The Wilderness

by C. J. Harper

  ‘You’re smart. You’re a good planner. You can think of what to do when the thing you wanted to do goes wrong. And you care about people.’

  I press the heels of my hands into my eye sockets.

  Kay puts an arm around me. ‘You led the Specials at the Academy.’

  ‘As I recall, you had to give the rousing speech because they didn’t understand a word of mine.’

  ‘You did a good speech for the Resistance. You made everyone want to do their best for all the people they had lost.’

  I didn’t even know she’d heard it. ‘The point is, look how things ended up at the Academy. I didn’t do a great job.’

  ‘You made the Specials believe that things could be different. That was the most important thing.’

  I shrug. ‘No one at the Learning Community every thought of me as a leader. I was, you know, the brainer one who looks after all the maths and science. I wasn’t good at being in charge.’

  ‘Stop there. It’s not about the things that you did; it’s about now.’ Kay’s right. I’m not the person I thought I was. Since I left the Learning Community I’ve done things that I never would have imagined I could.

  ‘Ven and all the others think you can do this.’

  Maybe it is possible. ‘What do you think?’

  She smiles wide. ‘Oh, I think you can do anything you want, anything at all.’

  It’s amazing what one person’s belief in you can do, if it’s the right person. I want to deserve her faith in me. I don’t know if we will ever free this country from the Leadership, but I do know that you can’t change anything unless you dare to believe that change is possible.

  I push open the door behind us. ‘Okay,’ I say. ‘I’ll do it. I’ll be captain.’

  Their tense faces break into smiles.

  And I stop thinking about who I have been and start thinking about who I can be.

  About the Author

  C.J. Harper grew up in a rather small house with a rather large family in Oxfordshire. As the fourth of five sisters it was often hard to get a word in edgeways, so she started writing down her best ideas. It’s probably not a coincidence that her first “book” featured an orphan living in a deserted castle.

  Growing up she attended six different schools, but that honestly had very little to do with an early interest in explosives.

  C.J. has been a bookseller, a teacher and the person who puts those little stickers on apples. She is married and has a daughter named after Philip Pullman’s Lyra. THE WILDERNESS is the second book in her series that began with THE DISAPPEARED.