“Think about what could happen, if you walked away. If the Face of the Resistance stopped supporting the coalition.”
I shrug. “What?”
“The situation is delicate. People don’t like seeing coalition soldiers in their towns. What if they stopped trusting us? What if they started fighting back?” She shakes her head. “We could lose everything, Bex. Everything we’ve fought for. We could find ourselves with a proper civil war on our hands.” She looks at me. “Do you know how destructive that would be?”
And I realise that she’s right. There’s no Prime Minister. No government to blame for all this. There’s no focus for people’s fear and anger.
But there is a focus for their hope. There’s a focus for their struggle.
There’s someone who knows what they’ve been through.
And that’s me.
I’m the figurehead. I’m the Face of the UK.
I’m the person holding this together.
I shake my head, and force myself to breathe. To stay calm.
“And what about the other side? Your political opponents. What am I supposed to do for them?”
She looks down. “I heard about that. You didn’t stay long enough to find out, did you?”
I shake my head, and try to stop myself from shouting. “How can I work with them, after they handed us over to the RTS? And how does it help anyone if we’re working for both sides?”
She takes a deep breath. “OK. Yes, I’m running against the former Prime Minister, and yes – we both want the job.” I nod. “But more than that, we both want a country that isn’t tearing itself apart.” She looks at me, and she’s smiling. “I know what they did, and that’s why I’m running against them. But we both need you, Bex. We need you keeping everyone happy. We need you supporting the process of change. We need you on our election broadcasts, because we need people to see a familiar face. We need them to see the Face of the Resistance, the person who told them to resist, leading the way back to democracy.”
I roll my eyes. Dan was right – I’m the Face of the Election. The Face of the UK.
“How long do you need me, Fiona?”
She shrugs. “At least until the elections. After that, people will feel as if they’ve got their country back.”
I stare at her. “That could be months!”
She looks back at me, calmly. “It will be months.”
“I can’t do this for months! I can barely do it now!” I’m shouting. I feel like crying. “My friends – we’re all exhausted. We’ve been on the run for a year. We need to stop, and figure out who we are, after all the running. We can’t be your figureheads. We can’t carry on.”
“You can, Bex.” She puts a hand on my arm, and I feel my muscles stiffen under her fingers. “You need to. We’re doing everything we can to make it easy for you.” She waves a hand at the room. “We’ve got the use of the hotel for as long as we need it. You’ve got your own rooms. You’ve got guards on the doors, keeping everyone away. We’re keeping you safe, and we’re giving you a home.”
“It’s not enough, Fiona,” I say eventually. “We need to recover. We need time. We need to remember who we are.”
She nods. “OK, Bex. I hear you. I’ll bear all that in mind.” I start to speak, but she carries on. “Let me know what you need, and I’ll do my best to make it happen. And I’ll make sure you know what we need. Deal?”
I don’t want to agree to this. I don’t want her to keep using us. But she’s right. She needs us.
This country needs us.
I don’t want everything we’ve done to be wasted.
I nod, slowly. “Deal.”
“Thank you, Bex.” She says. “I know this is hard. Just … keep going, for now. Keep doing what you’re doing.”
She smiles, and opens her laptop. I’m standing up to leave when she opens the video again – the one I saw two days ago.
A freeze-frame of Ketty, chained to a table.
I point at the screen.
“What’s going to happen to the prisoners?”
She looks up in surprise, and nods. “Katrina Smith. You’ve got some history, you two, haven’t you?” I nod.
She looks at the screen.
“It depends who they are. Some of the ringleaders are looking at life in jail. Others might get shorter sentences. At the moment we’re just trying to work out who we’ve caught, and where they’re locked up. There are a lot of prisoners, but not much information. We’re trying to find out what people have done. Whether we can build a case for a trial. What we can charge them with, and who to use for the high-profile trials. Who to put on TV.”
“I can help you with that one,” I say, pointing my finger at the image on the screen. “I can give you a list.”
Fiona raises an eyebrow. “Really? I’d be interested to hear your list.”
I stare at her, then start talking, counting off Ketty’s crimes on my fingers.
It takes a while, and Fiona listens, asking questions and making sure she understands.
And all I can think about is Ketty in court, TV cameras running as she listens to her guilty verdict.
Past
Ketty
The morning alarm sounds, and I struggle to open my eyes. I try to sit up, and swing my legs off the bed, but my leg won’t move. I try again, and a bright flash of pain bursts through my knee.
I sink back against the pillows, and it takes me a moment to remember where I am.
Prison. Hospital.
On the losing side.
*****
“Breakfast.”
The nurse pushes through the curtains and puts a tray down on the table. I’m pushing myself up on my elbows when she turns to help me, and I wave her away.
I can do this.
I push myself upright on the bed. I lift myself with my arms, ignoring the sting of the needle from the morphine drip, and drag myself backwards until I’m sitting against the pillows. My knee, bandaged and braced with plastic splints, pulses with pain as I move, but the hospital painkillers make it bearable, as if I’m floating above the hammer blows. As if I’m floating above everything. She pushes the table over the bed.
Cereal. Milk. An apple. A pot of yoghurt. A bottle of orange juice. A vitamin tablet. Better than the food in the dining room.
“Eat up,” she says, cheerfully. “You’ve got a visitor.”
Another interrogation.
“Colonel Ryan again?”
She shrugs. “No idea.” She points at the breakfast tray. “Eat.”
She starts to walk away, but I touch her elbow.
“Could I get a hairbrush? And a blanket?” I wave my hands at my bandage, and the shorts I’m wearing. “I don’t want to be interrogated like this.”
She nods. “Fair enough. I’ll see what I can do.”
*****
“Someone to see you.”
The nurse pulls back the curtain round my bed, and Colonel Ryan steps into the booth. The nurse helped me to wash, and brought me a hospital blanket and a sweatshirt – grey to match my T-shirt and shorts. I’ve brushed my hair, and pulled it back into a smart pony tail. It’s hardly a uniform, but it’s not a jumpsuit either. It’s the best I can do, in here.
“Miss Smith.”
“Yes, Sir.”
He puts a heavy folder down on the table.
“That will be all,” he tells the nurse. She closes the curtain and walks away.
He sits down on the stool beside my bed, glancing at the blanket over my bandaged leg.
“This is unusual,” he says, eventually. “I prefer to have a private room to talk to prisoners.” He looks around at the curtained booth. “But this will have to do.” He points at my knee. “I gather you’re having trouble walking, Miss Smith.”
“Yes, Sir.”
Nothing I haven’t dealt with before.
“Unfortunate.”
“Yes, Sir.” I keep my voice calm, as if we’re talking about the weather. Blocking out thoughts of the dark corridor. Th
e hissing voice in my ear. The hands, gripping my arms and legs. The stretcher to the prison hospital, every step jolting the broken bones and the scar tissue.
“I have some more questions for you.”
I nod. This isn’t so bad. No cameras, no one-way mirrors. No handcuffs.
He opens the folder, and pulls out a voice recorder. He sets it running, and places it on the table.
Careful, Ketty. This isn’t a friendly chat.
“We covered a lot of ground last time we spoke.” He picks up the voice recorder, checking the power light, and puts it back on the table. “This time I’d like to talk about the decisions you’ve made.”
I stare at him. I don’t understand what he’s saying.
“Tell me – what made you join the RTS, Miss Smith?”
More cold questions. I close my eyes, wondering what he wants to know. Thinking back to my life before Camp Bishop. Before Bracken.
Before Jackson.
And I’m telling him about Mum, leaving. Dad, doing his best, but always drunk. About leaving school. About Ken, and my job at the butcher’s shop.
About getting out, and getting away, and joining the Recruit Training Service as soon as they’d have me.
My thoughts are foggy. The morphine is choking my mind, and it’s like trying to think in slow motion. But I answer his question.
He nods, and listens, the red light on the voice recorder steady as I speak.
“And was the RTS what you hoped it would be?”
“Yes.” The word is out of my mouth before I’ve really thought about it.
It was safety and challenge and structure. It was responsibility and consequences.
It was justice.
I try to explain, but I’m aware that I’m slurring my words. That I’m not making sense.
“One moment, Sir.” He nods, and watches, eyebrows raised as I tug on the needle in my arm. I pull out the morphine drip, and push my fingers against my skin to stop the bleeding. I need to be thinking clearly. I need to say the right things.
“Ready, Sir,” I say, meeting his eyes. He blinks, and looks away.
Too much for you, Sir?
I can’t help smiling.
“Your promotion to London, Miss Smith. How did that come about?”
“Colonel Bracken. He requested me as his assistant.”
“And why would he do that?”
I shrug, still thinking through the painkiller fog. “I was his Lead Recruit. I worked with him through Leominster. I helped in the hunt for our lost recruits. I took a bullet for his recruits.” I’m vaguely aware that I’m hammering a finger on my chest as I say this. “And I worked with him on the raid at Makepeace Farm.”
“So he trusted you then.”
I think of the whisky bottles on the shelf in his office. The secrets I kept for him.
I try not to smile. “Yes. He trusted me.”
“And the Terrorism Committee?”
Wake up, Ketty. Don’t say anything stupid.
“What about it?”
“You kept Bracken going. You made sure he could do his job.”
I nod. “Every day.”
“So you supported the Terrorism Committee?”
I blink, trying to clear my thoughts.
“I didn’t know …”
“What did you think they were doing, Miss Smith?”
“I don’t know. Catching terrorists.”
“And are you proud of your decisions?”
“Am I proud?”
He nods, watching me. I don’t understand what he wants to know.
I think about it. Am I proud?
Have I made good decisions?
Have I done the right thing?
I look around the tiny booth. At the curtains, screening us off from the ward outside. At the morphine drip, and the blanket, and my broken knee. At the limits of my freedom.
And I laugh.
What’s the point?
I can’t change anything. Everything that happened, happened. I can’t go back and undo it.
I made decisions, and they made sense when I made them. Get out of the RTS. Get promoted. Protect me, protect Bracken.
And here I am, in a prison hospital, my knee smashed again, talking to someone who only wants to know about the past.
Part of me knows this is the morphine, messing with my head. And part of me doesn’t care.
“Thank you, Miss Smith,” he says, reaching to switch off the recorder.
Dark
Bex
“Is this one of those ‘any time you need to talk’ moments, Bex?”
I nod. Dan’s standing outside my door with Margie, waiting to go to breakfast. We’ve got an hour before Fiona wants us in the lobby, ready to meet another set of journalists.
But I haven’t slept. I spent most of the night staring at the ceiling, trying not to wake Mum in the other bed. In the end, I came in here, and curled up in my own bed.
I’m fighting tears as I open the door.
Dan gives Margie a shrug, and she puts her hand on his elbow.
“I’ll wait for you downstairs.”
He nods, and follows me into the room. I sit down on the bed, and Dan sits next to me.
“What’s up, Bex?”
I take a deep breath, but I can’t stop the tears from spilling down my face. My voice feels rough and broken.
I need to talk to someone, and I’m pretty sure Dan’s the only person who will understand.
“How do you do it?” It’s barely more than a whisper.
“How do I do what?”
“Live with it. With the bad stuff.”
He leans back on his elbows. “You mean killing people?”
When he says that out loud, it’s like throwing a punch.
I nod. “Yeah.”
He shrugs. “I don’t know, Bex.”
I turn to look at him. “But you do, though. You’re not awake all night, thinking about it.”
“Some nights,” he says, looking away.
“But …”
“I’m not a robot, Bex. I know what I’ve done. And yes, it keeps me awake sometimes.”
“Really?”
“Yes.”
I crawl back to the pillows and tuck my legs under the covers. I wanted answers. I wanted to know that he has this figured out.
But he’s as broken as I am.
“Does it get better? Does it stop?”
He shakes his head. “It gets … less vivid. The memories fade. But I still know what I did.”
I look down at my hands, feeling the weight of the rifle again. “Yeah.”
He sits up, and turns to face me.
“How do you feel? How does it make you feel?”
I shrug. “Horrible. Like I’ve done the worst thing I could possibly do.”
It feels good to say that out loud.
“Guilty, then?”
“I guess. But worse than that. As if there’s something bad inside me. Something dark.”
He nods. “As if you could do it again?”
There are tears in my eyes as I look at Dan. At my friend, who has my back. Who knows what I’ve been through. Who knows what I’ve done.
“Yeah. As if I will do it again.”
And that’s the part that hurts. Not trusting myself. Knowing how far I’m willing to go.
He closes his eyes. “You’re a good person, Bex. You’re not going to kill someone unless you have to.”
“How can you say that? How can you say I’m a good person?” I can see the man in the conference room, choking as our bullets took his life away. I can see the firing squad, their armour bursting open as I fired my gun. I can see the bodies on the South Bank. The wreckage from the OIE bombs.
He reaches over, and takes my hands in his.
“You’re a good person, Bex Ellman.” He looks me in the eye. “I know you’re a good person, because you feel like this.”
I shake my head. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“The
people you killed. Were they threatening you? Were they threatening the people you care about?”
I think of the conference room. Listening to those awful comments about Margie. I try not to think about the bombs. The people under the rubble. “No.” I shake my head. “Yes. Maybe.”
He tugs on my hands. “You killed the firing squad, Bex. You shot the people who were about to shoot your friends. You saved Margie, and you saved Dr Richards.” He shakes his head. “I don’t know how much longer my armour would have lasted. You saved me, Bex.”
I nod. I can feel the bullets, slamming into my armour, knocking me backwards.
I can see Dan, his arms round Margie, head down, sheltering her from the guns.
And I can see the back of Will’s shirt, turning red with the impacts.
“You did the right thing, Bex. You protected your friends.”
“Like you did?”
He nods. “Like I did.”
I remember standing in the gatehouse at the bunker, knowing that Dan was outside in the dark. Hearing shots, and watching the door open.
Knowing that he’d killed people to get us out.
My breath catches in my throat, and my voice is a whisper.
“I wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t.”
He looks at the ceiling and back at me. “None of us would be here if I hadn’t.”
“Does that help? Knowing that we’re still alive?”
He smiles. “Of course it does.”
I think of Margie, waiting downstairs. I think of Dr Richards, bandaged and cared for in her hospital bed.
“But …”
He pulls his hands away, and fixes me with a stare.
“Bex. You did the right thing. No one blames you for what you did.” I nod. “And this? This just shows that you’re human. That you understand what you’ve done, and that you don’t want to do it again.”
I shake my head. “I don’t. But I feel as if I’ve crossed a line. I feel as if it will be easier next time, and I don’t want that. I don’t want killing someone to be easy.”
He laughs. “It won’t be, Bex. You know how it feels, now. You know how hard it is.” He shakes his head. “You know that you need to live with it, afterwards.”
“But I know I can do it. That dark place inside? That’s real, now. I know I can take someone’s life away.”
Victory Day (Battle Ground YA UK Dystopia Series Book 5) Page 18