by Lou Morgan
“Did anyone see what happened?”
“What do you think? Anyone here?” Tigs looked around the room. “No. And don’t you think that if anyone else had seen, there’d be something? Police … an ambulance … anything?”
“Then it could have been an accident … or it could not.” Noah lowered his voice.
“Wait … what?” Tigs stared at him, along with everyone else.
“Maybe he slipped. He was twitchy, he was paranoid. Maybe it was all just bad luck. But on the other hand, maybe Dom was right. Maybe he did see someone. We took an unlicensed drug – a top-secret experiment somebody’s trying very hard to bury. Did it never occur to you that they might want it back?”
“And if they don’t get it?” Grey cut in, “what, they bury us instead?”
“Perhaps they don’t even have to do that. They just have to wait for us to drop.” Noah’s voice fell to little more than a whisper.
Seeing nothing but blank, frightened faces staring back at him, Noah picked through the papers for one more. He scanned it, then put it down again.
“How do I put this simply? The FokusPro, right? It messes with the way your brain works – it has to. That’s what it’s designed to do. But the brain’s basically the most complicated machine you could imagine. And just like any machine, if you throw one bit of it out of alignment you’re going to get some consequences.”
“Can you just get to it?” Grey glared at him with red-rimmed eyes. “What’s going to happen to us?”
“Would you listen?” Noah stifled a yawn, then shook his head. “The drug they called FPX348 – our drug – was designed to maximize short-term function and memory. It meant anyone taking it would be able to concentrate better for longer. Sound familiar?” He shuffled in his chair, not getting any answer.
Izzy wished he’d hurry up, too. She couldn’t tell whether he was dragging it out for the sake of the drama, or because he needed the time to think it out for himself. Either way, she wasn’t sure she was going to be able to stand it for much longer.
Eventually, he picked up again. “Somebody, somewhere up in a shiny office, figured that it might be an idea to use a pill like FPX348 longer-term. Maybe even sell it commercially.”
“To students? Like us?” Tigs seemed to be keeping up with the concept better than Izzy was.
“Who the hell knows? Either way, they started to run some tests – the final results of which you saw on that video.” He cleared his throat, then continued. “How much do you know about sleep?”
“I know I’ve not been getting enough…” Grey grumbled.
“You’ve been listening, clearly. You want me to break it down into words of one syllable for you?” Noah rolled his eyes. “When you’re asleep, your brain processes everything it’s dealt with in the day – that’s why we dream. It shunts everything from short-term to long-term memory ready for the next day. Then when you hit REM sleep, it stops producing adrenaline and temporarily paralyzes you so that it can process all the bad stuff you’ve seen or heard without you acting it out and … I dunno, running around screaming or something.”
“And that’s a bad thing?” Izzy would happily admit to being nowhere near as smart as Noah. None of them were, although most of the time they didn’t like to say it, not unless they could immediately turn round and say they were just kidding. But this was confusing and it was frightening, and the more he talked about sleep, the more she wanted to yawn and curl up into a little ball and just close her eyes, even if it was only for a few minutes.
“It is if you muck up the way your brain handles it all, yeah. And that’s what we’ve done. As our murderous friend on the video discovered, you take FPX348 for more than a couple of days and your brain forgets how to shut down its adrenaline production. Any issues you have? Any trauma? Anything whatsoever that might count as having had a crap day? It sticks there, and it just kind of festers.”
“What happens then?”
“What would happen if you left your lunch in the bottom of your schoolbag? And then you did the same thing the next day?”
“Eeew.”
“Exactly. Now imagine what it would be like after, ooh, say two weeks?”
Izzy’s mind presented her with a mental image of her brain, stuffed full of rotten sushi and gluey-green sandwiches. Judging by the others’ faces, they were thinking something pretty similar.
“So, what’s the problem? None of us have taken any of the pills for ages now – have we?” Tigs shot a meaningful glance around the room.
“You would think like that, wouldn’t you?” Noah didn’t bother to disguise the contempt in his voice. “What happens when a cog in an engine slips?”
“Like I’m supposed to know?” Tigs pulled a face. Of course she wouldn’t know, would she?
“It sends everything out of balance. And the longer it goes on, the worse it gets.”
“But we’re not talking about engines, are we? So isn’t there something we can just, like, take?”
“No. We’re not. We’re talking about something a lot more complicated, which even brain surgeons don’t totally understand. And you’d think they’d be pretty up on this stuff, right? That’s how much trouble we’re in, Tigs, seeing as you need me to spell it out. You can’t fix this just by chucking another pill down your throat, all right?” As he spoke, Noah’s voice climbed to a shout, and he got up from his chair and took one step at a time towards Tigs until he was almost nose-to-nose with her. She shrank back and Grey reached for Noah’s arm, but Noah shook him off and glowered at him. Izzy caught the look he gave Grey – and the most frightening thing about it was that it was almost completely empty of anything or anyone she recognized. It was pure rage. There was no sign of Noah in that look – just a stranger. An angry stranger, who could be capable of anything.
Grey stood his ground and edged between Noah and Tigs. “Enough,” he said calmly, and nodded towards the papers on the table. “You were talking about sleep, right?”
“I… Sleep? What?” Noah blinked, and suddenly he was himself again. He stepped away from Tigs, confused, and moved back to the table. “Right. Yes. Sleep. So while all this is going on in your head, your sleep cycles are out of whack and your brain just … forgets how to do it properly.”
“Which is why none of us are sleeping…”
“Bingo. Now, here’s the thing – because you’re not sleeping right, your brain stops producing the hormone that regulates sleep. Which means you don’t sleep right, which means you don’t make the hormone … and round and round we go. We’ve got a couple of weeks’ worth of it stored in reserve, just knocking around in our systems, but once you run out … that’s it. Done. Meanwhile, all the crap that goes on in the day is still getting stuffed into the brain and it’s getting more and more cluttered. Think of it like a computer. If you never shut the system down, it never clears the memory, and eventually it just runs out of processing power and crashes.”
“What does that mean for us?”
“Well, as far as I can make out, it means we go psycho. And then, because pretty much our entire system just packs in, we die.”
“Oh.”
“That’s the bit where I threw up.”
He handed what appeared to be a very official-looking document to Grey, who took it and started to look through the stapled pages. As he flipped, Noah said, “You have no idea how many firewalls I had to go through to find that.”
“No one could trace it, though, could they? Or find you? Find us?” Grey looked up, alarmed, but Noah snorted.
“Please. You think this is my first rodeo?” His attempt at a joke felt out of place.
“This is pretty useless, you know.” Grey passed the papers to Izzy. They were a mass of thick black lines, as though someone had been through huge chunks of the text with a big black marker pen. ‘REDACTED’ appeared in the margins in intimidating block lettering every now and again, just for variety.
“This isn’t exactly helping.” She gave it back to Noah
, who shrugged.
“Not much does.”
“So that’s it. You’re saying we’re screwed, right?”
“Maybe.”
Grey laughed. It wasn’t a happy laugh. “Maybe? Because to me, that didn’t sound like much of a maybe. It sounded pretty definite.”
“There’s a thing. It might work – I don’t know. Not for sure.”
“Right now, I’ll take ‘might work’ over ‘dead man walking’.”
“I said we’ve all got a couple of weeks of these magic happy brain hormones, right? The ones that help keep everything on track – and which we’ve managed to screw up with Antigone’s Marvellous Medicine? Somewhere in all this junk, I came across something about a way of kickstarting it. Something about…” He started to scatter pages across the table, the floor, the chair – skimming through them in search of the one he wanted. “That’s it. Your brain’s craving sleep. It needs sleep. Your brain’s not prepared to go down without a fight, and it’ll do anything it can to protect itself and survive. It’s hardwired into it. If you can force your brain into a critically sleep-deprived state, it puts so much stress on the whole thing that it reboots the adrenal glands, the endocrine system, the whole shebang. Totally floods the brain with all the right hormones, thus saving both your sanity and your life.” He wound up with a flourish.
“And you didn’t lead with this … why?”
“Because.”
“Because what?”
“Because you have to do it before it’s too late – leave it too long and the damage can’t be fixed.”
“So?”
“I don’t know, OK? I mean, eventually, there’s always a chance the whole thing will sort itself out… But from all the stuff I’ve read, it’s looking far more likely that by that point you’d be a monster, a vegetable or dead. Or all three.”
“So it’s worth a shot,” said Grey.
“I’d say anything’s worth a shot, wouldn’t you?” Noah was deadly serious as he looked at each of them in turn.
The question they all wanted to ask came from the sofa. It was Juliet. “What do we have to do?”
“Stay awake,” Noah said.
“Stay awake?” Grey repeated. “That’s it?”
“That’s it. Trigger the happy-brain hormone flood and ride the wave out all the way back to normal. Oh, and don’t get killed in the meantime.”
It seemed too easy, somehow. After all, thought Izzy, it was just staying awake. How hard could that be? She’d spent enough times out until the early hours, and done enough all-night study sessions to know she could do it. And after all Noah’s doomy predictions about what could happen, it didn’t seem difficult enough.
Grey spoke first. “How long? How long do we need to stay awake for?”
“Continuously? Forty-eight hours, as far as I can tell. Maybe more. It’ll be different for everyone, but from what I’ve read, it looks like somewhere between thirty-six and forty-eight hours should do it. Basically, as long as you can. No naps. No dozing. Nothing. Stay awake till you drop. Longer if you can handle it.”
“Forty-eight hours? That’s a long time, Noah.”
“You think?”
“It’s two days. Two days, and two nights. All of them. In one go.”
“Hey, you asked.”
Grey sighed. “That doesn’t mean I have to like the answer.”
Izzy yawned – and across the room, she saw Tigs and Juliet doing exactly the same thing.
“And what about these people?” she asked. “The ones you think are after the pills … or us? Did they… Did they kill Dom?”
“Maybe. Maybe not. All I know is we can’t let our guard down.”
“And Dom? What about him?” Juliet interrupted.
Noah cocked his head on one side as he looked at her. “Jools? I loved Dom. I mean, I really did. He was my best friend. Look, I don’t want this to sound harsh, but he’s done. We can’t help him any more. Here’s who we can help – you, me, Grey, Izzy, Tigs, Mia. That’s who we need to worry about right now. Dom…” his voice cracked and he bit his lip. A moment later, he tried again. “If somebody did something to Dom, we’ll find a way to make it right later. But now? We look after us.”
“And the police? Why don’t we just tell them? Tell them everything,” Juliet chipped in.
There was an awkward silence. Nobody wanted to be the first to say it, but from the way the others were fidgeting, avoiding Juliet’s gaze, Izzy could tell what they were thinking – and it was exactly the same thing she was. Going to the police really would mean telling them everything. About the pills. About where they’d got them from. What if they were illegal? What if they’d done something much, much worse than just fixing their exams? Once they told someone, anyone, there was no going back. And there would be consequences … for all of them.
It was Noah who finally spoke up. “Do you really want to sit down in an interview room and explain everything I’ve just told you to the police? You really think they’d take you seriously? Best case, they’d laugh you out of the building. Worst case … well.”
“What if there are people after us? Clearing up the mess?” Grey sounded thoughtful.
“Then we’ll have to deal with that, I guess.” Noah started to crumple up the sheets of paper. “But for now, we stick to the plan.” He strode into the kitchen, coming back out carrying a metal bin and setting it on the floor at the end of the table.
“And what is ‘the plan’, exactly?”
Noah swept all the crumpled paper into the bin. He pulled a lighter out of his pocket and snapped it open. A small flame wavered just above his fingers. “It’s really simple. You want to survive? Stick together and don’t go to sleep.”
He dropped the lighter into the bin, and together they watched as the flames consumed the paper inside.
Chapter Eleven
“We should get Mia.” Juliet was the first one to remember that she was upstairs.
“She’s not asleep, is she?” Noah’s voice rang with concern. It sounded like he was more worried that she might have dozed off than that she might be upset. Given what he’d just said to them all, it was a fair enough point.
“She just found her drowned brother, Noah. Do you really think she could sleep?” Juliet was already heading towards the stairs up to Mia’s bedroom.
“What do we do about him? Dom, I mean?” Grey was looking out of the window, his fingers running up and down the edge of the slatted wooden blind that covered part of the view over the lake and gardens. Thankfully, the duplex faced the opposite end of the Barbican to the one where Dom was currently lying.
“Like I said, we can’t go to the police.”
“We could report him missing?”
At the bottom of the stairs, Juliet stopped.“And what happens when they actually find him? They’ll want to know what happened…”
“We want to know what happened, don’t we?” Grey slapped at the blind. It swung back and forth, tapping against the frame of the window.
Noah wasn’t listening. Instead, he was running his hands back and forth through his hair, scratching at his scalp over and over again. When he finally stopped and his hands dropped back to his sides, Izzy’s stomach lurched as she saw that his fingernails were red.
“How easy was it to see him?”
“You what?” Grey spun away from the window and stared at Noah in disbelief.
“How… Could anyone just … find him? If they weren’t looking?”
“You’re serious, aren’t you? You’re actually serious.”
“Yes, I’m serious. You really think I’m mucking around?”
“I don’t know what to think. None of us do, right?” Grey looked around at Izzy and Juliet for backup. Juliet just stared at her feet. Something in her had broken back at the waterfall. Izzy wondered whether it was Juliet’s heart.
It felt like there wasn’t enough air in the room for all of them. The light had gone from the sky, and all the warmth with it. Izzy didn’t know
why or how, or what it meant, but everywhere was suddenly cold and dark and she could barely breathe. Her thoughts tumbled over each other, moving too fast to hold down or to grab on to. But the one pin-sharp thing she was sure of was that Dom was dead, and if Noah was right any of them could be next. All of them could be. It was unreal.
But it was real. It was happening.
And the worst part was that they’d done it to themselves.
There were no monsters. There were no ghosts, no demons, no witches wishing bad things on them. No one had played truth or dare; no one had torn up a chain letter. No one had stood in front of a mirror and chanted, and no one had read so much as a single word of Latin from an old book they’d found in an abandoned cellar.
No ghosts…
“Noah?” said Izzy.
“Mmm?”
“The side effects. You said ‘hallucinations’.”
“Yeah, you know … seeing things, hearing things that aren’t there. The usual.”
“Because I think I have. I know I have. Seen things.”
“Like what?”
“In the station. There was a poster…” The words clogged her throat. It felt more like her lungs were full of rags than air. “The faces on it … they changed.”
“Changed, how?”
“Like they were melting. Tigs and Juliet’s faces, too, and the guy in the station who asked if I was feeling OK. They just melted.”
“Yeah. That’s the kind of thing I was talking about.”
Grey stepped away from the window, his eyes searching her face. “So that’s what Tigs was talking about when she said you went loopy. Why didn’t you talk to me about it? You didn’t say anything.”
“What, and sound like I’d actually gone loopy? No thanks.” She stopped herself from saying any more, and looked again at Noah. “Is it … going to get worse?”
“I think that’s a pretty safe bet.” Noah’s mouth set into a grim line.
“Forty-eight hours?”
“Give or take.”