The Wilderness

by C. J. Harper

  ‘I can’t find any person,’ Kay says. ‘They’re all gone.’

  ‘Do you think they’re all dead?’ Kay asks. ‘Or do you think the Leadership came and got them?’

  I don’t point out that those two possibilities probably amount to the same thing. I need to think.

  ‘There must be something,’ I say. ‘Let’s look upstairs.’

  We run up to the first floor and start throwing open doors. There’s no one to be found.

  ‘Wait a minute,’ I say and I retrace my steps and look into the room behind the last door I opened. It’s the computer room. ‘This door is normally locked. And . . .’

  ‘There’s no computers!’ Kay says.

  ‘Kay, I don’t think they were captured. I think they left.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I think they’ve moved to another place. They took the computers with them.’

  I expect Kay to smile, but instead she bites her lip. ‘Maybe the Leadership took the computers to see all the things the Resistance do on the computers.’

  My shoulders sag.

  ‘What more things are gone?’ Kay asks.

  ‘There was food in the kitchen.’

  ‘Wouldn’t they be taking all that food, if they were leaving?’

  ‘Not if they were in a hurry,’ I say. ‘In fact, we shouldn’t be here. If they left, it was because they were worried that Robin had led the Leadership to this place, or even because of some other threat that we don’t know about.’

  We stare at each other hopelessly.

  Kay’s head jerks up. ‘I know. I know what thing they would take and the Leadership would not take.’ She strides up the next flight of stairs.

  I follow more slowly. My hand is killing me again. Kay shoots into our ward. By the time I’ve reached the door she’s triumphantly waving a pillow about. ‘It’s gone,’ she says.

  ‘What’s gone?’

  ‘Robin’s bear. Only Robin would take the teddy. The Leadership would not take that.’

  ‘What if she took him with her this morning?’

  ‘No, I saw her saying goodbye to it. Robin has been back to here.’

  Which I guess is enough to give us hope that the Resistance still exists.

  ‘We have to find them,’ Kay says.

  I nod. ‘You get whatever food and water you can find from the kitchen and I’ll look in Ven’s office to see if I can work out where they’ve gone.’

  On the ground floor we split again.

  I only hope that they’ve left some clue, because it could take us forever to find them in the Wilderness again.

  I open the door to Ven’s office and flinch.

  We’re not alone.

  Crouched in the corner with chocolate smeared around his mouth is Nard.

  ‘He was just keeping this stuff all for himself,’ he says, waving a chocolate bar about.

  I fly at him, grab his collar and haul him to his feet, then I punch him in the face with my good hand. He crashes backwards into a shelf of books. When he staggers upright, I punch him again.

  ‘Why?’ I shout in his face. ‘Why would you do that? Why would you send Kay to die?’

  He pushes me off him and shrugs his shirt sulkily back into place.

  ‘Why should I care about your stupid girlfriend?’

  ‘You liked her! You certainly spent enough time running around after her.’

  ‘I thought that maybe we had something in common. I thought that maybe we understood each other, but it turned out that she thinks she’s better than me, just like everybody else. You all think you’re better than me.’

  Efwurd, Nard has got some serious issues. ‘Maybe that’s because we wouldn’t try to kill someone just because they didn’t want to kiss us.’

  He screws up his face with disdain. ‘I didn’t set this whole thing up purely to kill Kay,’ he says as if I’m the crazy one. ‘I wanted to take out The Leader. Putting you three at the centre of it was just an added bonus.’

  He is seriously twisted. ‘We were already going to kill The Leader. And we were going to do it in a way that wouldn’t blow up thousands of innocent people.’

  Nard shrugs. ‘What does Ven always say? Sacrifices have to be made.’

  ‘Ven wouldn’t make a sacrifice like that.’

  ‘No,’ Nard sneers. ‘But he was prepared to sacrifice you, wasn’t he, Daddy’s boy?’

  A line of ice runs through me. ‘What the hell do you mean by that?’

  ‘Oh, come on, do you really think that he took you along because you were an asset to the Assassination team?’

  ‘I’m a good shot.’

  Nard sneers. ‘But not exactly a favourite with Ven. He knew who your father is and he took you along as an insurance policy.’

  I don’t want to give Nard the satisfaction of seeing me consider his words, but already my mind is whirling. Could Ven have known? How does Nard know? The last time I spoke about my father was up on the roof with Kay, and then . . . And then when I came down the stairs Ven told me I was on the team. He must have been listening. Nard is right. But Ven didn’t use me. He saw me there behind the guards and he didn’t give me away. He could have, but he didn’t. I volunteered.

  ‘Ven didn’t betray me,’ I say.

  ‘How sweet. But I’ll bet he shot a hell of a lot of people today.’

  ‘With reason. He didn’t try to kill anyone just because they pissed him off.’

  Nard lets out a high-pitched laugh. ‘Oh, please, I’m sick of you lot making out you’re so principled and high-minded. All anybody is interested in is getting on. Grasping something better. Every single member of the Resistance would shoot anybody else in the back to save themselves.’

  This is the way that Nard sees the Resistance. It’s a wonder that he hasn’t sold them out long ago.

  ‘If that’s how you feel, I don’t know why you even wanted to kill the Leader.’

  He pulls up his face to indicate my stupidity. ‘Because he’s a sick and twisted man,’ he says.

  My mind flips over in its effort to process this. My skin crawls. The fact that Nard thinks he is making perfect sense and that he judges The Leader’s crimes, but not his own, is terrifying.

  ‘You’re wrong,’ I say. ‘There are people who will sacrifice themselves for others, Kay did it for me. I did it for Ven and I’m certain that Ven has done it more times than either of us are even aware of. The Resistance are good people who have strived their whole lives to help others.’

  Nard rejects all the hard work and self-sacrifice of the Resistance with a dismissive shake of the head. Nothing I can say will change the way he thinks. What I need from him is information.

  ‘What’s happened here?’ I ask in a more level tone. ‘Where have they gone?’

  ‘They left. They’re afraid that Robin let a load of information out to that Jed guy. See? I’m not the only efwurd up.’

  He’s deluding himself again by putting Robin’s foolishness in the same bracket as his own treachery.

  ‘Where have they gone?’

  Nard smiles. He knows.

  ‘I don’t know why I’m bothering to ask,’ I say. ‘It’s not like you were anyone significant. They didn’t trust you with the really important stuff, did they?’

  ‘But I knew it all anyway,’ Nard spits. ‘They were like a bunch of kids with their secrets and their special groups. Did Ven really think we were going to keep out of his office just because he said so? I knew everything that there was to know around here. I knew about your father, I knew Ven’s little secret, and I know that they’ve gone to the university.’ He tightens his face in a ‘so there’ smirk.

  He really is horrible, but at least now I know where they are. I remember Paulo mentioning that most of the university in the next district had remained intact. I’ll bet that’s the one.

  ‘Go on then,’ Nard says. ‘Run along to your little friend, Ven. You’re all a bunch of bastards.’ He pulls a knife out of his boot.

  ‘We’
re not the bastards!’ My voice rises. ‘Can you not see the terrible things that you’ve done? What is wrong with you?’

  He takes a step towards me, pointing the knife at my chest.

  My hand finds the gun in my jacket. The splints on my fingers make it awkward to hold the gun, but I manage to grip it and aim it at Nard.

  ‘You wouldn’t shoot me.’ But I can see from his face he’s scared.

  He’s right, though. I can’t shoot him. Just like I didn’t shoot my father, even though I despise the pair of them. But I’ve got to keep the gun on him until I figure out what to do.

  Nard has paled. ‘It’s all gone wrong. You don’t understand what it’s like. People always expect the worst from me. All I ever hear is how aggressive I am. That stuff starts to stick. And then the time I try to reach out to someone, to tell a girl I like her, look what happens.’

  ‘That’s not a reason to plant a bomb on someone!’

  ‘I know. I’m just a mess.’ His shoulders slump and he covers his face with his hands.

  I can’t feel any sympathy for him. I don’t want to. What can I do with him? Maybe Ven can talk some sense into him. ‘Listen, Nard . . .’ I say.

  The second my guard is down, Nard throws off his fake despair and lunges for the gun. I step back at the last second and Nard falls against me, knocking me to the ground. I keep hold of the gun, but Nard is on top of me. He grabs my wrist with one hand and tries to wrench the gun from my grip with the other. It feels like he’s breaking my fingers all over again.

  ‘Did you think I was sorry?’ he sneers in my face.

  He’s twisting the gun to point it at me.

  I try to push him off me with my good hand, but he lands a lucky punch right on my jaw. My head cracks back against the floor. The gun slips from my grip.

  And then it’s pointing in my face.

  ‘Don’t do this,’ I say. ‘You don’t have to be like this.’

  ‘I never had any choice.’

  He takes the safety-catch off the gun.

  ‘Should have taken your chance,’ he says. ‘Shoot first or be shot.’

  Behind Nard something moves. Kay leaps towards us. She lands on Nard, sending him slamming into me. I fight to push him off. He’s yanked away from me. Where’s the gun? I push myself up. Nard and Kay are rolling over on the floor.

  ‘Let her go!’ I dive towards them.

  The gun goes off.

  Oh God.

  The two of them are in a heap. The gun is lying next to them. I snatch it up and aim it at the back of Nard’s head. Kay is underneath him.

  ‘Kay! Kay, are you all right?’

  She pushes Nard off her and struggles to her feet. She’s all right. Kay is all right.

  But Nard’s face is pulled tight in agony. He clutches his stomach and a moan leaks out of the corner of his mouth. His hands are red.

  ‘We’ve got to . . . We need . . .’ I start pulling off my shirt, thinking I can use it to staunch the blood, but it’s already too late.

  ‘Blake,’ Kay says gently.

  I stop tearing at my buttons.

  Nard’s eyes are unseeing.

  ‘No,’ I say.

  ‘Come on,’ Kay says, putting an arm around me. ‘Come away from here.’

  Out in the corridor, Kay stoops to retrieve the packets of food that she dropped in the corridor when she heard me and Nard fighting, and mechanically I bend to help her.

  We go back to the car.

  I rest my head against the steering wheel. I think of Robin. She will be very upset when she learns Nard is dead.

  ‘King hell,’ I say. ‘That wasn’t our fault. The gun just went off in the struggle.’

  Kay puts a hand over mine. ‘It wasn’t our fault,’ she agrees. ‘But . . . I fired the gun.’

  I don’t have any words left.

  ‘Nard doesn’t understand,’ Kay continues. ‘He doesn’t get it. We’re not murderers, me and you. We don’t choose it. But we won’t let people like Nard hurt the people we love. We’re not murderers. But we are fighters.’

  I try to hold on to Kay’s words. She’s right, what happened just then was self-defence. But even after what happened with The Leader, even though I’ve realised that it’s not my place to decide if someone lives or dies, even though I knew I wasn’t going to shoot Nard, there was a small part of me that wanted to. Not to protect myself or Kay, but just because I hated him. And I’m afraid that no matter how many decisions I take about what’s the right way to behave, I’m always going to have to keep that vicious angry part of me under control. There’s always going to be a new struggle to do the right thing.

  When we escaped from the Academy, everything seemed so clear to me. We were the good guys and the Leadership were the enemy. But I’m realising that no one I know can simply be slotted into a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ category. I thought Janna was a traitor, but she helped us out. I believed I was the one trying to put things right, but I could so easily have killed two unarmed people today. I thought my father was pure evil, but he really seemed to believe he was doing the right thing. And Nard – aggressive, predatory Nard – took the time to talk to a little girl everyone else ignored.

  Maybe most people are capable of both great kindness and terrible things.

  I know now that I am.

  It’s starting to get light when we arrive at the university on top of a hill. The first person we find is Toren.

  ‘Blake! Kay!’ He laughs in amazement. ‘You made it! We heard you’d been taken and—’

  ‘How did you hear?’ I ask. ‘Did Ven come back?’

  Toren’s smile disappears. He nods slowly. ‘His leg was broken. Tanisha got him back. But—’

  ‘Where is he?’ I ask.

  ‘He’s in sick bay.’

  ‘Where’s that?’

  ‘Upstairs, at the end of the corridor.’

  ‘I’ve got to see him.’ I head for the stairs.

  ‘Blake, I need to tell you something!’ Toren calls after me.

  But whatever it is can wait. I need to see Ven. I need to tell him what happened with The Leader.

  I take a right at the top of the stairs. At the end of the corridor I hear coughing. I peer through the last door. Sick bay has obviously been hastily assembled and the large room is full of an assortment of beds, cushions and sofas. There are a lot of wounded Resistance members sleeping here. And these are the ones that managed to make it back.

  In the bed closest to me is Alrye, the boy who tried to interrogate Kay and me when we first arrived. His eyes are wide open.

  ‘Where’s Ven?’ I whisper.

  ‘In the back room.’ He continues to stare at a spot on the wall.

  I make my way between beds and makeshift beds and through a door at the back. It’s a large room. The dawn light is pouring through a huge window. As I approach the bed, my footsteps slow. Something is not right. This limp body cannot be the twitching ball of energy that is Ven. He didn’t look well before the uprising, now he looks terrible.

  His eyes snap open. ‘Blake,’ he says in a rasping voice, fixing me with his gaze, ‘it surprises me that a young man of your limited skills was able to escape the Leadership. I’m going to assume that some sort of friendly animal helped you dig a tunnel out.’

  I open my mouth to speak.

  ‘No, don’t tell me I’m wrong. I’m enjoying picturing you with a badger.’

  ‘Ven . . .’ is all I can manage to say.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘What happened?’

  He rolls his eyes. ‘If you look at my weakened state, the shallow breathing, the internal bleeding and a few other details that I’ll save for when I really need to induce nausea in you, then it all points to the fact I’m ill. I’m ill, Blake.’

  I remember his sunken eyes and weight loss running up to the Big Day. I assumed it was stress and lack of time to sleep and eat, but clearly this is something much worse.

  ‘Is it . . . Is it the Sickness?’

  ‘Y
es, Blake.’

  I don’t know what to say. Even though I knew that the Resistance die young, I didn’t expect it to happen to the people I know. And certainly not to Ven.

  ‘Now that we’ve got your eloquent and heartfelt warm wishes out of the way, tell me about what happened to you.’

  ‘Kay found me. We escaped. But that isn’t the important thing; it’s The Leader, he didn’t even know that I was his son.’

  Ven raises his eyebrows.

  ‘I know you know about that,’ I say, seeing no point in pretending otherwise. ‘The fact is The Leader didn’t seem to know a whole lot of stuff. That Radcliffe man, it looks like he’s got a lot of power, but he’s turned against The Leader; he tried to shoot him.’

  Ven’s mouth twitches. ‘It’s nice that someone is picking up where we left off.’

  ‘But you don’t understand; Kay heard them saying that he wasn’t going to be Leader any more and one of his assistants told him that there were Leadership members who were going to pin the blame for the uprising on him.’ I remember with a jolt that it won’t matter to him what they do any more. ‘And he’s dead,’ I say.

  My father’s dead.

  Ven jerks upright. ‘Why didn’t you say so? What happened?’

  I hesitate; I don’t want to share the moment in the recreation centre where I nearly pulled the trigger, so I just say, ‘A crowd of people turned on him. They shot him.’

  Ven’s thin fingers clench into a fist. He closes his eyes to take in the fruition of all his hopes.

  ‘Thank you, Blake. You’ve made me feel much better.’

  ‘But . . . I don’t think it’s over. I don’t think that everything pivoted on The Leader in the way that we thought it did.’

  ‘Well, it’s an efwurding good start.’

  He leans back and shuts his eyes, and for a moment I think he’s gone back to sleep, but eventually he pushes back his blanket and I’m shocked to see how thin he is without his massive jersey. I can’t believe how rapidly he’s deteriorated. I can only assume that he was holding it all together for the uprising and that all that effort has completely drained him.