by Anna Day
The freckly controller shakes his head and tuts like he’s disappointed. “Gem spies are really slipping.”
“She’s not a Gem,” I say. My voice sounds tinny and unreal.
“Yeah, leave her alone,” Katie says.
The freckly controller looks at me, then Nate, then Katie. “I guess traveling with Imps is good thinking, helps her to blend in.”
“She’s not a Gem,” Nate repeats, all the strength stripped away.
“Pipe down, young ’un. You may be an Imp, but if you’re helping a Gem, that makes you as bad as them.”
“What about this one?” Terry thrusts a finger into my sternum. “She’s verging on Gem material—she’s pretty enough.”
The freckly controller looks at me long and hard. “No cheekbone enhancements, her lips are too thin, they would have plumped those, and she has a mole on her cheek, they would have sliced that off.”
I don’t know whether to feel offended or relieved.
He leans into me. “Don’t look so miserable, who’d want to be a stinking Gem?” His breath smells like damp wood and gin. Suddenly, he grabs my hair and yanks my head back—it feels like my scalp is going to rip away from my skull. My mouth automatically lolls open and he runs a finger over my teeth—it feels like a slug and can’t taste much better. I hear my friends shout their objections, but the controller ignores them.
He shakes his head. “Clean but wonky—definitely Imp.”
Terry does the same to Alice so she can move only her eyes, which swivel in their sockets, large and engorged with fear.
More Imps wander over. A couple stand behind Katie and Nate, their hands pushing down on their shoulders.
Terry cups Alice’s chin, almost tenderly. “Her teeth are perfect.”
They exchange a knowing nod and haul us from our chairs. I only reach the freckly controller’s chest. He bursts out laughing. “I think we can be confident this one’s Imp, gotta love a midget.” He lets me drop to the floor. I land awkwardly, knocking my chair so it clatters across the floor. Pain shoots up my tailbone. Nate tries to help me, but a burly Imp still leans on his shoulders.
I turn to see Alice, taller than Terry even without her heels.
Terry smiles this long, sick smile, like he knows he’s won. “Well, well, almost six foot, I’d say. Do you know how rare that is without the help of a little genetic tweaking?”
There’s an awful pause. I think Alice opens her mouth to say something, but the words never emerge, because in a sudden burst of movement the two controllers tear her overalls away from her body, revealing her slender limbs and her Comic-Con outfit. A piece of dress gets ripped and hangs from the sphere of her shoulder like a long blue tongue.
“Leave her alone, you bastards!” Katie shouts.
Alice tries to lift the tongue back into position, a look of horror contorting her features.
“The final test,” Terry says, gripping her arms. “You wear overalls, you reckon you’re a slave, then you should be numbered.”
All Imps who work in the Pastures have a slave tattoo, a number on their backs that denotes their place of work. It also means only Imps who’ve been vetted for strength and health are allowed into the Pastures. And of course it means the Gems don’t need to use their names—what better way to deny their humanity. I hold Alice’s gaze for a second. We both know she’s in for it now. The controller lunges toward her and rips down the back of the dress, revealing the blank canvas of skin where her tattoo should rest.
I try to stand, try to reach her, but my arms knock awkwardly against the fallen chair. I hear a loud bang as a door flies open and smacks the wall. Matthew comes storming from behind the bar, a bandage crisscrossing his shoulder, blood already seeping through. “Get off ’em, you shits.” He thumps and kicks his way toward us.
The Imps block his path and I just see a blur of fists and shoes. Everyone in the bar seems to wade in—an explosion of sound and movement. Hands pulling, voices shouting, knees jabbing. I feel a clap across my back, pain wraps around me like a pair of hot arms. I scrabble to my hands and knees and start to crawl toward Alice. Something hard plows into my ear, a boot, I think. Everything goes blurry and it feels like I’m crawling through water. But I don’t stop. I reach Alice’s ankles and pull on her calves with all my might. She crouches next to me and quickly, almost desperately, rests her cheek against mine.
“We have to get you out of here.” I deliver the words straight into her ear.
She doesn’t reply, but we start to crawl toward the door. An Imp falls in front of me, nose caved in. He tries to shout, but I shove my hand in his face, dump my knee on his rib, and just climb straight over him. And somehow, through the confusion, I clamber to my feet and blunder toward the door, Alice beside me.
“Stop them,” someone shouts.
“Nate!” I scream. “Katie!”
“I’m here.” Katie emerges from a blur of limbs and flounders toward us, her red bob now just a pile of mats stuck to her head.
I grab her hand. “Nate?” I ask, pulling her toward me.
She shakes her head, her eyes wide and startled.
“Nate,” I scream, trying to peer through the movement. “Nate.” But I see only angry faces storming toward us.
Alice grabs my shoulder. “We’ve got to run.”
I feel torn, straight down the middle. Nate or my friends. But something in Katie’s eyes and the rip in Alice’s dress forces me to prioritize them. We burst into daylight and run and run and run. My ear burns and my back screams, but my legs know what to do. One foot in front of the other. And all I can think—arms pumping, fists clenched, lungs stinging—is, I left Nate behind.
WE PAUSE FOR a moment, around the back of some terraced houses, gulping the air and wiping the sweat from our eyes.
“She went that way.”
The boot must have damaged my ear because the words kind of slosh together, but I recognize the controller’s nasal tone all the same. We start to run, ducking beneath clotheslines, jumping over mounds of rubbish. Alice’s long legs carry her farther ahead, and for a moment I think she may leave us behind.
“Alice,” I manage to say.
She slows and we reach her side.
“We can’t get too far from Nate,” I say.
“We won’t, don’t worry, Vi,” Katie says. “We’ll go back for him in a sec.”
I hear the controller’s voice again. “Come on, lads, let’s flush ’em out.” He’s louder, closer.
I frantically scan the alleyway for a hiding place. That’s when I see it—the bricked-up doorway from canon, the one Rose, Saskia, and Matthew hid in, a mess of crumbling bricks and pitted mortar. I catch Alice’s eye and we share an unspoken moment of understanding. We begin to pull away the bricks, disturbing a nest of wood lice. Katie drops to her knees and begins to help.
“They came down here,” someone shouts.
I hear Alice gasp, but we don’t stop, panic driving us on.
Terry’s voice sails over the rising stamp of boots. “Come on, you useless bunch of cretins.”
We cram our bodies into the hole, pulling back the bricks with frantic, urgent movements.
I hold my breath and pull my knees toward my body with trembling, sticky hands. The ground vibrates as the Imps pass. The air stirs against my cheek, and I watch my hands turn pink to black to pink as their shadows block out the light. Only when my hands stay pink for a while do I start to breathe again.
“They’ve gone,” Alice whispers. “Just like in canon.”
“What do you mean?” Katie asks.
“Rose, Saskia, and Matthew hid in this very doorway to avoid the same lynch mob,” I say.
“That’s weird,” Katie says.
I nod. “You’re right. It’s like the original plot seems to be …” I pause, searching for the right words. “Haunting us.”
Alice lets her head slump back against the wall. “How the hell did we end up in this place?” In the shadow of the bricked-up door
way, I can just make out the tears glistening on her cheeks.
“It’s insane.” I shift my weight so our knees knock together.
“I want to go home,” Alice says.
“Me, too,” Katie says.
I wish we could just stay in this doorway forever, huddled and warm and safe.
Alice wipes her nose with the back of her hand, something I’ve never seen her do. “It’s funny, you know,” she says. “I used to wish and wish I could be inside The Gallows Dance … but now we’re actually here and”—her voice breaks from the weight of the emotion—“it really sucks.” She makes this soft, rhythmic noise, halfway between a laugh and a sob.
“At least you’ve read the book and seen the film,” Katie says. “Why couldn’t we be in Narnia or Neverland or … or … or A Midsummer Night’s Dream? At least then I’d know what was going on.”
I don’t reply. I focus instead on the pain—my head, my ear, my back. It kind of distracts me. We listen to something drip nearby, a distant sound of chatter, the mew of a cat.
“We need to find Nate,” I finally say. I know we probably lured every angry Imp away from the tavern, but all the same, I won’t feel happy until I’ve seen him alive and well.
Alice nods. “Give it a second longer, though, yeah? Make sure those bastards have definitely gone. I think Rose waited for an hour or so.”
I shake my head. “He’s only fourteen …”
Katie squeezes my leg. “But he’s super-smart, he can think his way out of anything.”
We share a sad smile and begin to push the bricks away. We emerge from the doorway, stubbing our toes on the rubble, upsetting the brick dust. It catches in my throat and I stifle a cough.
Maybe we didn’t wait long enough, maybe it was the cough, but somebody spots us.
“There they are,” an Imp shouts. “I told you they came this way.”
My stomach flips. But we don’t pause, we don’t even turn to look, we just start running again. We skid around the corner to see more Imps; an angry, ugly wall. They close in on us, pinning us in, rounding us up, and I spin faster and faster as I realize walls surround us, of both flesh and brick. I grab Alice and Katie by the hands and balance my weight on my toes, ready to move at any opportunity.
The freckly controller smiles—long and slow—like he knows how scared we must be. “Well, look what we have here.”
I don’t respond, too scared to speak. Beneath my tunic, my skin bristles.
“A Gem and her friends—two Imp traitors.”
I open my mouth, but only a whimper escapes.
“For God’s sake,” Katie shouts, “she’s not a Gem.”
The controller ignores her. “You know what we do to Gems and traitors?”
Another Imp cries from the back of the group, “String ’em up.”
In the film and the book, the Imps are the goodies, the ones you root for, so it’s strange to be at the receiving end of their hatred. I wish I could explain this to them, sit them all down and show them the film, their film, make them see that this isn’t real. None of this is real.
And suddenly I don’t feel the heat in my ear or the pain in my back, I don’t think about my friends’ hands, slicked with sweat and cold in my own. I just feel my whole body melt on the spot. My legs cave, my lungs stop gasping, and my heart stops squeezing. I hit the ground like a dead weight.
“She’s beaten us to it.”
“Can you hang a traitor if they’re already dead?”
“You can never kill a traitor too many times.”
I hear Alice’s voice, like she’s talking through cloth. “Violet, wake up, Violet.”
Colors dissipate, shapes fragment, sounds ebb to nothing.
I sail toward the clouds, toes pointed, legs stretched. I reach the peak of an invisible arc and glance down—the trampoline oscillates like a magenta sheet pulled between the trees. Mum laughs and Nate claps his hands. Jump, Violet, jump. We won’t let you fall. And then I hear a voice, muffled, like it’s moving through water. It belongs to Dad. That’s it, Violet, come on, baby girl. Wake up, wake up. My eyelids flicker, the effort of opening them feels like lifting a massive weight. And I can smell something clean, a lack of rotten bird, something crisp and medicinal. But the trees dissolve, the rotten bird returns, and Dad’s voice turns to a scream. Alice’s scream.
The grogginess lifts, and I realize I’m sailing toward the clouds not because of a trampoline, but because of the hands that have seized my limbs, heaving me upright. The earth vanishes, and I momentarily hang in the air like a doll. Then, my heels smack the ground and bounce off the cobbles as the Imps drag me down an alley. The strip of sky above opens into an expanse of washed-out blue. I’m back on a main street again.
I turn my head and catch a glimpse of Alice, hoisted high above the heads of several Imps, her face twisted with fear. I hear shouts and jeers. Judging from the increase in volume, quite a crowd is gathering. Hands grab at my skin. We’ve caught us a Gem. We’ve caught us a traitor. String ’em up. Make ’em pay. They flip me onto my stomach and I lose sight of her.
“Alice!” I scream to the cobbles.
The Imps ignore me and lug me toward a barrel. Alice has already been dumped on one; she stands tall, her chin stretched high, probably because she’s afraid of falling, but I can’t help thinking how she looks like the tiny fairy from my music box. I half expect her to start spinning. And then I realize, with a bolt of horror, that she stands so tall because of the noose around her neck.
Before I can shout or scream or cry, I feel a rope slip over my own head and tighten beneath my chin. I try to lift my hands—to pull, to claw, to break free—but at some point the Imps must have bound my wrists together. This sends another shot of panic through me, as though the use of my hands could somehow save me.
The Imps plant my feet onto a barrel next to Alice and pivot me into an upright position. The other end of the rope whistles past my ear like a bullet, arcing over a battered streetlamp and whacking the ground. Then it’s Katie’s turn. I watch them jostle her onto another barrel, her rope sailing after mine. I look down on the hateful faces and lock my legs, trying desperately to stand—I know that slumping will be the death of me. But the rope tightens against my throat, cutting off my air supply, and can only get tighter. I close my eyes and wonder if the noose will prevent the vomit rising any farther. I wish my hands weren’t bound, just so I could hold my friends’ hands one last time.
An Imp with a hooked nose steps forward and raises his voice. “Silence, fellow Gems, this is your president talking.”
The crowd laughs and claps.
The president slices his hands through the air. The crowd falls silent.
“Welcome to the Gallows Dance.” He purposefully rounds his vowels, inflating his chest like a cockerel ready to crow. “We are here to witness the hanging of these … Imps.”
“What are their crimes?” someone shouts.
He looks to the sky as though communicating with a higher power. “Their crimes are scraping an existence, feeding their families, contending with your disgust, your persecution, your sexual advances.”
The crowd makes jeering noises. One Imp lunges forward and tugs at my tunic. The barrel wobbles and I feel my body lurch against the rope.
The president laughs. “Their crime is poverty.”
I try to breathe, but the air is thin. My legs weaken with every passing second.
“Their crime is disease.”
It’s strange what goes through your mind when you’re about to die. But my final thought goes something like this: What a shame to come all this way and not meet Willow.
“Their crime is starvation.” The president sweeps his hands in a giant circle. “Their crime is … holding up a mirror to the ugliness within.”
The crowd bursts into life, laughing and braying.
The president raises his hands in surrender. “But wait. These are no Imps. They are wolves in sheep’s clothing.” He points an accusatory
finger at Alice. “This one is a stinking Gem.” He turns his attention to me and Katie. “And these two … God knows what they are. Imp by birth, but Gem by allegiance. Traitors through and through.”
“She’s not a Gem,” Katie rasps. “She got a C on her math exam and she had a cold last week.”
“Shut it, traitor,” the president says.
I stare into his eyes, searching for a morsel of compassion. The compassion that shines from the eyes of the Imps in the film. But I see only loathing.
He sneers. “So what should we do with our stinking Gem and her stinking sidekicks?”
A chant begins, soft at first, but gathering strength with every word. Make ’em dance. Make ’em dance. Make ’em dance.
The president bows and the chanting stops. This is it. We’re about to die. The Imps remove their hands from my body and I teeter on the edge of the barrel. Somehow, I manage to squeeze some words past the rope. “We just want to go home.”
The controller laughs. “Tell someone who cares.” He looks at the barrel and pulls back his boot.
“STOP!” This voice doesn’t travel through water. It’s strong and clear and hangs in the air like thistledown.
I squint into the crowd and see an Imp pushing his way to the front, his strong face set with determination. A shock of black hair spills onto his porcelain skin, and even from afar, blurred by movement, I can tell he owns the palest blue eyes I’ve ever seen.
“For God’s sake.” He strides right up to us, his strong nose raised high. “What the hell do you think you’re doing? I know these girls, they’re Imps. All of ’em. You’re about to hang three Imps.”
The freckly controller runs an anxious hand across his brow. “The little ones are, but the tall one, she’s Gem, for sure.”
“She’s definitely Imp, I grew up across the street from her. She’s always been bloody gorgeous. I keep telling her, you need to break your nose or summit, or one day you’re gonna end up flipping on a barrel like a fish.”