“Huh.” Gry gave a glare towards Bracken.
It was the first proper room I had lived in. The first proper, rectangular room with corners and walls and cracks in the floorboards. It was exciting but also a bit scary. Trying to distract myself, I put all of Mama’s things in the bottom of the chester drawers in the corner of the room. If I ever needed them, I knew where they would be.
“Nice to know they’re there,” Bracken said. “Keep it all in one place. Very sensible, that.” She smiled warmly.
“Wouldn’t want to lose anything,” Gry finished, her face all soft and serious.
“That’s right,” I replied before shoving the drawer in roughly and pretending to not really care about the things inside. “Let’s go for a walk.”
* * *
The work was easy. I couldn’t read properly (very few people could—even Professor Nimbus could only make out a few simple words and sentences) so Nimbus would sit me down and tell me the stories. Then he’d ask me questions, like did I think that he should say A before B or should he put C before A and then come in with D? You get the idea. I was starting to learn an awful lot about the world and its history. Such as, before the Gases came, the ancestors of the Aus all bought special injections to change their faces so that they looked like famous beautiful people.
“They would re-create the jeans of the famous and fill their faces up with them,” Nimbus absentmindedly muttered, the fingers on one hand pushing against the fingers on his other hand. “Even nowadays the Aus talk of an Elvin Pretsley lip or an Angelica Jolly cheekbone. With all of their money, they tried to turn themselves into other people. Very foolish.”
Another thing I learned about were the seasons. Hundreds of years ago, the sky wasn’t the same purplish color all year long like it is now. It would change as the days crept past one after the other.
Firstly, said the Professor, came winter, where the clouds were white and puffy and cold, icy snowflakes (not poisonous!) would drift to the ground. Children would play in the flakes and throw balls of snow at each other. Then they would try to make big fat men with round heads and waste carrots by sticking them in and pretending they were noses.
Next was spring, when the sky relaxed a little bit and actual real flowers pushed their way out of the earth. Birds would return from hiding and the trees would go from being dead woody stumps to green, leaf-covered giants.
Then came summer. All the clouds in the sky would be blown aside by the winds to reveal a blue—yes, blue—roof to the world and the people would roast in the sun and eat sweet creams, or fan themselves with paper and complain about the heat.
Finally, there was autumn, when all the leaves that grew in the spring decided not to cling on to the trees anymore and the warm winds of summer started to get colder and began to blow the thick clouds back across the sky. After that it would be winter again and the whole thing would go round and round like a daft dog chasing its own tail.
“So very, very different from the world we live in now,” the Professor said with a sigh. “All we ever have now is the one dull sky with a few speckles of dangerous rain. It must have been so much more … interesting back then.”
I nodded in agreement. I rather got the feeling that life, in general, was more interesting back then.
* * *
It all started a few weeks after I became Nimbus’s apprentice. The Professor had asked me to take a walk to the Spitting Fields to interview some of the market people there. He wanted me to ask for stories that their mothers and fathers had passed down to them. It could be anything really. Some tiny fact about the history of the area. The people who used to live there. A scary story that used to frighten youngsters at night. Anything that Professor Nimbus could incorporate into his teachings. We would sit down together, sift the details and plait the stories into our heads as best we could.
Lots of the people at Spitting Fields were helpful and I was full to the top with things to tell him. I was struggling to keep as much of it in my soft brain as I could remember when I took a route down a thin street that I don’t believe I’d ever wandered before. There was nothing exceptional about the street itself but a small way down the pavement with the weedy cracks, something glinted in the afternoon dullness. My eyes swooped to it; my legs followed soon behind. There, lying as innocently as a strip of forgotten rag, was what I could only believe was a telebracelet. Having never seen one before, it was only a bit of a guess. But something told me that, yes, that was precisely what it was. A telebracelet.
Only the Aus have telebracelets. They talk to each other on them apparently. In fact, only the Aus have technology of any kind. The Aus have the technology and the Pbs have none. The Cus meanwhile sit somewhere uncomfortable in the middle, only able to use technology if it makes the Aus’ lives easier. Gold, copper and lead—that’s what the Professor told me. That’s where the terms come from. Au, Cu and Pb.
I squatted down and scooped it up in my hands. It felt cold and heavy, and as I twisted it around, inspecting it, I could see that it was in the shape of a butterfly. A pretty, purple-and-gold butterfly with shiny inlays and delicate wings. The diamonds or rubies or emeralds or whatever they were wrapped themselves all the way down along the wrist strap until they had nowhere else to go.
My heart staggered, and just for a second, I thought how pleased Mama would have been to see it. She would have been as dazzled by it as I was. She would have turned it over, holding it up to the light, draping it over her wasted forearm. She would have polished it up until it was so shiny you could see yesterday reflected in it. She would have put it against my face and said how the colors suited my eyes and how … But I shook the silly thoughts out of my head and quickly slipped the telebracelet into my pocket before anyone else should see it.
As I made my way down the street, I wondered if there was any way in which I could keep it for myself. Hold on to it like a special sort of secret that no one else in the world could know. Perhaps lock it away in the bottom drawer with all of Mama’s things. But as I came out of the road onto another, busier one, I could feel the thing weighing very heavy in my pocket and I just knew that I should return it to its proper owner. Its proper Au owner.
I hawked it out again and looked at the back. Inscribed in the silvery surface was
Caritas
1-76380
Crystal City 3
I didn’t know what much of it said, but I recognized some letters and kind of worked out that the last line said “Crystal City.” I also knew my numbers well enough to know that it referred to Crystal City Three. Crystal City Three was only a short walk farther east. From where I was standing, you could see their icicle-sharp towers on the violet skyline, like knives that had stabbed up through the ground. Pbs weren’t allowed inside the Au compounds, but I could probably leave the telebracelet with one of the guards at the entrance and they’d be able to find the person it belonged to. So I started walking and after a while was knocking on the gatekeeper’s window.
The Cu on duty slid the window back and frowned at me like I was a piece of unwanted clutter on a shelf. “What?” he sneered.
“I found this. It was on one of the roads. Over there.” I pointed back. “I thought I’d better return it.”
His hand came out of the window and snapped it off me. I saw that he wore the standard almost-black uniform of the Minister’s Police Force and that on his shoulder he had two stripes. A constaple. His face was craggy and his mouth untrusting.
“Let me see that…” The guard stared at the telebracelet as though it burned his eyes. “Hmm. Okay.” One of his hands reached out for some sort of phone device, and his fingers started nudging rubbery buttons. “Good. Go away now.” His free hand made a flicking gesture and slid the window shut. Behind the glass I could see him talking into the phone.
I sighed before spinning around on my heels and trudging away. Life felt so spectacularly unfair at that moment. I had done the right thing. I had put my own feelings aside. The telebracelet
was one of the most amazing things I’d ever seen and yet I knew that I couldn’t have it for myself. I didn’t want a reward for finding it—Mama always said you should never do anything for the reward, you should do things because they were the correct things to do—but perhaps a “Thank you” or a smile or a pat on the back would have been nice. Still. That was the way the world was built, with Pbs being nothing more than the dust blowing across the ground.
“Oy!”
I stopped and looked back at the constaple in his office. The window was open again and he was leaning out of it and waving me to him. His face looked even more red and contorted than before and his black sleeve was flapping to and fro.
“She wants to meet you. Come back here. She wants you to take it up to her. And she’s top toffee, so mind your peas and queues.”
chapter 6
CARITAS AND THE CRYSTAL TOWER
EVERYONE WAS STARING at me. Their eyes were like lasers sweeping across the entire area, as though alarms were about to start screeching. Intruder alert! Intruder alert! I half expected armed police to rush out and throw me to the ground. But they didn’t. The constaple on duty in the office must have told them I was coming through.
It was like nothing I’d ever seen. I had heard stories about grass being green before—I had only really ever known it to be a slightly dullish brown—but here it actually was green. Green enough to eat, like a shoot on a carrot. And the paths were all neat and even, clean gray stone after stone that cut through the green grass like hands chopping through smog. But the most noticeable thing was the people. The Aus. Every single one of them was beautiful and healthy looking. Even their clothes were perfect. Not crumpled and stained and hurried together like most of us Pbs, but crisp and ironed and clean and new. I felt like a sewer rat in comparison, so I scuttled as quickly as I could along the edges of the paths to the main entrance of Crystal Tower Number One. Close to, it looked like a coldfish bowl. They were something from the olden days—big glass bowls that coldfish swam in.
The hallway was made entirely of marble and my feet echoed as they clip-clipped towards the silver doors. The constaple had told me to head for the silver doors and to push the button next to them. When the doors opened I was to get in and to push the number 7. So, when the doors did open, I stepped inside the tiny room with mirrored walls and gently stubbed my finger on the number 7. The silver doors shut tight and the room started to shake a little. I felt as though I was getting heavier and I have to admit that a panicky feeling shot up my whole body and I wanted to get out of there as fast as I possibly could. Then, suddenly, I felt all light again, and before I knew it, the doors slid open and I was in a different place. I stepped out of the magic room and looked around. Some way farther down the corridor, a long, thin hand stuck out of a door and waved. I waved back and walked towards it.
* * *
“Let me look at you.” The woman stood in front of me and let her eyes zoom all over my face. “My goodness, you are pretty. Very pretty indeed for a Pb. In fact”—she squinted to try to take in the detail—“I would go so far as to say that you are probably even more beautiful than any of the Aus I know. Your hair. And your bone structure.” She grinned. “Pretty much perfect.”
The woman was quite old but her skin was as smooth as my own and her hair fell away from her unlined face in long bundles of thick gray. Her nose might or might not have been described by one of the other Aus as being a little bit Aubrey Heartburn or Elizabeth Tailor—popular choices amongst the old Aus, apparently—and the hands that straightened my shoulders as the eyes did their zooming were as soft and youthful as the rest of her.
“Tell me, what is your name?”
“Serendipity,” I whispered.
“Well, Serendipity”—one of her soft, youthful hands lowered to shake one of my own—“my name is Caritas. An honor to meet you. Are you hungry? You look hungry. I know I am.” She led me through to a large, bright room filled with things I’d never seen nor imagined possible. A screen with pictures moving across it sat on a wall; a vase filled with more flowers than I’d ever seen in one place before; porcelain figurines that looked so thin and delicate that if you breathed too near you might just break them. All of it lit from a hole in the ceiling. “I’ll order us some food, shall I? Anything in particular you’d like to have?”
“Er…” I didn’t understand.
“Oh, I’m so sorry. I was forgetting that Pbs have to survive on dinner pills. Fizz, chalk dust and a bit of dried milk powder. Not one of our Minister’s greatest ideas, I think.” She started tapping at a smaller screen sitting on a side table. “I’ll get a bit of everything.”
Within a couple of minutes, two Cus in a uniform I didn’t recognize came into the room carrying plate after plate of delicious-smelling food. They laid them out on a table next to a window and my stomach did a weird squelching in anticipation of what was to come. It was like a list of things I’d only ever dreamt about or heard about in stories. There were rashers of hot, smoked, salty bacon. Crispy bread rolls to rip apart with your fingers. Asparagus tips with butter—yes, butter! Cold whole strawberries with little green crowns and bowl upon bowl of thick whippled goat’s cream. Even the potatoes weren’t soggy and squished like the ones I’d always had before. These potatoes were drizzled with butter—yes, butter again—and spattered with herbs. Freshly grown herbs. The smell was delirious.
“Please.” She sat at one end of the table and offered the chair at the other end to me. “Sit. Help yourself.” I couldn’t think where to begin, so I forked a couple of rashers of bacon and a brown roll covered in seeds onto the plate in front of me. I wanted to take more but I thought it might look greedy. “Now. I believe you have something for me. Something of mine that you found.”
“Oh.” I pulled the telebracelet from one of my pockets and handed it across the table to her.
“Thank you. I must have dropped it during one of my little expeditions to the markets. Very clumsy of me.” She hooked the telebracelet around her wrist and pressed a button on it. It responded with a tiny peep. “There. Ownership recognition.” Miss Caritas wore large, heavy pearls in a chain about her neck and whenever she moved, the light in the room bounced off them. “Silly of me to drop it. And so very good of you to return it. I would have thought that a telebracelet could fetch a good price on the black market. Enough to keep you fed for a number of weeks. But”—she looked up at me as I stuffed soft, fluffy bread into my mouth—“you didn’t hold on to it. You brought it back. Try the strawberries,” she urged. “They’re genetically engineered, of course—grown in a warehouse somewhere south of the river.”
I picked one of them up by the crown and scooped it into the cream before biting it clean off into my mouth. It was sweet and wet and I quickly went back for another.
Miss Caritas smiled to herself, all the while her stunning blue eyes watching me. “So, Serendipity. Tell me something about yourself. Tell me about your family—your mother and your father. Where do you all live? What do you all do?”
“Afraid I don’t have any family,” I said, through a mouthful of cream. “My mama died recently and I’ve never known anything about my father. Mama never told me anything about him.”
“Oh, I am sorry—about your mother, I mean. Do you have any brothers or sisters?”
“No, miss. It’s just me.” I fed a floppy asparagus between my lips, suddenly guilty that my mama had never tasted such a thing. I looked out of the window. “Hope you don’t mind me saying so, Miss Caritas, but I’ve never seen grass as green as that before. Everywhere else in Lahn Dan it’s always brown.”
“The grass?” She laughed. “Oh, it’s not real. They wash it twice a week to keep it looking that way. In fact”—she leaned back in her chair and folded her arms around each other—“there’s very little around here that’s real. Much of it is fake or pretend.” For a passing moment she looked sad. “Fake doesn’t die, you see.”
On the screen flashed images of the Minister, und
ertaking some ceremonial duty or other. Miss Caritas saw me looking. “Would you like me to turn it off?”
I shook my head. “No. It’s alright.”
“It’s just another of the Minister’s many announcements. Nothing important.”
“I’ve never seen anything like it before.”
“Hmm.” She knifed some strange gooey golden stuff onto a chunk of the bread before offering it to me. “Honey?”
“Thank you.” I took it and pushed it into my mouth—it was the sweetest thing I’d ever tasted. She quickly prepared me another one.
“Good, isn’t it?”
“Hih his.” I spoke with my mouth full—something Mama always said I shouldn’t do. “Hih his goo.”
Miss Caritas tapped her fingers together in delight. “Wonderful.” She suddenly jumped up, the chair squeaking away behind her as she did so. “Come with me. Come on. I want to show you something.” She beckoned me through to another room as I swallowed the last of the bread and honey and wiped my sticky hands on the rough fabric of my trousers.
The room was dazzling. An enormous bed, probably about three or four times bigger than the one I’d recently started sleeping in, sat in one corner, its pillows and sheets puffed and fluffy and lovely. The walls were bright white with pictures and paintings dotted about the place. One of the pictures, I realized, was of Miss Caritas, all glamorous and charming, shaking the Minister’s hand. And along one wall were racks and racks of the most fabulous clothes you might ever see. It was as though I’d stepped out of the normal world and into a dream.
“Here.” She pulled some of the clothes off one of the racks and threw them onto the bed. Satin and silk. Chiffon and velvet. Even the words sounded beautiful. “This one. And this one … This one too. What about this lace one here?”
“They’re incredible.”
“Those ones would probably fit you. Shall we try them on?”
A Whisper of Horses Page 3