, ‘I’m going to go up there and check it out. I reckon it might be some kind of immersive theatre production. I’ve been to one of them before and you had to follow the clues. Whoever’s planned this wants us to be part of the action.’
He pulled himself up on stage and picked up the two objects. He held the rose between his teeth, winked at the crowd, and then inspected the parcel carefully.
‘Wow, it’s addressed to Gem,’ he said. ‘Gem, are you here? Do you want to come and get it?’
Next to me, I felt Gem stiffen.
‘What?’ she asked. ‘What’s going on?’
‘It’s for you,’ somebody in front of us told her. ‘You should go up there.’
‘It’s… it’s not for me.’
‘It is,’ Arun said, amused. ‘Come up here and grab it, Gem. Or do you want me to open it for you? Maybe that’s what we’re supposed to do.’ He lifted up his other hand, as if to tear the top of the wrapping paper when Gem suddenly wailed, ‘No!’
She pushed through to the front of the crowd, got up on stage and ripped the parcel from his hand. Then she ran down the side stairs and disappeared through the double doors.
The crowd erupted into nervous chatter. I stifled the excited laughter that was bubbling up in my stomach. It had worked. Our plan had worked even better than we’d hoped. Next to me Dilly was nervously biting her fingernails.
‘Oh, no! Oh, no! What are we going to do now? What was in the parcel?’
I shrugged my shoulders, but I knew, of course I knew, and what was more, I took full responsibility for it this time. I was no longer scared. I hadn’t even bothered to disguise my handwriting. The parcel said simply, ‘For Gem’, and inside was Girl 38, which I’d scanned and copied especially for
her.
It was mysterious enough for others not to know what it meant, because I didn’t really want to humiliate Gem by letting everyone know what she’d done. I just wanted her to feel, for a moment, what it was like to be on the receiving end of one of her ‘operations’. She would realise straight away that she was Hawk Eye.
Dilly and Ruby eventually decided that the right thing to do was to run after her, but I stayed back. The rest of our classmates soon got bored, accepted that it was some sort of joke that had gone wrong, and began to walk back to our form room. ‘What was she trying to do?’ I heard one of the boys mutter.
I hung back after everybody had left and then I ran up the stairs to the lighting box, where Julius was waiting for me.
‘It went perfectly,’ I told him. ‘I hope it makes a difference.’
‘If nothing else, it will get her thinking about who she’s messing with,’ he said, grinning. ‘Hey, this box is grand, by the way. I reckon I might want to be a lighting technician. Look how many cool things you can do with these controls,’ he said, swirling three different coloured lights round the stage to create a disco effect.
Gem didn’t speak to me at form time or during double chemistry, which was our last lesson of the day. She made a point of switching seats with Ruby so that she didn’t have to sit next to me. All three of them were ignoring me, which wasn’t surprising. I knew that our friendship was over and, weirdly, I didn’t mind. My heart was light and I felt better than I’d done in a very long time.
I saw Arun casting glances in Gem’s direction, as if trying to figure out what she’d been playing at. I noticed that he still had our rose, which he’d picked up off the stage. He’d been goofing around with it in form period, twirling the stem between his fingers. I wondered if Gem had hoped that he might give it to her.
After school, I caught up with Julius at the gates and asked him if he wanted to come round. I thought that we might celebrate with some of Mum’s chocolate brownies and then we could go next door. It was high time that we found out what happened to Mila.
TWENTY
‘Are you sad that you moved down here? Do you miss Yell?’ I asked Julius as we turned into my road.
‘Aye, I mainly miss my dad and Kit. I try to talk to Dad on the phone every night and Kit’s busy with uni, but he messages most days. I miss the sea – I always saw it on the way to school and I could tell exactly what mood it was in. When the waves were crashing like mad, I knew that it was furious, and when it was flat, like a cloud mirror, I could tell that it was thinking about what it would do next. I kind of miss the quiet sometimes too.’
‘The quiet? How d’you mean?’
‘Here, even in the middle of the night, when everything’s switched off and I’m in bed, there’s still noise. I can hear the hum of the traffic or people shouting in the street. In our old house, there would be complete silence, ’part from the wind against the windows.’
I shuddered. ‘It sounds spooky.’
‘Spooky? Nah. It was home,’ he said. ‘But I’m not sad I came here. It’s an adventure. Everything’s scary at first but my dad says that in frightening situations you gotta look for good people, so that’s what I’m trying to do.’
It was strange, because it was exactly the sort of thing that I expected Ania to say to me.
The last few days had brought a cold spell, so Ania was no longer in her garden. Instead, when she led us into the living room, the fire was on and the smell of freshly-baked bread wafted in from the kitchen.
‘I made it with you in mind,’ she said. ‘And I realise it’s probably still too warm outside to have the fire on. But I had a feeling that you would come today and I wanted to create the atmosphere of the bakery. I thought that it could help you to imagine that you are there. Can I cut you a slice?’
‘For sure,’ said Julius. ‘Smells amazing.’
We sat there with the flames dancing before our eyes, and although I could taste the delicious buttery bread in my mouth, and then the nuttiness of the brownies, I felt that I couldn’t properly relax, as I was about to be told Mila’s fate.
‘You said you were about to reach the “crux of the matter”. So what happened when you heard the noise beneath your feet?’ I asked her nervously.
‘Well,’ she said, and I could see her grip the tissue that she was holding. ‘When I heard the noise, I clambered down that ladder as quickly as I could and shone the torch ahead of me. At first I saw nothing but damp walls of earth, and I started to worry that I had imagined it. But then I saw Roman. My torch beam illuminated that wonderful old man who was carrying someone over his shoulder. It was someone who looked so much smaller, thinner and frailer than they should, but even from a distance of many metres I could tell that it was her.’
‘It was Mila!’ I jumped up and hugged Ania. Her withered cheek brushed my school shirt.
Julius shouted, ‘You did it!’
‘When I took Mila out of Roman’s arms, I clung on to her as tightly as I could. In that moment, only the two of us existed, nothing else,’ Ania whispered.
Then her voice faltered and she gazed down at her hands, opening her mouth as if she wanted to say more, but no words came out.
The silence hung between us, suspended on an invisible thread. I glanced at Julius and I could tell that, like me, he didn’t want to snap it by speaking. Ania would carry on her story in her own time.
‘For a long while I struggled to believe that the moment was real – that she was really there in my arms. She was so fragile – like a shadow of a person slipping through my fingers. Holding her close, I could feel the bones of her spine through the jumper that she had been wrapped in. It was navy and made of thick wool, and I was certain that it belonged to Sommer. Her breath came out in little gasps, and when she opened her eyes for a second, I wasn’t sure whether she could actually see me.
‘I whispered her name over and over and there was a moment when I thought that there might be a flicker of recognition, but it was gone almost instantly. We carried her back to the bakery and I was in a state of such shock that I didn’t notice the dark figure lurking in front of our doorway until we were a few metres away.’
‘Was it a soldier?’
‘No, no. It was a young doctor, who had been sent by Sommer. I could tell he was extremely nervous and he did not want to be there, but I guess that he owed Sommer a favour.
‘I laid Mila down on the couch at the back of the kitchen and got some water heated for the large tin bath that Roman used for washing. I cleaned her face, arms and legs. Her elbows jutted out in sharp corners and I could see the outline of her bones against her pale papery skin. Every few minutes a terrible cough tore through her body. I also saw an awful dark red rash spreading from her chest and stomach to her shoulders, as though she had been bitten all over by mosquitoes.
‘The doctor examined her closely. He took her pulse, listened to her breathing and pulled back her eyelids gently.
‘“A very severe case of typhus,” he said eventually. “As I suspected, there’s nothing I can do for her. The disease has progressed too far. If you’re lucky, she may have a week left. The best that you can do is to keep her warm and comfortable and give her lots to drink. If you do, there is a possibility that she may become conscious enough to speak to you… before the end. You might have a chance to say goodbye.”
‘He said those last few sentences softly and apologetically, but I would not accept it,’ said Ania, and she suddenly looked angrier than I’d ever seen her.
‘Why? Didn’t you think it was true?’ Julius asked.
‘No, I believed him about the typhus. But I also believed she could get better. Roman could tell how furious I was because he begged the doctor for some new medication that he had heard about – antibiotics. To start with, the doctor wouldn’t give it to us, because he said he did not want to waste his small supply on such a “lost cause” but you can imagine how much I fought him.’
‘And did he give in?’
<
br /> ‘He had to. I wouldn’t have let him leave otherwise. For the next few days Mila mostly slept. As Roman still had to run the bakery, I looked after her myself. She only woke up for a few moments each time to take the medicine, drink lots of water, and have a tiny bit of porridge, which was all she could swallow. On the fourth day, when I was washing her face, her eyes focused on me properly for the first time and I thought I might be hallucinating when I heard her ask uncertainly, “Ania?”’
‘She was going to be OK?’ I whispered.
‘Yes,’ said Ania smiling at me. ‘After she said my name, I knew for certain that she was going to be OK.’
TWENTY-ONE
‘That didn’t mean that Mila’s recovery was easy from that moment – it was still very difficult and very slow. But Roman let us stay at the bakery for as long as we wanted to, and the medicine eventually started to work. It took about five weeks for her to eat some proper food, and another week for her to walk without my help. By then she was well enough to stay awake for a bit longer and she told us everything that had happened from the moment that I’d last seen her outside our village church.’
‘Was it really terrible? Did she see people die?’ I asked, scared of what I was about to hear. I’d started to build up an image in my head of life within the walled village – one of the darkest places in the world.
‘Yes, many – some died of starvation; others of disease. There was a little boy Mila made friends with who she desperately wanted to survive. She ended up giving him most of her own small allocation of food. Sadly, the typhus got him in the end. But Mila didn’t see her efforts as a waste. She was glad that she had managed to help him and that he knew, before he died, that he was loved. That is the kind of unbelievable person she was.
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