Gilded Cage

by Vic James

  As it turned out, ‘party’ didn’t come close.

  It was remarkable, thought Luke, looking at the others sat around the table, how the Doc had managed to assemble a group of people with all the talents the club needed. As he’d come to know the others, he’d realized that behind their everyday exteriors lay some impressive abilities. Take the ditcher sisters. They’d both been police officers, but it had been a while before he’d learned exactly what kind.

  ‘Cyber crime,’ Hilda had said one day, taking pity on Luke’s attempts to guess.

  ‘Catching perverts,’ her sister had elaborated. ‘Internet drug dealers. Pleasant folk like that. So we know where to find stuff and how to hide stuff on just about any system.’

  ‘Plus we’ve got some great jokes that your mother wouldn’t approve of,’ finished Hilda.

  So it was with the others. Jess had been a gym instructor, but had used her earnings to support a career as a semi-pro free runner. She’d begun her slavedays when on a protracted downer after realizing she was no longer at competition standard – ‘Worst decision my ego and I ever made,’ she’d told him ruefully.

  Asif was a recently qualified computing science teacher who’d hated the classroom. (‘Kids terrify me. Imagine a room full of thirty Renies.’ Luke could see his point.) He’d become fascinated by the internet restriction protocols in place at the slavetowns. After spending a couple of years experimenting with hacking in, he’d decided to take on the bigger challenge of being inside and trying to hack out.

  ‘You started your days to give yourself a challenge?’ Luke asked him, incredulous.

  ‘What can I say?’ Asif shrugged. ‘Geeky as charged.’

  What did Luke bring to the team? He wasn’t sure. He’d been useful fixing the getaway van, but no one could have foreseen needing his abilities there. He was also prepared to take a risk to do what was right. That had been second nature to him, though Luke had now been in Millmoor long enough to realize it wasn’t the choice most people made.

  So that put him in a minority. But surely only one thing about him was unique. The fact that his family was at Kyneston.

  Where, despite all that he’d contributed in Millmoor, Jackson still wanted him to go.

  Did the Doc have some reason why?

  No answer immediately presented itself, so Luke let that thought go and threw himself into the party planning.

  They sat talking and arguing for hours, until they had something that looked like an actual, honest-to-goodness day of chaos across Millmoor. Renie chewed so much gum it was a wonder her teeth weren’t worn to nubbins. Jessica was looking alive again for the first time since Oz’s capture. Hilda and Tilda must have drunk a bathful of tea, and Asif was jiggling in his seat looking totally wired on nothing at all.

  ‘I don’t suppose we should involve anyone from the other slavetowns?’ Luke said finally. ‘Like Riverhead, maybe?’

  Renie caught on straight away to this transparent pretext to see Angel again, and cackled mercilessly. Even Jess smiled.

  ‘What?’ he protested, face reddening. ‘Just saying. They might have some . . . awesome people, is all.’

  Jackson watched him squirm. ‘Riverhead has its own priorities,’ he said finally, with a grin.

  ‘Okay, okay.’ Luke knew when he was beaten.

  The Doc wrapped up the meeting. Now all the club had to do was bring its plans to life.

  And Luke had somehow come up with the most ambitious plan of all – a day-long walkout that would shut down Zone D.

  It was distinctly more daunting than his lifetime achievements thus far: getting picked for the senior footie team, running his class project for the community festival and nailing varial kickflips on his skateboard. He couldn’t simply go asking people to join a shutdown. Security would nobble him in no time. And even if they didn’t, who would follow such a risky scheme, led by a seventeen-year-old boy? But Luke had an idea where to begin.

  He knew his colleagues in Zone D by now. He’d noticed the ones who talked loudest in the canteen queue. The ones who always had a bunch of blokes around them, squeezing in some banter and camaraderie despite a schedule designed to make it impossible.

  One of them was a guy named Declan, who had known Si’s Uncle Jimmy. It was a thin connecting thread, but it would help Luke find a way deeper into the network of trust and friendship that existed among his workmates. Passed from man to man, word of an insurrection would spread.

  For the first time he was grateful for the din of Zone D, because otherwise Declan would surely hear the pounding of his heart, louder than any machinery. Luke tugged the man’s sleeve as they passed near the storeroom, and drew him to one side.

  ‘What do you think of this shutdown I keep hearing about?’ Luke said. ‘Sounds brilliant, but scary. Are you in?’

  Declan looked blank, because of course there was no shutdown, not yet, and no talk – though there would be soon. So Luke outlined his plan as if it was something he’d been told, and Declan listened with interest.

  ‘We’ve not heard about it in the shakeout room,’ he responded. ‘Must be some hothead in components stirring it up. But it’s a sweet idea. Teach the Overbitch a lesson for denying us even a word from our families at Christmas. Not to mention those patrols crawling everywhere these days. The third Friday, you say? Lemme check with the others.’

  And when Luke saw Declan next, the man reported that though none of his colleagues had heard of the shutdown either, they’d all be well up for it.

  ‘It’s not like they can punish us all,’ Declan said, gripping Luke’s shoulder reassuringly. ‘So hold your nerve and come in with us, lad.’

  ‘You know what?’ Luke said, grinning. ‘I think I will.’

  The first of January came and went with no fireworks. There’d be some soon. Just not the kind the Overseer and the Equals were expecting.

  Luke had a few more conversations. It wasn’t long before the responses of those he spoke to began to change. They’d heard about the shutdown too, he was told. Loads of the guys had. Everyone was up for it.

  The weather was unvarying from one dreary day to the next, but by the middle of the month the atmosphere in Zone D and across Millmoor had shifted in some intangible but important way. Then the week of the club’s party arrived.

  Monday morning, Williams muttered something inaudible as he and Luke operated their station’s clattering gears.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Have you heard?’ Williams repeated, looking like he wanted to bite off his own tongue.

  ‘Heard what?’

  Luke looked away, tracking the slow progress of the massive piece of metal now swinging over their heads. Maybe if Williams wasn’t being watched, he could kid himself he wasn’t actually speaking either. Trees falling in the woods and all that.

  ‘No show. Friday. You in?’

  ‘Yeah. You?’

  There was a long pause. Together they unlatched the safety clasps and released the massive component into the cradle. Luke licked at the sweat that trickled along his upper lip, and tasted metal.

  ‘Yeah.’

  The man sounded terrified, but Luke couldn’t suppress his jubilation. Now that even a timid, trouble-averse bloke like Williams knew of the walkout, word must have gone round the whole of Zone D.

  And Luke had talked it into existence.

  Thinking about that made his head spin. It was almost like Skill – conjuring up something out of nothing.

  ‘There’s no magic more powerful than the human spirit,’ Jackson had said at the third and final club meeting. Luke was beginning to dare to hope that was true.

  As he and Williams moved in smooth partnership around their workstation, Luke wondered how the others were getting on with their schemes.

  Mostly, it was on-the-day stuff. They’d run through it all at that last get-together. Hilda and Tilda were going to reset the electronic pricing inventory across Millmoor’s stores, so that no credit was deducted from anyone’s account for
purchases made. Hopefully word would spread quickly on the day and the shops would be besieged. Renie was sabotaging Security’s vehicle pool – ‘a little knife-in-tyres jobby’, she’d called it – while Asif would have fun with the hated public broadcast system.

  ‘I’ll tune it to Radio Free For All,’ he announced, referring to an online channel believed to operate from a canal boat in the Netherlands. ‘Nothing like some C-pop with your agitprop.’

  Luke groaned. ‘Just promise me you’ll pull the plug if they start playing “Happy Panda”.’

  For an instant, his memory catapulted him back to last summer: Daisy and her pals prancing round the garden singing in atrocious Chinese. It was almost Luke’s final memory of life before Millmoor. It was only half a year ago, but it felt as distant as the Equal history he’d been cramming that day.

  If anything went wrong at the club’s party, would he ever see his family again?

  But no: if he thought like that, he’d never do anything. Never make a difference to all the other Daisys who didn’t have an Abi resourceful enough to get them out of Millmoor.

  Back to the plans, Luke.

  Renie had shown Jess how to mess with the power settings on Security’s stun guns and she’d be sneaking into their gear store to reset them. The Doc had several banners prepared for landmarks around the slavetown. But the headline act would be a mass rally at the MADhouse.

  Security would be distracted by the lower-level stuff: calming things down at the shops, removing the banners, maybe rounding up Zone D’s workers and getting them to their stations. So hopefully they wouldn’t realize what was going on at the MADhouse until a huge crowd had assembled. What happened next would be up to the crowd itself.

  ‘You not gonna make a speech or nothing?’ Renie had asked the Doc.

  ‘Not me,’ he’d replied, to everyone’s surprise. ‘This has to be something that people themselves want; it’s not something we can make happen.’

  ‘Isn’t that what we’ve just spent these last weeks doing?’ said Tilda. ‘Making it happen?’

  ‘Not really.’ Jackson scratched his beard. ‘We’re giving people permission, if you like. Reducing the risk to any one individual by creating a mass they can lose themselves in. If anything more happens, it’ll be because the people of Millmoor want it.’

  The people of Millmoor.

  Luke was one of them now.

  And something weird and terrifying had happened in the weeks between that first planning day and now: Luke had begun to think he should stay in the slavetown.

  The idea had first popped into his head, fully formed, as he’d had one of those casual conversations with a workmate that seeded the shutdown. After what he was doing right now in Millmoor, could he really go back to being just his parents’ son and Abi’s little brother? A dogsbody on a great estate saying ‘Yes, sir’ and ‘No, sir’ all day long.

  Once the idea had arrived, it was strangely reluctant to leave.

  It ran through his head every day as he worked alongside Williams. He had no more luck dislodging it in the nonexistent privacy of his dorm room at night. He’d resorted to the little kid’s trick of pulling his blanket over his head. He tried to fool himself that if he couldn’t see his roommates, they couldn’t see him either, lying there sleepless.

  In the darkness, all attempts at logic overheated his brain till he wanted to rip the blanket out of pure frustration. His family down south, and his friends here. The splendour of Kyneston, and the squalor of Millmoor. Slavery there, and slavery here. But here, there was a chance to do something. Change something.

  Maybe even change everything.

  No, that was ridiculous. He was only a teenage boy. He was doing well if he changed his worn underpants for clean ones, from one day to the next. His family wanted him at Kyneston. Even Jackson wanted him to go.

  But if the Doc changed his mind, just said the word and asked Luke to stay . . . would he?

  Luke woke on Thursday unrested, and stumbled his way through his shift no nearer to clarity. Anxiety and excitement about the next day’s events lodged nauseatingly in his stomach. Back at the dorm that evening he went to the kitchen to whip up his chef’s special of spaghetti sur toast. But he had no appetite and just stood there staring at the rusty cooker.

  ‘All right? Thought I might find you here.’

  Luke turned. It was Ryan.

  Sometimes the two of them met in the rec room on a Saturday night, or in the breakfast hall, and they’d natter. They didn’t really have much in common – especially not now that Ryan had decided on the military route and enlisted as a mauler. His conversation was full of his training sessions and his fellow cadets. But it was nice just to have someone to joke with about the improbable glow of nostalgia that surrounded their crummy old school, Henshall.

  Luke hadn’t seen Ryan since Christmas. It was good timing that he’d popped down now. A bit of distraction from everything churning through Luke’s brain.

  Ryan pulled out a chair at one of the kitchen tables and made himself comfortable. It looked like Luke would be playing host, so he topped up the kettle and switched it on, and plucked an extra teabag out of the dusty jar.

  ‘It’s a bit like being at uni, isn’t it?’ said Ryan, vaguely indicating the two mugs Luke had placed on the worktop. ‘My cousin was studying at Staffs and I went to stay with him one time. He was living in halls and they had kitchens like this.’

  Luke stared at Ryan. Slavery was like uni? Because they had communal kitchens? Was he mad?

  Or was this what Jackson had meant, when he’d said that the people of Millmoor had to want to rise up? Ryan was leaning back against the wall, staring at the ceiling. He looked as likely to rise as one of Daisy’s jaw-breaking cakes.

  Luke made some tea and carried both mugs to the table. What he wouldn’t give right now for a biscuit.

  Ryan seemed a bit tense, and Luke wondered what was on his mind. Maybe he’d met a girl? Some fit cadet. Lucky sod. Luke considered telling him about Angel, but knew he’d have to veil it in so many half-truths it wouldn’t be worth the effort. And he’d be so terrified of letting something slip it’d only be more stress, instead of a relief.

  If only there was someone he could speak to about everything that was going on – someone who wasn’t right in the middle of it all.

  But Ryan started talking and Luke discovered it was good just to listen, to lose himself in the mundane details of someone else’s life. Half his brain followed Ryan’s account of his new exercise regime and something called Basic Training. The other half felt luxuriously drowsy. Maybe he’d actually get some sleep tonight.

  Then adrenaline coursed through his body as if someone had jabbed a syringe of it between his shoulder blades like the Doc had with Oz, the night they broke him out.

  ‘You what?’ he said to Ryan, squinting in the fluorescent light. It didn’t actually make anything brighter, just turned the room a sickly yellow.

  ‘I said, big day tomorrow?’

  And what the hell did that mean? Luke’s throat closed up, but he lifted his mug of tea to buy himself time. He rested his elbow on the table in case his hand shook.

  ‘Big day?’ he said, trying to grin. ‘This isn’t Henshall Academy, Ryan. Tomorrow’s only Friday – nothing big about that. My week doesn’t end till Saturday night.’

  ‘Ah, yeah,’ said Ryan. His gaze darted around the worktop, seemingly fascinated by the meagre appliances. It settled on a particularly riveting stack of saucepans. ‘It’s just that I heard . . .’

  Luke put his mug down. He was losing the struggle to keep his hand still, and tea would be sloshing over the side in a minute.

  Ryan hesitated.

  ‘It’s not easy here, is it? You must be angry about the fact that they transferred your family but not you.’

  Luke went cold. He couldn’t believe it. Ryan was fishing, trying to catch him out. He was sure of it.

  So what did they know – whoever they were? Did they have an e
ye specifically on Luke? Which would be bad, because that’d mean they’d made some connection to the club. Or had they simply got wind that something was up at Zone D? And Ryan, like a good little cadet, had volunteered to try and get something out of his mate who worked there?

  His mate. Not any more. The bastard.

  ‘I’m hoping my family will get me transferred to Kyneston soon,’ he told Ryan. Let him think that Luke wanted out, and would therefore be toeing the line like a good boy. ‘I’m crossing off the days, to be honest. Who could have guessed I’d actually miss my sisters?’

  Ryan huffed a weak little laugh and turned back to Luke. He looked wretched.

  ‘So you’ve heard nothing out of the ordinary at work lately?’ he said. ‘Nothing odd?’

  Ryan had clearly abandoned the subtle approach. Luke’s palms were sweating. Outright denial would be suspicious. Better to hide a big lie in a small truth.

  ‘Look, I don’t know what it’s like where you are in maintenance, but Zone D is pretty hardcore. Moaning is about the only way to deal with it. I hear intense stuff all the time. Blokes talking about wrecking machinery, bunking off, or beating up the guards. It’s how they let off steam.’

  Ryan frowned. ‘You don’t report any of it?’

  ‘It’s just talk, Ryan. Might as well report someone for going to the loo or picking their nose. You know what it’s like here: grim and boring. You’ll be well out of it as a mauler. Good choice you made there. I’d do it too, if I was sticking around.’

  Ryan looked down at the table. He’d drunk even less of his tea than Luke. Maybe even none at all. Then he pushed back his chair, looking more cheerful than he had since he arrived.

  ‘Better turn in. Been a long week and it’s not over yet. Thanks for the brew.’

  He slapped Luke on the back as he went past.

  Sod you. Traitor.

  Luke listened to Ryan’s footsteps moving along the corridor, towards the stairs. It was hard to tell with the echo from the stairwell and the background noise from other men moving around and talking, but it sounded like Ryan was going down.

  Not back up to his room on a higher floor, to turn in. Down and out – to make his report?