by Terry Kitto
Then it happened.
White-hot agony fired through her limbs. The right side of her body was doused in cold, and in her mind came Joel’s thoughts, just as clearly as her own.
Mr Cridland is a mean man, Joel thought.
Panic seared through Rasha’s stomach. She had let herself be occupied. Joel Tredethy had her body.
No. Her heart rattled inside her chest, and the night air rushed between her fingers. Her imprint, there in the ombrederi, was still connected to her body in the physical. Rasha stepped toward the workshop’s fire exit to search for a way out of the ombrederi, and Joel sidestepped too. She reached for the door handle, as did he. She paused, hand suspended in the air, and Joel mirrored her: a pitiful, mutated reflection.
Joel didn’t occupy her.
Rasha occupied him.
Rasha opened her eyes to the bleak night that hung over the drab playground. Vanessa wrung her hands as she waited.
Rasha became doused in Joel’s aura: her kneecaps in splinters, her neck taut. She’d been overcome by his shy posture, his distrust for people, his fear of Cridland – a kind of horror only found in the living.
‘What are you experiencing, Rasha?’ Vanessa asked. ‘Talk to me.’
‘I can feel him,’ Rasha stuttered in an attempt to make sense of the sensations coursing through her body. ‘Everything I do, he does too.’
Rasha turned to get a better view of Cridland’s workshop, and as she did Joel righted himself behind the glass, his misted eyes fixed on her.
‘It’s like I’m a TV remote,’ Rasha said. ‘He’ll do what I want.’
Vanessa scribbled into her aged journal with a Biro.
‘Push the connection, Rasha,’ Vanessa said. She didn’t seem at all surprised by what Rasha claimed to do, but she did seem eager to test it to its full extent.
Cridland’s workshop window was between Rasha and Joel. Rasha dreaded the lesson she’d have there the following day; being in Cridland’s company was a terrible thought. Perhaps she didn’t have to be. She raised a fist in the air, and Joel did too. She swung it forward, punching into the empty space before her. Joel’s swept through the glass. It shattered with a stupendous crash, spilling fragments across the playground.
Rasha jumped. Joel’s aura faded from her body, and realisation dawned on her for what she had just done.
‘I didn’t . . . I didn’t mean . . .’
Vanessa disregarded the broken window, grabbed Rasha’s hand, and examined it in the near darkness. A laceration ran across the back of it, and warm blood trickled across her forearm. It oozed between Vanessa’s fingers, but she didn’t mind.
‘I . . .’ Rasha stuttered. ‘The glass . . .’
The window had shattered outward thirty feet from where they stood. No glass projectiles made it to them. Joel stood in the empty window, nursing his right hand. Through Joel, Rasha had gained an injury.
‘What does it mean?’ Rasha asked.
Vanessa looked at her, eyes white in the beam of her upturned flashlight. They were frantic – not with worry or concern, but sheer excitement.
‘You tore down the walls.’
Rasha had become more than her body.
The morning after her stint with Vanessa, Rasha washed at the bathroom sink and took care with the stinging wound on her hand. Nausea came and went, which Vanessa had told her was a by-product of prolonged engagement. Exactly what Rasha had achieved was still shrouded in cryptic words. Before she’d forced Joel to break the workshop window, she had just been a passive spectator in an imprint’s memories. It was as if she had become Joel. As Vanessa had said, she’d broken the walls of her mind. Rasha presumed that if she had become free of her own mind, then she’d broken into Joel’s.
Her presence caused utmost horror for Haya. Dried, changed, and with her schoolbag packed, Rasha once again ate Rice Pops at the kitchen table. Haya sat in the living room and stared out of the window. She held a cup of tea in her hands but hadn’t taken one sip. She was thinner again, her eyes sunken in their sockets. With a pang of guilt, Rasha realised that she hadn’t been present enough the last week to ensure that Haya was well nourished. Not that she’d take food from her.
Nausea swam in her stomach. Rasha nudged her cereal around the bowl. She talked at Haya, muttering a long-winded and poorly constructed lie about where she had been the night before and how she had come to cut her hand.
‘I was using a palette knife to sculpt this face from clay,’ she fibbed. ‘I had the face mounted on a wooden stick, and the palette knife slipped. Luckily, Mr Reed is a first-aider.’
Come on, she thought. I texted to say I was with Mrs Branning. Catch me out, tell me off.
Haya nodded slightly. Her hands shook, her wedding band chiming against the cup. Rasha scared Haya. She wondered what their dynamic would be if her mother knew of her abilities. Would fear push them further apart, or would it bring Haya closer?
‘Some people gravitate toward power,’ Vanessa had said as they drove back to the holiday park the night before. Perhaps Haya would run to Rasha for protection, run to Rasha for all the wrong reasons, and not because they were the last of their family surviving in a foreign country together. She didn’t want to be considered other – she just wanted to be a daughter.
Rasha swiped her bowl to the floor. It shattered on the lino, and soggy cereal splattered on the cupboard doors. Haya flinched and spilt tea over her clean tabard. Her eyes met Rasha’s, wide and horrified.
Rasha leapt up, grabbed her bag and waterproofs from the coatrack, and burst out into the misty morning. It said a lot that she was wanted by a group of imprint-wielding mine dwellers over her own mother.
She walked hard, ignoring Mr Keats’s mewing tabbies. When she reached the coiling lanes she didn’t bother to move out of the way for oncoming traffic. Drivers honked at her more than once, but she soldiered on with the rain on her back and the world on her shoulders.
Her morning at Gorenn Comprehensive passed in much the same way. Classmates’ snickers and teachers’ voices washed over her. Each exercise book she pulled from her rucksack remained unopened; she hadn’t once taken the cap off her Biro. From maths to English to drama, Rasha became increasingly withdrawn, and after a lunchtime spent in the staff toilets once more, it was time for the last period of the day: DT.
With Cridland’s rear window broken, the class was squeezed into the smaller adjoining workshop. Mr Cridland treated Rasha as any of her cohort: with disinterest and a quick temper. She couldn’t tell if it was because of her outburst or because his workshop window had been shattered in the night. Cridland scathed the students with lack of progress on their current projects. He directed a group at the jigsaws to finish the base of their wooden lamps, which naturally included Fred and his band of bullies. Not wanting to be on the receiving on Cridland’s temper, in fear of finding her end the same way Joel Tredethy had, Rasha took to the benches opposite the jigsaw machines to solder her main components to her circuit board.
It was simple work, just a parallel circuit with multiple LED outputs – nothing compared to the kitchen radios and vintage game consoles she’d fixed – which was good because every time Cridland swooped past her to check up on Fred and company’s progress, a cold shiver shot through her body and her hands faltered with the soldering iron. Soon not only chills cascaded down her spine, but static pinched her skin and itched the cut on her hand.
Joel returned.
Cridland disappeared to check on the maintenance team that was repairing his window, so Rasha turned on her stool. Fred and friends traded porn video links and cigarettes at the saws, and beyond that Joel loitered beyond the glass. His body was turned at angle so that his face – contorted on his twisted neck – could stare right in Rasha’s direction. Her blood ran ice-cold as though she had been injected with liquid nitrogen: an invite to leave the flesh-and-bone world.
Rasha presumed that, after showing her his death, Joel had achieved what he wanted. Her short time with th
e Network had taught her that the dead continued to live without bodies, sometimes in the ombrederi and sometimes in the physical world. The idea of imprints with unfinished business seemed redundant in witnessing lore.
Yet Joel continued to pester her.
Cridland reemerged, and Joel’s pasty face revolved on his neck as he tracked the teacher’s movements. Her classmates’ chortles threw Rasha back to the workshop. Fred and company mimicked her with vacant faces and agape mouths. Her fear entertained them.
Cridland laid the equipment he’d gathered onto his desk and crossed the room to the jigsaws.
‘Sit the right way and finish your stands or it’s detention,’ he hissed.
Fred and friends turned on their stools, still snickering at Rasha, and whispered the Joel Tredethy song under their breath. ‘Don’t be weird or you’ll be next.’
Cridland bounded between the jigsaw cutters and Rasha’s bench. He scathed them for their lack of work and threatened detentions. ‘You waste my time, and I’ll waste yours.’
All the while Joel limped ever closer to the jigsaws, arms flopping where they were ripped from his sockets. He stopped before Fred, leant across the saw, and pressed his frosted nose to Fred’s. Those cloudy unblinking eyes.
Rasha leapt to her feet and skirted away from the jigsaws. Their blades whirred beside many hands.
Fred cackled harder. Cridland floundered around him and yelled, but it didn’t make a difference; Fred had heard it all before, and it hadn’t made him a better person.
Rasha hated Fred’s pubescent chirp and the vile things he sputtered. He’d be better silent. She couldn’t stand the fact that Cridland committed a murder and would never face repercussions. Rasha’s skull fizzed with frequency energy. She seethed with venom for all Cridland and Fred had done.
It was then she knew she wasn’t just Rasha. Her walls had gone.
She put her hand out before her and grabbed at the dusty air. Joel thrust forward and pinned Fred’s hand next to his jigsaw.
Fred’s laughter depleted. He struggled but couldn’t break free. Rasha swung her hand, and Joel forced Fred’s knuckles across the jolting blade. The machine shrieked as it punctured bone and cartilage. Blood flicked across the workshop and showered Rasha’s cohort. The class screamed and fled to the farthest end of the room. The metallic tang of Fred’s blood lingered in the dusty air.
Milana’s dismembered arm.
Joel dissipated into the light of the window. Cridland slammed the emergency stop valve above Rasha’s head. The saws halted. He grabbed at Fred with blind panic and roared for a first-aider. Jets of blood squirted from the stump where Fred’s fingers used to be, and the boy, discoloured like old milk, slipped from his stool to the hard stone floor.
Rasha fled, leaving everything behind, and sprinted out of the school grounds.
Her father impaled by a steel girder.
She kicked her feet harder every time she was compelled to cry.
Haya’s weeping arms and distraught face as she pulled Rasha from the wreckage.
Rasha stumbled on the collieries’ gravel lane before she slowed. Lactic acid burned her shins, and her lungs no longer retained air. She was under the shadow of Wheal Gorenn’s engine house chimney, a stone giant reminding her that there was no escape from the frequency.
No escape from what she had just done.
‘Rasha?’ Trish called.
Rasha caught sight of Trish as the woman raced toward her.
‘I could hear you,’ Trish said. She wasn’t wearing her dielectric band. ‘You were projecting.’
Close enough to see Rasha’s tears, Trish’s face washed with concern.
‘Rasha?’
‘I didn’t mean to do it,’ Rasha said. ‘If I’d known.’
‘Rasha, you’re scaring me.’
‘There’s a boy at school. I set an imprint on him. I hurt him real bad.’
Perspiration dewed across Trish’s forehead.
Trish needed her dielectric band to be around Rasha.
The teenager’s mind blasted across the collieries’ yard, blocking out all thought and sound. It was as if Trish had thrust her head against a blearing subwoofer.
I’m a monster. Worse than Joel and Cridland combined. What has Vanessa done to me?
Able to get Rasha to a state of calm, Trish asked Rasha to wait whilst she grabbed her dielectric band from the Reliant. Certain that taking her into the collieries would magnify Rasha’s hysteria, Trish walked her along Gorenn Mount, the same trail she and Sam had led her along when first explaining the frequency. Just one week had passed since then, yet it seemed that an entire lifetime had unfolded.
‘I was Joel, and he was me,’ Rasha stuttered. ‘Anything I did, he’d copy.’
They stopped where a fallen tree blocked their path. Face wet, Rasha looked out onto the babbling sea. Her tears quelled, and her breathing slowed. The sea could often do that; a silver lining to the Network being located in the collieries.
Trish trusted in Rasha’s account of her classmate’s delimbing as much as she trusted in her description of the shadow imprint and believed, to some degree, that Rasha had predicted Will’s death.
‘I thought Vanessa was going to help me,’ Rasha uttered. ‘I’m worse than I was before.’
‘Getting a grip on your witnessing capabilities is an emotionally turbulent time,’ Trish said, speaking from her own experience. ‘Lots of highs and lows.’
‘I need to make it right.’
‘What’s worse than one mistake is making another,’ Trish said. ‘You need more training – ’
‘What if he’s disabled now? What if he gets an infection and – ’
‘Hey, hey,’ Trish said gently, and she pulled the teenager into a one-armed hug. ‘You don’t know that. We’ll take it as it comes. We have to focus on doing good.’
‘Are you going to tell anyone?’
‘I’ll have to the let the board know,’ Trish said. ‘So yes. Yes I will.’ Trish took a breath, put some space between herself and Rasha, and asked, ‘Have you seen the shadow imprint since?’
‘Just Joel Tredethy. I know why you’re asking me. Will. I’m sorry.’
‘You’ve nothing to be sorry for.’
‘I should have said something.’
‘In all honesty, Rasha, we wouldn’t have believed you if you did.’
Rasha sniggered and wiped her tears away. Trish continued.
‘You saw The Vincent?’
‘And a broken window. I suppose that . . .’
Trish was thankful Rasha didn’t finish the sentence; she’d replayed Will’s demise too many times in her head, and each revision was as painful as the last.
‘Yes,’ Trish said. ‘The shadow imprint must have been planning Will’s death. Did you catch its motive? A sense of who it is, anything at all?’
Rasha shook her head.
‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered. ‘How’s Sam?’
Trish pondered a moment. No texts, no phone calls; Trish had only caught minutes with Sam at a time as he raided the Network’s drug stores every other day. She doubted Sam had been fully in reality since the day he’d discovered Will died – unwashed and, judging by the heady fumes wafting off of him, living on a diet of vodka.
‘Struggling,’ she answered. ‘As we all are, struggling on. But what matters is that we keep on going. You too.’
‘I don’t think Mum can,’ Rasha said. ‘She won’t look at me. She sees the girl climbing on the ceiling . . .’
‘It won’t last. Ever changing, remember?’
‘Cliff and sea,’ Rasha retorted.
Trish decided to speak to the board before taking Rasha home. When they got down to the activity centre, a hectic ruckus distracted her; the occupations unit gathered around the birdcage and dispensed equipment. Inside the birdcage, Vanessa and James argued. Whilst he stayed in his chair, Vanessa leant over him, hands on his desk. Trish led Rasha to her desk, told her to wait, and joined her colleagues.
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Trish didn’t know the occupations unit well, but she recognised Leri. A twiglet with a Lego-helmet haircut, Leri usually kept to herself in the laboratories.
‘Everything okay?’ she asked.
Leri’s eyes widened. She faltered with her words, fumbling with the zip of her jacket.
‘It’s been a stressful day, to say the least. Just drove back from Lanhydrock.’
There was a cold atmosphere to the room. People skirted a particular subject, and Trish wished she didn’t wear the dielectric band. She’d have pestered Leri further, but Vanessa and James exited the birdcage.
‘We’re classifying this as code red,’ she informed the occupations unit. ‘We’ll monitor the situation daily until we can extract the occupying imprint.’
‘There was an occupation?’ Trish asked. Vanessa and James turned sharply, unaware she was there at all.
‘With all due respect, it doesn’t concern you, Trish,’ James said.
Vanessa purposefully turned away from Trish to the occupations unit. ‘We’ll go down to test cavern 3C and use the terminal to try and consult guiding imprints on the matter.’
The unit meandered into the shaft beyond the birdcage. Vanessa pulled James in, muttered under her breath, and followed her colleagues.
‘James, a word,’ Trish said.
‘Can it wait?’ His was mind was clearly on other matters.
‘Not unless you want Rasha Abadi to dismember another innocent child,’ Trish retorted.
Mouth agape, James gestured for her to follow into the birdcage. They closed the door, shutting off the ruckus in the activity centre. Trish couldn’t sit, restless with anxiety, so she paced back and forth in front of James’s desk whilst she relayed Rasha’s story.
‘It was a mistake to train Rasha so soon,’ Trish concluded.
‘Without wanting to sound petty,’ James retorted, ‘comparing Vanessa’s actions with your own, hers had far less impact on Rasha’s well-being.’