“There’s something you didn’t tell me, isn’t there?” Pia says on the other end of the phone. Her voice is low and urgent, not her usual perky TV voice, and it takes me a moment to register what’s going on, to differentiate between being asleep and awake.
“What? About what?”
“In the Branding Chamber. Your family was all sent away before the fifth brand, but there was somebody else in there who saw what happened. Wasn’t there?”
I’m suddenly wide awake. I sit up and feel the pain in my body from Logan’s kicks. I groan.
“Are you okay?”
I close my eyes and take a deep breath, waiting for the dizziness to pass.
“Celestine?”
“I’m here.”
“I know you were looking for Mr. Berry at the castle.”
She knows something. “He’s my solicitor. There were things I needed to discuss with him about my case.”
“Why have you left seven urgent messages on his voice mail over the past few days?”
This stops me. How does she know that?
“Mr. Berry was in the Branding Chamber at the time of the sixth branding, wasn’t he?” she says quickly, urgently. “He saw.”
I freeze. I don’t know if I can let her know this. I don’t know if I can trust her.
“Who’s there with you?”
“No one.” It sounds like she’s moving around. There’s a clicking sound on the phone again. Her presence comes and goes. “I’m alone, I promise. Celestine, trust me.”
Goose bumps rise on my skin. This is the moment. It’s either make or break. If I trust her and she’s lying, I’m putting Mr. Berry in grave danger. And after tonight, there is no one that I can trust. Then again, I’m alone in all this, whom else have I got to help me?
“Pia, this can’t all be on your terms,” I say. “I need to know why you’re asking.”
She says something I can’t hear properly.
“What? Pia, where are you? This is a bad line.”
“Doesn’t matter. Think, Celestine. There’s something you’re not telling me and I need to know it.”
I’m sick of all this, sick of everyone taking from me. “Why the hell should I tell you?” I hiss, not wanting to wake anyone in the house. “So you can twist it in Crevan’s favor? He’s not going to let you print any of this. If nobody knows about this now, it’s for a reason. He’s gotten rid of just about everybody who’s a witness to it. In fact, he’s probably listening to us now. How do I know you’re not trying to set me up? How do I know you’re not working with him to make sure there’s nobody left who saw what happened?”
“He can’t hear this conversation,” she says through clicking noises, her voice coming and going. “And you can trust me. You have to trust me,” she says, more clearly this time. “Who else have you got, Celestine? Who else do you know can find out information for you?”
I think fast. “What do I get in return?”
“Celestine,” she almost shrieks, “I’m trying to help you here.”
“You’re trying to help yourself.”
She sighs. “What do you want?”
“I want information on a person.”
“Who?”
“Carrick.” I don’t even know his surname. “He was in the cell beside me in Highland Castle.”
“The Flawed boy? Why?”
“No questions. It’s my own business.”
“Does he know something?”
“No!” I lie. “I just want to find him. Let’s just say I’m running low on friends right now. I need someone who can understand what I’m going through.”
“Fine. I’ll get whatever details I can, but I never interviewed him. It wasn’t a story we wanted.”
This maddens me.
“I’ll find out something and get back to you. Now you think for me, Celestine. I need something. I need more. Was Mr. Berry in the Branding Chamber? Did he see the sixth brand? The reports say he wasn’t there after the fifth, that he was removed with your family. Are they wrong?”
A long pause.
“Yes, Mr. Berry saw the sixth brand,” I finally reveal. She’s right, I need her help.
I picture that day again, in the Branding Chamber. I have tried so hard to block it out, but I can’t. It comes to me in my nightmares, at certain times of the day when I’m least expecting it, the pain, the smell, the horror of it, and I want to escape it. It happens when my dad comfortingly puts his hand on my shoulder and squeezes. He doesn’t know it, but I tense up, immediately taken back to the chair, feeling Tina’s touch before each branding. To willingly put myself back in that chamber, while in the comfort of my own bed, is against everything I have been trying so hard to do, especially after the events of tonight, when I’m scared and sore and want to forget it all. But I go there. The smells, the sound, the fear, my banging heart, the ache in my wrists and ankles. Crevan shouting at me in his bloodred cape, the angry spittle flying from his mouth.
“He wasn’t thrown out with your parents?” she asks.
“He somehow made his way back in. He had a phone in his hand. He was recording.”
No need to mention Carrick being in there, too. I need to keep something further for myself.
“Recording? There’s video? Oh my God. Okay, thank you, Celestine. Thank you.” She hangs up.
My heart is racing, anxious from reliving the moment, for revealing Mr. Berry’s possible video, also for asking about Carrick. I don’t want her to think that he has anything to do with this, and I don’t want to get him into trouble, but I have no other way of finding him.
Now that I’m awake and have the Branding Chamber scenario firmly in my head, I can’t go back to sleep. My head is pounding from hitting it earlier on the car, and I feel a large bump on my head. My mouth is dry, and I’m parched. I get out of bed, feeling shaky, and throw an oversized cardigan around my T-shirt.
I go downstairs to the kitchen, going straight to the fridge for water. As I open it, I sense a presence and turn around to see Mary May sitting in the corner of the room, in darkness, watching me. The overhead light of the oven fan is all she has to see by. She has a book, which she covers with her hands, the first time I’ve seen her flesh without the leather gloves. She smiles at my obvious fright, though she seems tired.
“What are you … I mean, why are you … you’re staying the night?” I ask.
She takes me in, looks me up and down slowly, and it makes me wrap the cardigan around me tighter. This woman gives me the creeps.
“Bearing in mind the events of tonight, I thought it best I stay here. That’s a fine bump on your head,” she observes.
My hand goes to it, and I wince. It’s pounding. I need water and headache pills. I help myself as she watches.
“You’re worried I’ll have a concussion?”
“No.” She laughs, but it’s not a joyous sound. It’s cruel, like she’s laughing at me, as though I’m the most stupid person she’s ever met. “I wanted to make sure you stay where you should be. No rule breaking. I know about events like these, what they do to a person.”
“What do you mean?” I down the pills and water.
“Revenge,” she says, and I see the coldness and the darkness in her eyes, and I think back to what she did to her sister, reporting her to the Guild, and then to her entire family when it turned its back on her.
“Is that why you did what you did to your family?” I ask. “Out of revenge?”
“No,” she says, not blinking, not seeming bothered that I’ve asked a personal question. “I caught my sister with my boyfriend. Reporting her to the Guild was out of revenge.”
The story is too close to home for me right now, and I wonder if she’s testing me. Does she know about Art and Juniper? She couldn’t. If she did, the Whistleblowers would have found him by now.
“My family…” She looks away a little, and I detect a hint of sadness that is quickly covered up. “That was just necessary.”
I get the shiver
s from head to toe.
She looks me over again. “Dr. Smith says nothing’s broken.”
“No. If you don’t count my heart, my pride, and my complete belief in humanity.”
I hold her stare, her eyes black in the darkness, and I almost think she gets it.
“No,” she says, simply, going back to her book. I see a Jane Austen cover. “I don’t.”
FORTY-NINE
THAT AFTERNOON PIA comes to the house. Apart from the dramatic trip to the police station with Dad, I have spent the day in bed curled up in a ball. Still aching from last night’s attack, I drag myself out of bed, pull on some loose dark clothes, and meet her in the library. I expect her to be seated in one of her crisp peach chic pencil skirts and blouses, but, instead, she’s pacing. Her shiny black hair is scraped back sharply, and she’s wearing jeans, sneakers, and a hoodie.
I look at her in surprise.
She looks at me in surprise.
“What happened to you?” I ask.
“Never mind me, what happened to you?”
The bruise on my forehead has come up nicely, an enormous, cartoon-sized bump that today has turned a shade of yellow and black. My face is scraped from the twigs and branches that cut my skin as I ran blindly through the trees in the darkness.
I sit in the armchair and wince from the pain in my stomach. My ribs aren’t cracked, but they may as well be.
“Celestine,” she says with urgency in her voice and nothing but concern on her face. So I have to drop the act. “What happened?”
I sigh. “Turns out there wasn’t a party. Not for me, anyway.”
“You were set up?”
“Ambushed, I believe the word is.” My eyes fill up at the memory of it, which is still raw in my mind and in my body. Each time I move, I feel the aches.
“That kid who invited you?”
“Logan Trilby. L-O-G-A-N,” I say slowly, sarcastically. “T-R-I-L-B-Y. Aren’t you going to write that down? Oh, no, of course not, nothing that might make people pity me.”
Her eyes are angry, but not at me. “You don’t want people’s pity, Celestine.”
“I actually do.” I half-laugh. “I want everybody’s pity, because then I will know that everyone is human, instead of whatever it is everybody is now.”
She sits down in the armchair across from me, but not delicately and prissy as before. She’s on the edge, feet parted, elbows on knees; she’s getting down and dirty today.
“What did he do?”
“Not just him. He had a few friends. Their mission was to humiliate me.”
“And did they?”
“Yes.”
“Tell me.” She’s being soft and patient, but underneath it there’s a sense of urgency about her today, nothing calm and calculated like our previous conversations. The first time we met, Pia was in “Pia TV Personality” mode, then I saw “Off-Duty Pia,” but this woman is new, this is a side to her I’ve never seen. I have been gullible in the past, but I believe this person.
“They put a sackcloth bag over my head, tied me up, hit me, kicked me, dumped ashes on me, stripped me, and locked me in a shed. That about covers it.”
I don’t mention their forcing the alcohol into my mouth—that would get me into trouble, even though I had no option. I’m not going to take my chances, not even with Pia in this mood.
Her eyes turn cold. “Logan Trilby. And who were the others?”
I give her fuller details and she shows her disgust, discomfort, and empathy in all the right places and I believe that she cares.
“So what’s happening?”
“Nothing. My dad arranged for everybody to be at the police station today. Principal Hamilton, Natasha, Logan, Gavin, Colleen. Their parents, apart from Angelina. Logan’s parents have vouched for him, said he couldn’t have had anything to do with it, because he was in Bible study.”
“They don’t believe he was lying?”
“They’re lying. They say he was with them at Bible study.”
Her mouth falls open. “What about the other kids?”
“Natasha and Gavin blamed Colleen, said she masterminded the entire thing, in retaliation for something that happened between me and her mom.”
“What happened?” She naturally switches into her journalist mode.
“Can’t tell you. Natasha’s dad is some fancy lawyer, started jabbering on about human rights and his daughter protecting herself from a Flawed. The police aren’t going to do anything about it. They let the school punish us. My dad went crazy. Gavin and Natasha were suspended for two days. Colleen is expelled, but it doesn’t matter, because Bob Tinder was fired as editor of the newspaper—”
“Believe me, I know,” she interrupts, and her eyes start racing again as I see her mind ticking.
“I forgot he was your boss. Anyway, they’re moving. You probably know that, too, so it’s hardly a punishment. Colleen will have to start at another school anyway.”
She shakes her head, seemingly appalled.
“Pia, there’s one other thing I’m worried about. Last night, when they stripped me”—I swallow hard, feeling the humiliation all over again—“they photographed me. They’ve seen the sixth brand and have proof of it.”
Pia focuses hard while she thinks it through.
“The thing is, they were afraid of it, they backed away after that. So I think they know not to say something, but sooner or later it’s going to come out. Natasha’s bound to let it slip to someone. She couldn’t keep a secret if you paid her.”
“But they don’t have the video,” Pia says. “We need to get our hands on that video. And we need to move on this story fast.” Pia starts pacing again. “We need to break it before they do. Before Crevan hears their rumors and has a chance to spin it, if he’s not working on that already.” She looks around the room to see if anyone can hear us. “This morning I learned that there’s an inquiry into Crevan,” she says, her voice a hush. “A private inquiry. The outcome of your case, Angelina Tinder, Jimmy Child, Dr. Blake, they’ve all got people talking.”
“Who’s Dr. Blake?” The name’s familiar. Granddad mentioned him to me during the trial. He said I needed to find Dr. Blake and somebody else. It didn’t seem important at the time. I was putting it down as his conspiracy ramblings, but I should have taken note.
“Dr. Blake is the woman who misdiagnosed Crevan’s wife, Annie,” she says. “Your granddad told me to look into her at your trial, and I fobbed him off as a crazy old man. I started looking into it, though, after meeting you. She didn’t catch the cancer in time. Crevan found her Flawed just before Jimmy Child’s case. She was found Flawed on another personal matter, much like Angelina Tinder was. The case had nothing to do with Crevan’s wife. I would never have caught the link until your granddad tipped me off.”
Good old Granddad, I think proudly. He was always on my side, but I, too, thought his views were extreme. If he got Dr. Blake right, perhaps he’s right about it all.
“Crevan is using the Guild as his own private court,” I say.
“I believe he was planning the Dr. Blake case for some time. The outcome gave him confidence to proceed with Angelina and Jimmy Child. He got away with them, but now people are questioning his decisions.”
I roll my eyes. “A Guild into the Guild?”
She smiles weakly. “Kind of. A private inquiry into a public one.”
“Well, let me guess the outcome. The Guild will find that the Guild acted perfectly and appropriately. Ta-da! Inquiry over.”
“It’s an investigation into Judge Crevan only. Members of the government feel he has been abusing his powers. Remember, this began as a temporary fix to look into wrongdoing. It has become far more than that and grown faster than the government has had time to control it. The lines are blurring between legality and Guild rules. The government wants to take back its power.”
“People like Enya Sleepwell.”
“Exactly. Because of pressure by her, a private commission has been set
up to first investigate the cases privately.”
“Privately,” I sigh. “They hide well, these rational-thinking concerned people.”
“Not everyone is as brave as you are.”
I look for the sarcasm in her voice, but there isn’t any.
“You know.” She sits down. “A new journalist arrived on the online scene a few days ago. She’s getting popular, very quickly.”
“Jealous?”
“A bit.” She smiles. “She’s a fan of yours.”
I’m surprised. “Who is she?”
She takes out her tablet to show me. “Her name is Lisa Life.”
I snort.
“She’s on your side. She’s part of a new news site called X-It. They have millions of readers every day.”
She flicks through her tablet to show me the article. The headline reads, IF I WAS SUCH A HERO, THAT OLD MAN WOULD BE ALIVE NOW. I FAILED. Underneath that is a pretty picture of me sitting by Clayton Byrne’s grave site and lighting a candle, with the quote, “I helped an old man to a seat.” I hadn’t known I was being followed that day. I should have been more careful, especially after escaping school to visit the guards and Mr. Berry in Highland Castle. I read on.
The story is about how my actions on the bus have made the Flawed issue a human rights issue. Clayton Byrne’s death is the first recorded death of a Flawed through negligence of society, a society that was following rules. Yet those rules led to the death of a man. There’s a quote from Enya Sleepwell, “I’m not condoning what Celestine North did, but her actions, and recent comments, raise serious and valid points that must be questioned and answered by our government. If we are to question the rule of aiding a Flawed, then surely the entire system must be questioned.”
I look closely at the photograph of Enya and recognize her as the woman with the pixie cut who nodded to me each day in the crowd as I was jeered and jostled on my walk across the courtyard at Highland Castle.
“Lisa Life published this today,” she says, handing me a new article from a folder.
“Compassion and Logic: The Perfect Pairing. Our Perfect Leader?”
Flawed Page 21