by Tim Lott
“Stargazer. Is everything all right?”
“There’s something going on. There are X girls teeming all over the place.”
“It’ll be the bed check in a minute,” said Little Fearless. “Keep quiet and pretend to be asleep or they might suspect you.”
“No one would suspect me. Everyone knows I’m too much of a coward to run away.”
“You’re braver than you know, Stargazer. But you must be quiet now. They’ll be coming any second.”
Stargazer muttered something all the same, but Little Fearless couldn’t make it out.
“What is it, Stargazer?”
The younger girl looked up at her. “Little Fearless … Little Fearless … are they coming, Little Fearless?” was all she said, her voice faint as dust.
“What?” said Little Fearless, hardly listening, so worried was she about the bed check. She glanced down at Stargazer’s pale, frightened face.
“Our families … are they coming to get us?”
Looking at the hope in Stargazer’s eyes, like a blue spark shed by her soul, Little Fearless felt sad, but didn’t show it. Instead she quickly grabbed her hand, their locked bracelets glancing against one another.
“Of course they are. But I will have to go back one more time. I haven’t found enough of our families yet. Not enough of them to tear down the walls of this place for ever.”
“But they’re coming?”
“Yes, yes,” said Little Fearless, hesitating only for the smallest fraction of a second. “Of course they’re coming.”
Stargazer gave a broad smile. “I know, Little Fearless. I have seen it.”
Then they fell silent and closed their eyes. At that exact moment, the midnight bells sounded and the dormitory doors opened.
A familiar croak sounded throughout Hall Seven. “Everybody out of their beds immediately.” Although the Controller said the words quite softly, his voice carried to every corner of the room.
As Little Fearless pretended to yawn and stretch, she saw that the Controller had the Whistler, Lady Luck, Bellyache and Stench with him. Lady Luck was chain-smoking with one hand and tossing and catching her silver coin with the other. The Whistler was neither whistling nor giggling – instead she looked stern and angry. Bellyache was muttering to herself. As for Stench, she simply looked very nervous. When her eyes fell on Little Fearless, a look of pure terror rippled across the pale wasteland of her features.
The X girls immediately set about throwing anyone still dozing out of their beds. The children squealed in pain, shock and discomfort. Stench and Bellyache went down one side of the dormitory, the Whistler and Lady Luck the other.
Bellyache talked incessantly, as much to herself as anyone else. “What have you been up to now? Can’t trust any of you. Look at the dirt under this bed. You Z letters are always so filthy. As for the Y girls – who do you think you are? Think you’re special. You’re not. You’re worth less than what’s on the sole of my shoe. Slime. Mud. Decay. Germs. Straighten up. Bend down. Get out. Get in. Stand still. Move out the way. Shut up. Speak louder.”
The Whistler whistled to herself quietly between her teeth as she slapped and pinched any children who didn’t move fast enough, while Lady Luck tossed her coin up and down in the air, a joyless smile fixed on her lips like a rime of frost.
The Controller looked more and more agitated as the rumpus grew and girls complained and cried. “SILENCE!” he barked finally.
A minute or two later, all the girls were standing to attention next to their beds. Lady Luck and the rest of the X girls went up and down the lines, counting. They finished, and consulted with one another. Then Lady Luck, looking rather puzzled, marched up to the Controller.
“They’re all here, Controller.”
“That’s impossible,” he said impatiently. He grabbed Lady Luck by the shoulders and put his face up to within an inch of hers. She flinched. He spoke very softly to her, and stroked her cheek menacingly. “Count again. The checks in the other halls are finished and all the beds are occupied. Your mathematics must be inaccurate.”
So they counted again. And then again. No one was missing.
The Controller turned the colour of stone. Not one of the girls could ever remember seeing him so angry. Even Lady Luck looked nervous. He marched into the centre of the ranks of beds so that all the girls could hear him clearly.
“Something very serious happened tonight,” he said. “Something disgraceful. Something unforgivable.”
He was silent for a long time, as if to impress on them how serious the matter was.
“Someone in the Institute escaped – I mean, left the protection of the school, and somehow found their way into the City.”
At this pronouncement there was a buzz of excitement that spread around the dormitory, which the X girls immediately suppressed with a flurry of strappings and cursing.
“I want the girl who did this to have the guts to admit it. Right now.”
Nobody moved. Lady Luck, however, twitched her nose and moved to within a few feet of Little Fearless. “You reek, Z73,” she said. And it was true: Little Fearless bore the noxious imprint of the night’s journeys on every inch of her skin. “You stink more than Stench.”
Lady Luck began to look suspicious as she sniffed the air and stepped towards Little Fearless’s mattress, where her dirty clothes were hidden, but the Controller stopped her.
“Never mind your obsession with personal hygiene, X1,” he snapped. “We have more important matters to attend to.”
Lady Luck reluctantly moved away, still glancing suspiciously at Little Fearless. When the Controller spoke again, it was to the whole dormitory.
“Each and every one of you must understand this very clearly. I will not stand for this kind of behaviour. If the individual who did this does not own up right this moment, every single Y and Z girl will be punished. This, as you know, is the first rule of the Institute.” And he looked directly into the brown and blue eyes of Little Fearless, so that Little Fearless could see her own eyes reflected in his tinted glasses.
Little Fearless felt her heart begin to race. She wasn’t scared of owning up. She was prepared to accept her punishment, because she always believed in taking responsibility for whatever it was she did. But she also knew that she needed to escape again. She needed to keep trying. All she had to do was find someone in the City who would listen to her.
So, with some reluctance, Little Fearless remained silent.
It then occurred to Stargazer that the brave thing for her to do would be to pretend that it was she who had run away. Then Little Fearless would not be caught and she would be able to go and get all their families, and it would save everyone from being punished. But it was just a fleeting thought. The scared part of her was still much bigger than the brave part. She knew she could never be like Little Fearless.
So the threatening silence went on and on.
When the Controller spoke again, it was more like the voice he usually used – dry, soft, insinuating.
“Come on now. I know that whoever did this could not have done it alone. They must have had help, and that help must have come from an X girl.”
Little Fearless saw the colour drain from Stench’s face. A blood vessel began to throb just above her right eye. There was a faint sheen of perspiration visible on her forehead.
“It is far more important to me to catch the X girl who has shown such terrible disloyalty to me personally than it is to catch some reckless, foolhardy girl who wanted an adventure. So the person who actually escaped will have a lenient punishment – compared to whoever it was from the X category who helped her. But if I find out who she was the hard way, then the punishment for the girl that escaped will be grim indeed. More severe than you can possibly imagine.”
Stench seemed to be holding her breath. But Little Fearless kept her lips pinched closed.
“So be it,” muttered the Controller bitterly. “You will all suffer the penalty, as the rules prescribe.
And you won’t forget it in a hurry.”
With that, he abruptly left the room, which was now filled with an atmosphere of fear, shock – and just the slightest trace of hope.
The Meeting
We must be gentle, but tough as nails.
We must be kind, but cruel as winter.
We must be tolerant –
but absolutely without mercy.
The City Boss
The laundry was a single vast hall with enormous rotating washing drums, and dryers that roared hot air and raised the temperature to unbearable levels. There were intense blue-white overhead lights, which glared off shiny metallic pipes that moved the hot air for drying the clothes from place to place and had once provided some form of ventilation before the cooling mechanism had broken and never been fixed. Hundreds of Y and Z girls, watched over by ranks of X girls, laboured all day to get the clothes of the City clean.
Tattle, Soapdish, Beauty, Stargazer and Little Fearless had managed to find a corner of the laundry where no X girls were patrolling, and Tattle hissed at Little Fearless urgently over the clatter and whoosh of the machines.
“Did you find him, Little Fearless? Did you find my father?” she asked, hardly able to contain her excitement. She pulled nervously at the soft lobes of her protruding ears.
Little Fearless looked around, making sure that they couldn’t be overheard. She put her arm round Tattle’s shoulders.
“I found the police station, Tattle. But your father wasn’t there. I’m sorry.”
Immediately Tattle’s face took on a bereft, crestfallen look. Her tall, rangy body slumped.
“So it was all a waste of time,” said Soapdish curtly, carefully folding a newly laundered shirt in a perfect geometrical shape. “The risk, the punishment. All pointless.”
“Not exactly,” said Little Fearless. “I did meet a policeman, and I showed him your hair, Tattle, and I told him the story of the Institute.”
“And what did he do?” asked Beauty urgently, her almond eyes hooded yet fascinated.
Little Fearless paused. She hated lying. But she also knew that sometimes it was better to tell someone you cared about a small lie, rather than a larger truth that might crush them.
“He didn’t do anything. I had barely finished telling him the story, when I heard the Whistler outside the station. I don’t know how they found me. But as soon as I heard her I ran – just in time.”
Now Tattle’s sadness seemed to curdle into irritation. “You’re lying, Little Fearless. How could they know you were there? Why would they come to the station unless someone had told them?”
Little Fearless said nothing, for she had no reply.
“The policeman rang the Institute, didn’t he?” finished Tattle bitterly.
Little Fearless paused, and then nodded. “I’m sorry. I didn’t want to disappoint you too much. But yes. He didn’t believe me.”
Beauty flicked her hair back from her face, and bit her lip. “What chance is there for us? Not even a policeman will believe you.”
“There may be a chance,” said Little Fearless, allowing a note of hope to creep into her voice. “He seemed a good man. He was just trying to follow the rules and do what people expected of him. I simply don’t think he could believe that the City Boss and the Ten Corporations, who pay his wages and are meant to look after everybody, could be capable of anything like this.
“But I don’t know – I felt I left a trace of myself there somehow. That I made an impact. I could see it in his eyes. Somewhere, under the obedience and keeping-his-nose-clean, there was kindness. Yes, he called the Controller. But he was uneasy. Perhaps he’ll think about it and do something. All the same, I can’t rely on him.”
“What do you mean?” said Stargazer nervously.
“I’m going to have to go again,” said Little Fearless simply. Stargazer looked shocked and afraid.
“How can you?” asked Beauty. “The security is now tighter than ever before.”
“Things will quieten down. As long as they don’t replace Stench, we’ll be OK. I can try again, with her help. But whose parents should I try and find next time?”
There was a long pause. Beauty looked aloof and indifferent once again. “I’ve told you, my parents wouldn’t want to know even if you could find them. They never had any time for me. Always too busy working. Anyway, I’m finished with them.”
Beauty stuck her nose in the air and looked proud and indifferent. But Soapdish spoke up, in her precise, well-modulated voice. “You could try mine. I can’t remember much about them, but I remember our address. It’s impossible to miss – in sector four, about three hundred yards down from one of the biggest worship zones in the City. In a row of brown and white houses.”
Little Fearless nodded. “I need something that will show them I know who you are. Something familiar to them.”
Soapdish took the rag doll that she carried with her at all times out of the pocket of her overalls. “My doll, Toussaint. He was a present from my parents when I was born. He’s very special to me. They’ll recognize him.”
Little Fearless nodded. Then Soapdish produced some paper and a pencil out of her pocket. She wrote an address. She drew a picture of a small house with a pitched roof, and a few pot plants in the garden. She added windows, and the outline of people at the windows. Their faces were featureless, blank.
“Perhaps one day, with your help, I will once again know what they look like,” she said.
Later that day, the punishment began. All the Y and Z girls had to have their hair cropped close so that they were nearly bald.
Little Fearless didn’t think it seemed too bad. It did not involve hurting anybody, or locking anybody away. Most of the girls were relieved when they heard that a haircut was to be their only punishment. As the children queued up for the barber’s chair, many of them felt quite cheerful at having got off so lightly. Some even liked the way they looked shorn and clean-headed.
But after a day or two with their new hairstyles, they didn’t feel quite so cheerful.
For what they realized was that they had all begun not only to look more and more like each other, but to feel less and less like themselves. If it hadn’t been for their richly varied vagabond clothes it would have been hard to tell them apart. No one looked pretty – apart from Beauty, of course – and no one looked ugly. No one looked special and no one looked ordinary. No one looked younger and no one looked older. This, they very quickly realized, made them feel empty and hollow. Not having any mothers and fathers, and not having any names, the girls sometimes doubted that they themselves were real. Now they were all indistinguishable, and even less like girls than before. It became harder than ever to believe that they were real children with real families (somewhere) and real minds and real feelings. They felt more and more like they imagined statues might feel if they were alive, or black and white pictures on a page, flat and two-dimensional.
There was another unpleasant consequence. The X girls seemed to be even crueller to them than they had been before. Most of the X girls had always been distant and unsympathetic, but there were a number of them that often weren’t so bad and would help them occasionally and even talk to them almost as if they were equals. Now those girls became fewer and fewer. Little Fearless decided the reason the X girls were crueller to them was because the X girls had begun to think of them as creatures, rather than children. Vermin, or insects perhaps. After a while, it was hard for the children not to think the same thing about themselves.
This wasn’t the case with Little Fearless, whose spirit seemed unbreakable. But she needed all her reserves of courage. Because, once it sank in what was going on, and how tough the punishment was, some of her friends became angry with her.
“Her and her tricks. They’ve backfired on all of us,” said Tattle, despite the fact that Little Fearless had risked everything to find her father. She started to do imitations of Little Fearless instead of the Controller – picking her nose in exactly the way Li
ttle Fearless picked her nose, and rubbing dirt all over her face. Beauty and Soapdish giggled. When Stargazer complained that she was being two-faced, Tattle just laughed it off. “Don’t be boring, Yellow,” she said. “I’m just having a joke. It cheers everyone up. Little Fearless is still one of my best friends.”
“Perhaps going to the City was a big mistake,” said Beauty, being brutally outspoken as usual. At least she said it to Little Fearless’s face, but that didn’t stop her words hurting. “Wouldn’t it have been braver to own up? It’s hopeless anyway. You’re looking a real wreck lately, Little Fearless. Sometimes I wonder if you’re really pretty enough to be my friend.”
At this, Little Fearless looked hurt, and Beauty felt a pang of regret. She gave her a hug. “You are still one of my very best friends, though. And my hair will grow back one day.”
“And you’re still the prettiest girl here even without hair,” said Little Fearless.
“That’s true,” agreed Beauty, inspecting her long, perfect fingernails.
“Maybe your stories about our families are just that – stories,” said Soapdish to Little Fearless, scratching at her scalp, happy she didn’t have to get her hair dirty any more but still worried about lice and dandruff. “Perhaps you should just accept things as they are, like the rest of us. At least things are orderly, and not messy and untidy. We know where we are. We know who’s in charge. Things could be a lot worse.”
Little Fearless nodded politely, even though she didn’t agree.
Out of Little Fearless’s hearing, the grumbles went on. But if any of them took place within earshot of Stargazer, she would pluck up all her courage and speak out.
“Little Fearless is the strongest and bravest of us all. The Controller is just trying to turn us against her. If he succeeds, we will lose everything. Because we will no longer have hope.”
Every time she said something like this, although she wasn’t always aware of it, the scared part of her became slightly smaller and the brave part grew imperceptibly larger.