by Teri Terry
I step into a wooden cabin with Freja. Four pairs of eyes look at me.
“Listen up,” I say. “I only promise not to punch people who don’t mess around in my head, so keep out of it.”
“Sounds fair.” It’s a milder voice than the one I remember earlier—was that JJ? He’s not here. “I’m Patrick.” He holds out a hand. I hesitate, then shake it. It’s a firm handshake, and his face is open, honest. He’s about my mum’s age, and there is something about him that says he’s all right. “I’m sorry you all got off on the wrong foot before,” he says. “They were taken by surprise.”
There’s a woman who comes up behind him—she must be in her sixties. “I’m Zohra. I’m sorry too. I’d have knocked JJ’s head if I’d been there for what he did. I know we’re all scared we’ll be found, but that’s no excuse for bad manners.”
The door wafts open as she speaks, and JJ appears with a platter of barbecued sausages.
He scowls. “Knocked my head? Like to see you try.”
“Peace,” Patrick says. “Our guests”—he stresses the word guests—“are hungry. Food first. Talk later.”
CHAPTER 7
CALLIE
“I THOUGHT TO START THINGS OFF we should tell you who we are, and how we came to be together here. Out loud, everyone,” Patrick says, and nods at Kai. It’d been weird at dinner, like they had to keep reminding themselves Kai couldn’t hear what everyone said if it wasn’t out loud, given that everyone—even JJ, when pressed by Patrick—promised not to venture into his head.
“Zohra, do you want to start?” Patrick says.
“Yes. Well, I’m rather good at finding survivors—sensing them. It was me who first noticed you walking up the road today. Before we came here, I’d been hiding in plain sight, as it were, but I was scared. Lonely. Afraid to tell anyone what I was, even though it was obvious I wasn’t a carrier—no one ever got sick around me. But I think I needed to talk to someone like myself to understand what had happened to me. So I started trying to find others like me.”
Freja nods; she understands. She’s been by turns nervous of this group, like Kai, and ecstatic to have found people like her. I mean they’re different from each other in all the ways that people can be—accent, age, skin color—but with this one overriding thing in common. They’re survivors like her, like me.
Or like I used to be.
“First I found Henry,” Zohra says. She smiles at the boy—he’s maybe a few years younger than Freja and has been staring at her with rapt attention all through dinner. “And he knew about Amaya—they’re friends from school. We were all out in the community, passing ourselves off as immune. But then they started testing people that were immune with some scan, and we were scared we’d be caught. There were rumors of survivors being taken away to some research place, and who knows what would happen to us there?”
Kai winces, and I’m guessing we are sharing the same thought: was Shay taken there? She might know the answer.
“Anyhow, we decided to disappear,” Zohra says. “But we were being tracked. We nearly got caught, but JJ found us and helped us get away—he’s rather good at blocking, so I didn’t sense him. It’s mostly JJ that’s put a block over this place—even though Callie still found it.”
It was hard, though, I answer, still marveling at this: communicating with a whole roomful of people. Not just through Shay or Freja. Everyone in this room hears me, acknowledges me—except Kai, of course.
“I’d been monitoring Zohra for a while,” JJ says. “They weren’t very good at hiding, and worse at defending themselves. I’d retreated here already. I’d already seen Freja’s channel online at this point and told her how to find the road.”
“And Patrick?” Kai asks.
“I was online telling everyone survivors aren’t carriers, like Freja was, but anonymously and not as visibly perhaps. JJ gave me hints how to find them here; I was the last to come. I don’t stay here all the time. I’m still officially living at home—I’ve got a place on the outskirts of Matlock—so I can check online for news and so on, and come and go, bringing supplies and updates on what is happening.”
“Didn’t they scan you?” Freja asks.
“No. Where I live the epidemic hasn’t come. Not sure how I caught it—I’d been traveling back from seeing a friend in the Lake District, so probably caught it somewhere along the way. I live alone in an epidemic-free area; nobody knew I’d been sick, so there was no reason to test me.”
“Okay, so now we know how you came to be together here. But what next? What are you going to do?” Freja asks.
“Stay alive and free,” Zohra says.
Stay together, Amaya adds silently, and no one tells Kai what she said. But I can feel it—despite their differences, this group has become like a family to each other. Maybe closer than a family—it’s hard not to be when you’re in each other’s heads most of the time.
“Tents in the woods might feel like fun in the summer, but it won’t stay that way,” Zohra says. “We need to relocate. Go past the boundaries into the quarantine zone. Find others like us and a place where we can live more openly.”
“Others?”
“There are traces of other groups here and there,” Patrick says. “One in the zone in Scotland has contacted us and asked us to join them.”
Freja scowls. “Go and hide away behind the barriers? What good will that do? We need to take it to them, not run away.”
“A girl with some fight; I like that.” JJ grins at her. “But we feel some responsibility to each other—to continue surviving. What if we’re it for the human race? We’ll need to get busy, repopulating the planet.”
He’d make my skin crawl if I had any, I say, an aside to just Freja—one the others can’t hear.
No kidding, but let’s keep him on our side for now, she says, answering me the same way.
“Do you mean if everyone in the country dies?” Kai says. “That’s a bit cold. What if we can do something to stop it?”
“The best medical people the government and World Health Organization have come up with can’t stop it,” JJ says. “What are we going to do?”
I was there when it started, I say. On Shetland. In a government lab. I didn’t understand the science, but Shay did.
Freja repeats what I said, looks at Kai, and nods. It’s time to tell them all that we know.
Kai gives them the whole story about Shay and us. That she was a survivor, that I told her what I’ve told them now—how it started on Shetland. That we went there and found out about the underground particle accelerator and that antimatter causes the epidemic. How it got out.
How some parts of the army didn’t seem to know what other parts were doing. That Shay, believing she was a carrier and trusting that all of the armed forces couldn’t be behind the epidemic and cover-up, turned herself in to the air force base on Shetland. That now that he knows survivors aren’t carriers, he wants to find out where she’s been taken.
They don’t think Kai will see her again, though none of them say it out loud. All through his telling they’ve looked alternately shocked and angry, and afterward the silence goes on while they process what he’s said.
Finally JJ breaks it: “Does knowing more about what is behind the epidemic and what happened to us change anything?”
We need to find Dr. 1—he started it all, he must know how to stop it, I say, and Freja tells Kai what I said.
“But how do we find him?” Zohra asks. “If he’s even still alive.”
“Someone in the government must know who he is, where he is,” Kai says.
JJ raises an eyebrow. “Should we give them a call and ask?”
Freja’s arms are crossed. She’s radiating cold fury. “The government can’t be trusted. They started this. And they must have worked out by now that survivors aren’t carriers. Why do they perpetuate this myth? Is it
to let mobs do their work for them—hiding the evidence of what they’ve done by eliminating survivors who may carry traces of what has happened to them inside? They must know more than they’re letting on. If they don’t want to tell us, we have to make them.”
There is a furious exchange now between all of them, inside their heads, and Kai looks from face to face, wondering.
Patrick puts up a hand. “Out loud, remember? But there is something we have to deal with first. I really think you can see from all that Kai has done and what we’ve learned from him, and Callie too, that they’re both on our side in this. Does anyone object to Kai joining us, along with Freja and Callie?”
No one says anything. JJ is the only one who isn’t sure, about Kai at least, but he says nothing.
“Good. Now back to the really big question, one we’ve been dodging for a while, but you’ve reminded us must be faced: what do we do next?” Patrick says.
“We need there to be more of us, together, to tackle the lies being spread about us. We need to find the government institution—the one in all the rumors—where survivors get taken. Free them. Find out what the government knows,” Freja says.
“Or we could continue to hide away, try to keep our own sorry skins safe,” Patrick says. “Should we vote? Who is in favor of staying out of the zone, trying to find and free these captive survivors, seeing what we can find out and do about it all? Hands, please.”
Kai’s hand goes up. Freja’s and Patrick’s too.
JJ’s, Zohra’s, Henry’s, and Amaya’s stay down. Zohra looks at the two younger ones, one after another—silent arguments are taking place, ones that exclude the rest of us. Amaya wants to put hers up, she’s almost twitching with it, but hers stays down.
“Callie? What do you want us to do?” Freja says, and I’m startled.
Do I count? Hesitantly I put up my hand.
Patrick nods, and something moves inside me, some feeling. I belong here with these people.
“It’s an even split,” Patrick says, disappointment clear in his voice. “Should we think about it and talk some more and then try again tomorrow?”
But JJ is looking at Freja, holding her gaze. Then he puts up his hand too.
“That’s it then,” Patrick says with a grin. “We stay; we search. We’re going to do this thing.”
CHAPTER 8
KAI
I SLIP OUT OF MY SLEEPING BAG, unable to sleep—maybe because of all that unplanned, involuntary sleep I had earlier.
Or maybe because somehow I know that Freja won’t be able to sleep either.
It’s like she’s waiting for me. Did she plant a suggestion in my head and do it so subtly that I wasn’t aware of it? I don’t think she would do that, really, but both what JJ did to me earlier and Freja’s talking to me inside my head have brought my paranoia up to full rev.
The moon is new tonight and there is little light, just stars, but her white skin reflects what there is. Her red hair is a bright halo.
She gestures, and I follow, walking away from the cabin with her, wanting to ask her—to demand to know—if she’d called me somehow. I’m both angry if she did and wanting her to have done it at the same time, and confused about why I feel this way.
When we’re a hundred yards or so away from the cabin, she stops and leans against a tree.
“I couldn’t sleep. First Callie and Amaya were up giggling endlessly, and I didn’t have the heart to ask them to stop,” Freja whispers. “Amaya finally fell asleep, but then Zohra started to snore.” Freja makes a face. She’d been put in the cabin with Zohra and Amaya; the rest of us are in tents. I’m in Patrick’s tent at the moment; he’d headed out as the rest of us went to sleep, saying he needed to get back home, find out what was happening in the world—and make sure no one noticed he was gone. He said we’re too far out here to get any reception on phones or signal to check anything online.
“What did you say to JJ to get him to vote with us?” I ask.
“You know, the usual. I appealed to his male ego until he’d agree to anything.”
“Hmmm. Is that what you do with me?”
“Not necessary in your case. You’re more sensible.”
“I see. Do you give me little commands inside my head?” I try to say it lightly, but it isn’t felt that way and she knows it.
She frowns. “No, don’t be an ass. Of course not. I’m not into subtle; arguing is much more fun.”
I’m sure she’s telling the truth, and I’m embarrassed. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t accuse you of that.”
She tilts her head, looks at me searchingly. “Are you happy?”
I shrug. “Existentially or more specifically?”
She rolls her eyes. “About staying here with this group.”
“Patrick is all right, I think. Zohra is too—she’s protective of the younger ones, that’s all. Not so sure about JJ.”
“You haven’t answered the question.”
“No?” I try to smile, but there is something that is still bugging me. Despite her reassurance that she hasn’t been meddling with me, there is still some sense of weirdness, and I don’t know what it is. I shrug again. “We’ll see how things go.”
“You don’t like feeling like the odd one out, do you? The only one who is different.”
I look back at her, surprised. Is that it? “I don’t know. Maybe a little.”
“Now you know how we feel.”
CHAPTER 9
CALLIE
THE NEXT DAYS WE SPEND HUNTING. Not in the woods, but in nearby villages—for other survivors. They all agreed we should try to find any survivors we can in the surrounding areas first so that there are more of us—that we need to increase in strength before tackling a government institution. But couldn’t they at least try to find it? Kai, like me, is full of impatience: he wants to find Shay, and I want to find Dr. 1. But no matter what I say about it to everyone, this is what they’ve decided to do.
The group has a few motorbikes and Kai’s eyes lit up when he saw them; it’s been a long time since his bike was left behind outside of Killin. Kai and Freja go on one, JJ and Zohra on the other. Zohra has made a grid and we’re trying different places.
Now I’m searching the farthest parts of the village Kai and Freja are checking tonight. Looking for the telltale signs and traces that say a survivor is here—a concentrated place of feeling and thought. It’s how I found Freja that night in London. Freja can do it too, but she can’t cover the ground that I can.
Though sometimes I get it wrong. I glare at a Siamese cat crouching on a shed roof and wonder: why do cats feel so much like survivors? Its eyes are wide, measuring, but it doesn’t flip out and run away like most of them do. What can it see of me?
I hold out a hand, like I would have done with a new cat if I were still me and not what I am now. But instead of sniffing it, deciding if I am friend or foe, it just runs away.
I used to like cats. Some trace of a memory says I had one once, a ginger tabby with deep green eyes, but when I got Freja to ask Kai about it, he said we’d never had a cat, that Mum was allergic, that maybe the cat I’m thinking of belonged to a friend. But I remember the soft fur, orange tiger stripes; the loud purr late at night that made me feel safe. Until—
A door slams shut in my mind. Until what? I don’t know.
I go back up into the sky and then out and around in increasing circles, again and again. There are no survivors in this village.
I head back to where Freja and Kai are checking on foot.
None here, I say. Are we going on?
Freja shakes her head, disappointed, and sighs. “We need some sleep.”
“Do we know what the incidence of survivors is?” Kai says. “Like how many survive for every hundred infected?”
“Not precisely. At least I don’t know, except that they’re rare.”
“And how many are likely to even be here, when the epidemic isn’t in this area anyway? There’s only the odd one who traveled from somewhere else, like Patrick, or escaped the zone, like you.”
“JJ thinks we should go into the zones instead and search there. Zohra does too. She probably thinks it would be safer to be on the other side of the barriers, where the authorities have given up.”
“But it’s easier to get into the zone than back out—believe me, I know. So maybe it makes sense to keep looking out here, at least for a while. But we need to stretch out farther.”
They’re just going over the same argument everyone has been having for days.
But everything changes when we get back to camp.
CHAPTER 10
KAI
WE’RE A FEW MILES AWAY STILL when Freja tenses behind me on the bike.
“What is it?” I say.
“I don’t know. Something’s happened; something’s wrong. Hurry.”
Patrick’s back.
He’s brought more supplies. Everyone walks to where he’s parked his four-wheel drive to help unload and carry stuff to the cabin, but there is something he’s not saying. JJ and Zohra aren’t back, and he wants to wait until they are. There must be some words flying back and forth silently to make everybody else so on edge, but no one says anything out loud, and once again I’m annoyed. I throw myself into lugging as much as I can at once to help Patrick. I march up the thin path, muscles straining.
“Is this a race?” Freja asks, walking behind me with a more reasonable load.
“Just takes my mind off whatever.” I grunt more than say the words.
Finally JJ and Zohra appear, and by their faces they know something is up too.
We all gather, and Patrick takes out a bottle of whiskey and some glasses and pours himself one. He gestures a question at the rest of us with the bottle. Zohra and JJ have one as well.