by Teri Terry
I lunge for her, but it is too late.
She is gone.
‘I’m all right now. I just didn’t get enough sleep last night, that’s all. I’m fine,’ I insist. ‘Can I go to my last class?’
The school nurse doesn’t smile. ‘I’ll be the judge of that,’ she says.
She scans my Levo, frowns. My stomach clenches, afraid what it will show. My levels should have dropped low after what happened: nightmares sometimes even made me black out when it was functioning as it is meant to. But who knows what it is doing now?
‘Looks like you just fainted; your levels have been fine. Good, even. Did you have any lunch?’
Give her a reason.
‘No. I wasn’t hungry,’ I lie.
She shakes her head. ‘Kyla, you need to eat.’ She lectures on blood sugar, feeds me tea and biscuits, and, before she disappears out the door, tells me to sit quietly in her office until the final bell.
Alone, I can’t stop my thoughts spinning around. The girl with the broken hand in my nightmare, or vision, or whatever it was…I know who she is. I recognise her as a younger version of myself: my eyes, bone structure, everything. Lucy Connor: vanished years ago from her school in Keswick, age ten, as reported on MIA. Missing In Action, the highly illegal website I saw just weeks ago at Jazz’s cousin’s place. She was part of me before I was Slated. Yet even with my new memories, I cannot remember being her, or anything about her life. I can’t even think of her as ‘I’ or ‘me’. She is different, other, separate.
How does Lucy fit in this mess in my brain? I kick the desk, frustrated. Things are there, half understood. I feel I know them, but when I focus on details they slip away. Indistinct and insubstantial.
And this was all brought on when I realised I was using my left hand. Did Nico see? If he saw I was writing with my left hand, he’ll know something has changed. I’m supposed to be right-handed, and it is important, so important…but when I try to focus on why I am meant to be right-handed, why I was before, why I don’t seem to be any more, I can’t work it out. The memory goes all distorted, like fingers smashed with a brick.
CHAPTER THREE
* * *
Mum appears at the nurse’s office as the final bell rings. ‘Hello there.’
‘Hi. Did they call you?’
‘Obviously.’
‘Sorry. I’m perfectly all right.’
‘That must be why you passed out in the middle of a lesson and wound up here.’
‘Well, I’m fine now.’
Mum tracks down Amy, and drives us both home. Once through the door I head for the stairs.
‘Kyla, wait. Come talk to me for a minute.’ Mum smiles, but it is one of those that is more on the lips than the whole face. ‘Hot chocolate?’ she asks, and I follow her into the kitchen. She doesn’t chatter as she fills the kettle, makes our drinks. Mum isn’t much of a talker unless she has something to say.
She has something to say. Unease twists in my stomach. Has she noticed I’ve changed? Maybe if I tell her, she can help, and…
Don’t trust her.
After being Slated, I was a blank. It took nine months in hospital for me to learn to function: to walk, talk, and cope with my Levo. Then I was assigned to this family. I grew to see her as a friend, someone I can rely on: but how long have I known her, really? Not even two months. It seemed longer before because it was my whole life out of hospital, all I could remember. Now that I have a wider frame of reference, I know people should be viewed with suspicion, not trust.
She sets the drinks in front of us on the table, and I wrap my hands around the mug, soaking heat into cold hands.
‘What happened?’ she asks.
‘I guess I fainted.’
‘Why? The nurse said you hadn’t eaten, yet your lunchbox is mysteriously empty.’
I stay silent, sip my chocolate, focusing on the bitter sweetness. Nothing I can say about it makes much sense, even to me. Writing with my left hand made me faint? And that dream, or whatever it was. I shudder inside.
‘Kyla, I know how hard things are for you right now. If you ever want to talk, we can, you know. About Ben, or anything. It is all right to wake me up if you can’t sleep. I won’t mind.’
My eyes start to fill with tears at Ben’s name, and I blink furiously. If she only knew how hard things really are; if she only knew the other half of it. I long to tell her, but how would she look at me if she knew I may have killed someone? Anyhow, she might not mind being woken up, but Dad would.
‘When is Dad getting back?’ I say, suddenly aware of his continued absence. He always travels for work: installing and maintaining government computers all over the country. But he is usually home a night or two a week at least.
‘Well, he may not be home so much for a while.’
‘Why?’ I say, careful to hide the relief I feel inside.
She stands, rinses our mugs.
‘You look like you need some sleep, Kyla. Why don’t you take a nap before dinner?’
Conversation over.
Late that night I am lost in confused dreams: running, chasing and being chased all at once. Awake for what must be the tenth time, I punch the pillow and sigh. Then my ears perk up at a slight sound, a crunch, outside. Perhaps I wasn’t woken by dreams this time after all?
Crossing the room to the window, I pull the curtains to one side. The wind has picked up, whipping leaves across the garden. The trees seem bare all at once. Yesterday’s storm has littered the world: orange and red spin in whorls through the air, and around a dark car out front.
The car door opens, and a woman steps out; long curly hair falls over her face. I gasp. Could it be? She pushes it back with one hand as she shuts the door, enough for me to be sure: it is Mrs Nix. Ben’s mother.
I grip the window ledge tight. Why is she here?
Excitement rushes through my body: maybe she has news of Ben! But almost as soon as the thought forms, it is gone. Her face, caught in the moonlight, is pinched and white. If she has any sort of news, it is not happy. Footsteps crunch on the shingle below, and there is a light knock on the front door.
Maybe she has come to demand to know what happened to Ben, what I did. Maybe she is going to tell Mum I was there before the Lorders took him away. It flashes painfully in my mind: Ben in agony; the rattle of the door when his mum came in. I’d told her I found him with his Levo cut off, and—
The rattle of the door. She had to unlock the door to get in. I’d told her I found him like that, but she must know I lied. How else could it have been locked when she got there?
The door opens downstairs; there is a faint murmur of voices.
I have to know.
I slip quietly across the room and out to the landing, then take one careful step at a time down the dark stairs. I listen.
There is the faint whistle of the kettle, low voices; they are in the kitchen.
A step closer; another. The kitchen door is part open.
Something touches my leg, and I jump, almost cry out, until I realise it is Sebastian. He winds round my leg, purring.
Please be quiet, I beg silently, bend to scratch behind his ears. But as I do my elbow bumps the hall table.
I hold my breath. Footsteps approach! I duck into the dark office opposite.
‘It’s just the cat,’ I hear Mum say, then there is movement, a faint ‘meow’. Footsteps retreat back to the kitchen; there is a click as she shuts the door. I creep back into the hall to listen.
‘I’m so sorry about Ben,’ Mum says. I hear chairs move. ‘But you shouldn’t have come here.’
‘Please, you must help.’
‘I don’t understand. How?’
‘We’ve tried everything to find out what happened to him. Everything. They won’t tell us a thing. I though
t, maybe, you could…’ And her voice trails away.
Mum has connections. Political ones: her dad was Prime Minister before he was assassinated, on the Lorder side of the Coalition. Can she help? I listen eagerly.
‘I’m so sorry. I’ve already tried, for Kyla’s sake. But it is a blank wall. There is nothing.’
‘I don’t know where else to turn.’ And there are faint noises, snuffling and hiccupping. She’s crying; Ben’s mum is crying.
‘Listen to me. For your own good, you have to stop asking. At least for now.’
And there is no logic, no thought, no control: I can’t help it. My eyes fill, my throat closes up tight. Mum tried to find out what happened to Ben. For me. She never told me, because she never found out anything. What a risk she took: asking questions where Lorders are involved is dangerous. Potentially lethal.
What a risk Ben’s mum is taking, right now.
When they start saying goodbye, I sneak back up the stairs and into my room. Relief that Ben’s mother never told Mum she found me with Ben that day mixes with sorrow. She feels like I do: the loss. Ben was their son for more than three years, since he was Slated. He’d told me they were close. I long to run to her so we can share this pain, together, but don’t dare.
I wrap my arms around me, tight. Ben. I whisper his name, but he cannot answer. Pain hits me like being crushed. Trampled. Smashed into a million pieces. Before, I had to stop myself from feeling it all, or my Levo would make me black out. Now that it’s not working the hurt is so much, I gasp. Like surgery without anaesthetic: no dull ache, but the slash of a blade, deep inside.
Ben is gone. My brain is working better now, no matter the messed-up memories inside it. He is gone, and he is never coming back. Even if he lived through his Levo being cut off, there is no chance he survived the Lorders. With my memories comes knowledge: once the Lorders take someone, they never return.
It hurts so, I want to push it away, hide from it. But Ben’s memory is one I must keep. This pain is all I have left of him.
His mum comes out of the front door moments later. She sits in her car a few minutes before leaving, hunched over the steering wheel. As she pulls out a light rain starts to fall.
Once she is gone from sight I open the window wide, lean out and stretch my arms into the night. Cold drops fall light on my skin, along with hot tears.
Rain. Something about it is important, itches in my memories, then slips away.
CHAPTER FOUR
* * *
I lean over my sketch, furiously drawing leaves, branches, remembering to use my right hand. The new art teacher the school has finally come up with doesn’t look dangerous, or inspiring. He doesn’t look much of anything. He isn’t a patch on Gianelli, the man he replaces. But so long as I can draw, anything, even just trees as instructed, I don’t care how insipid the teacher.
He moves around the room, making bland comments now and then, until he stops at my shoulder. ‘Hmmm…well…that’s interesting,’ he says, and moves on.
I look down at my sheet of paper. A whole forest of angry trees I’ve drawn, and in the shadows underneath, a dark shape with eyes.
What would Gianelli make of this? He’d say, slow down, and take more care, and he’d have a point. But he’d like the wildness just the same.
I start again, soothed by the scratch of charcoal on paper. The trees less angry. This time, Gianelli himself looks back at me from their shadows. No one but me would recognise it as him: I know what happens when you draw the missing, as he did. Instead, I draw him as I imagine he might have been, a young man lost in a sketch. Not the old man the Lorders dragged away.
An hour later, I scan my ID in at the door to study hall, and step into the classroom. Start to walk to the back…
‘Kyla?’
I stop. That voice: here? I pause, and turn. Nico leans against the desk at the front of the room. He smiles, a slow, lazy smile. ‘I hope you are feeling better today.’
‘I’m fine, Sir,’ I say, and manage to turn away, to walk to my seat without falling over.
His presence as bored teacher in charge of making sure we study silently shouldn’t be that much of a surprise. They change all the time, so it was bound to be Nico sooner or later. Yet I wasn’t expecting to be faced with him again, so soon. I have to hold my hands together on my lap for a moment to stop them from shaking.
I open algebra homework: something I can pretend to do without much effort. And I try to stare at the page, pencil carefully in my right hand. Nico has a red pen and papers to mark in front of him at the desk up front. Yet I can tell he is pretending as much as I am, glancing my way all the time.
Of course, I wouldn’t know that if I wasn’t watching him. I sigh, and attempt to solve an equation for x.
But the numbers swim, won’t behave, and my mind wanders as the minutes tick away. I doodle around the borders of the page, then draw vines and leaves around the date I’ve written as usual at the top. But then the numbers jump into stark focus: 03/11. It is the 3rd of November.
Almost with an audible click inside, a chunk of knowledge falls into place.
Today is my birthday. I was born seventeen years ago today, but I’m the only one who knows.
Goose bumps trail on my arms. I know the date of my real birthday, not the one assigned at hospital when my identity was changed, my past stolen.
My birthday? I probe at the concept, but there is nothing else. No cake, no parties or presents; the fact of the date is all there is. Memories that should go with it do not. Yet I sense there is more inside me, more I might find and learn, if I probe around.
Some of my recovered memories are like cold facts. As if I’ve read a file about myself, and remember certain bits of it and not others. There is no feeling in it.
I know from the missing children website that I was Lucy, that I disappeared when I was ten, but I can’t remember anything of that life. Then somehow I reappear in my teens with Nico. It is only from then on that memories are stealing back; there is nothing from before.
Nico is the one who might have answers. All I have to do is tell him I remember who he is. But do I really want to know?
When the bell goes, even though I tell myself to bolt out quick and leave this choice, whether to speak to him or not, until I can make sense of it, I dawdle. A shiver, of what – excitement? Fear? – tracks down my spine. I walk slowly to the front of the room, where Nico stands by the door. The last of the other students have gone. We are alone.
Just go, I tell myself, and start walking past him.
‘Happy birthday, Rain,’ he says, voice low.
I turn back. Our eyes meet.
‘Rain?’ I whisper. Touching and tasting the name, owning it again. Rain. Another time and place rush back, vivid and clear: I chose this name for myself three years ago, on my fourteenth birthday: I remember! It is my name. Not Lucy, the name given at birth by parents. Not Kyla, the one chosen years later by an indifferent nurse filling in a form at hospital after I was Slated. Rain is mine. And it is as if the sound of my name said out loud, at last, explodes any final resistance or barrier inside.
His eyes widen and flash. He knows me, and more. He knows I know him.
Danger.
Adrenalin surges through my body, a burst of energy: fight, or flight.
But the look falls from his face as if it never was, and he steps back. ‘Try to remember your biology homework for tomorrow, Kyla,’ he says, his eyes glancing over my shoulder.
I turn and there is Mrs Ali. Hate flashes through me, and then fear: but it is Kyla’s fear. I’m not afraid of her. Rain isn’t afraid of anything!
‘Try to remember,’ Nico says again, this time leaving off the meaningless homework reference added for Mrs Ali’s ears. He disappears up the hall.
Try to remember…
‘We need to have a little chat,’ Mrs Ali says, and smiles. She is at her most dangerous when she smiles.
Two can be so. I smile back. ‘Of course,’ I say, and try to still all that sings inside. My name! I am Rain.
‘I won’t be taking you between your classes any more; you obviously know your way around the school now,’ she says.
‘Well, thanks so much for your help so far,’ I say, as sweetly as I can manage.
Her eyes narrow. ‘I’ve heard you’ve been moping about classes, looking a misery and not paying attention. Yet you seem happy enough today.’
‘Sorry about that. I’m feeling much better.’
‘Now, Kyla, you know if anything is ever bothering you, you can talk to me.’ She smiles again, and a shiver goes down my back.
Be careful. Her official job title may be teaching assistant, but she is so much more than that. She’s been watching me for any sign, any deviation. Anything outside rigid, expected Slated behaviour – any hint of returning to my criminal ways – and I could be returned to the Lorders. Terminated.
‘Everything is fine. Really.’
‘Well, see that it stays that way. You must try your best in school, at home, and in your community, to—’
‘Fulfil my contract. Take advantage of my second chance. Yes, I know! But thank you for reminding me. I’ll do my very best.’ I grin, happy enough with the world to even share my smile with a Lorder spy. That Mrs Ali won’t be my shadow at school any more is an unexpected bonus.
Her features war between confusion and annoyance. Too much?
‘See that you do,’ she says, ice dripping from her voice, the smile gone. She obviously likes it better when I quake in her presence.
Shame that Rain doesn’t quake.
Red, gold, orange: the oak tree in our front garden has covered the grass with colour, and I fetch a rake from the shed.
I have a name.
I attack the leaves with the rake, pulling them into piles, then kick them about and start over.