by Helen Brain
She thinks her bedroom is wonderful – it’s the room in the slave lodge that Jasmine complained about when she first arrived. But in Alexia’s eyes it couldn’t be better, and she can’t believe it’s all hers. Even when we end up back in my room, she isn’t bitter about the difference between her room and mine.
She climbs on my bed and hugs one of my pillows, beaming at me. “Can I ask you something?” she says, looking at me eagerly.
“Sure. Anything.”
“Is it true you’re part goddess? That’s what Leonid heard.”
I turn away, pretending to tidy the dressing table so she won’t see me blush. It sounds so pretentious. What must she and her mother think of me? No wonder Leonid hates me so much.
“Is it? Is that why you’re so beautiful?”
I snort. “No one’s ever called me beautiful.”
“Oh, but you are. You’re so tall and elegant, and I’d die to have hair like yours – it’s the colour of fire. And not only are you the richest person in the world – you’ve got this special talent to make plants grow extra fast. That’s what Leonid says.”
“Leonid says that?” I turn to see if she’s laughing at me. But she looks like she means every word. “I thought he hated me.”
“Oh, he’s grumpy most of the time. Mom says he’s like the cloud that covers the mountain when the southeaster blows. But is it true? Are you part goddess?”
“Wait here.” I fetch the Book of the Goddess from the library and pass it to her. “It’s all in here. Apparently this mark on my hand is the Goddess’ sign – that’s what Aunty Figgy says. I don’t feel like a goddess. I’m scared most of the time, and completely out of my depth, and worried …”
I’m about to add “about Micah”, but I stop. I haven’t told anyone that I saw him hiding behind the rain tanks with a beautiful girl.
“I don’t even know if anything in the book is actually true,” I say as she pages through it. “But apparently the earth goddess, Theia, was my great-great-a-million-times-grandmother.”
Alexia looks up from the page and back at me with huge eyes. “Can I borrow this? Can I read it?”
“Sure. If you’re really careful. But don’t take it away. Read it in the library – Aunty Figgy will kill me if it gets damaged.”
She bounces off the bed and gives me a peck on the cheek. “Thank you for letting me work here – you’re the best sister a girl could ask for.”
And she goes off to settle on the sofa in the library to read the Book of the Goddess from cover to cover.
“AS YOU KNOW, the general is assigning fifty girls to work on the farm. I have to give him the list tomorrow afternoon –” I begin.
We’re all there, all nine of us, crowded around the battered wooden table in the farm office. Seeing that everyone thinks that I’m bossy, I’m trying to be more democratic and have called a meeting.
Before I’ve even finished speaking I’m being told what to do by eight different voices.
“We need help in the kitchen if we’re cooking for fifty people,” Aunt Figgy says over the rumpus. I nod to Shorty, who’s writing a list: one extra cook.
“Wait, I thought I was helping with the cooking,” Alexia says.
“Get one anyway,” Fez suggests. “We can sort it out later. And you’re going to need some stonemasons.”
“Stonemasons?” Jasmine scoffs. “What, Leonid and I aren’t good enough anymore? Didn’t we do a good job on the gable?” She and Leonid scowl as though we’ve all insulted them.
“Don’t take it personally,” Fez says. “The extra produce will mean more wagonloads, which means more wear and tear on the road. We’ll need someone to fix it.”
“I don’t care who you get,” Letti interrupts, stroking Shorty’s fluffy head, “as long as it’s not that girl Watheeqah. She’s a miserable cow, and she’s always trying to get out of her work.” Letti starts telling Shorty about the time Watheeqah told Ma Goodson she was sick when she wasn’t, and Letti had to work a double shift.
“I think we should choose the most easy-going girls,” I say. “The ones who do as they’re asked and never cause trouble.”
Once again they start shouting me down. I take a step back but I’m almost up against the wall, and they’ve got me trapped, all arguing and insisting and trying to force me to listen.
“One at a time,” I beg. “Please just talk one at a time.”
It makes no difference. Alexia and Leonid are now fighting because she’s told him to stop bullying me; Jasmine is shouting into my ear warning me about Bonita and Vanessa, as if I’d even think of choosing them; and Micah is shaking my shoulder to get my attention. When I take another small step back, Jasmine bumps against me, and I reach out towards the grandfather clock to steady myself.
Instantly, a strange woman is standing there. She’s sort of cloudy and transparent, but her voice is clear enough in my head, and I don’t like what she has to say.
Oh, for heaven’s sake, she sighs. Don’t be such a little mouse. Take charge, girl. Take charge.
I blink hard and she’s gone again, but her words sting. Don’t be such a little mouse …
“Be quiet, all of you!” I shout. “Everyone just be quiet!”
There’s instant silence.
“Thank you. Now let’s start with the most important decision. Leonid, how many girls do we need to work in the fields?”
He and Jasmine discuss it briefly. He adds up on his fingers and then he nods and says, “Thirty, minimum. Plus someone to work with the carthorses.”
“Write that down, Shorty,” I say. “Any suggestions as to who the thirty should be? They have to be from the growing chamber, obviously.”
“Just get the biggest and strongest,” Leonid says. “It’s hard work in the fields.”
Letti starts telling him that he knows nothing about how hard everyone works in the colony, but I hold up my hand, and to my surprise, she stops.
“Right. Next item,” I say sternly. “What else do we need to consider?”
“You’ll need to get the produce to market,” Fez says. “So you’ll need someone to sew sacks. And a weaver.”
“They’ll have to be the same person,” I say. “Shorty, please write that down.”
By the end of the meeting we’ve agreed on additional stonemasons and carpenters to help with maintenance around the farm, four poultry workers, and two girls to work with the goats and pigs.
Then Micah says, “We should get some engineers. The only person who can fix anything around here is Leonid, and it’s good to have backup. What about Jaline?”
“No way!” I exclaim, thinking back to life in the colony. “She’s trouble.”
“Jaline can fix any piece of machinery,” he argues. “She’s moody but she’s brilliant.”
“She’s more than moody. She’s absolutely impossible,” Jasmine says. “I swear that girl hates everyone and everything.”
“Robyn is a better choice,” Fez says. “She’s easy to work with.”
“But she’s not half the engineer Jaline is,” Micah insists.
I sigh. Now everyone is arguing about the engineers, even Leonid and Shorty, who’ve never met either of them. I have to regain control.
I bang on the side of the filing cabinet. “Okay! Let’s take a vote. Everyone who wants Jaline, put up your hand.”
Only Micah’s hand goes up, so I quickly put mine up in solidarity with him. Alexia sees, and puts hers up as well.
“So that’s three people in favour, six against,” Fez says.
I hope Micah sees it wasn’t my decision. That I’m just being fair.
“So,” I say, “I’ll have to go into the bunker tomorrow morning to select the girls. Who’s coming with me?”
“No way.” Jasmine shakes her head. “I’m not going back there. And Leonid’s not going either.”
“You definitely mustn’t go,” Shorty says to Letti. “It might be a trap. You might never come out.”
Fez agrees. “I�
��m not risking it, sorry. I’ll be thinking of you, but I’m staying here.”
I look at Micah, sure he’ll come with me, but he hesitates. “Sorry. Too risky for me.”
I’m aghast. Not a single person will go with me!
But Alexia smiles. “I’ll go,” she says. “I’m your sister.”
THAT EVENING, MICAH and I are bringing in the horses for the night. The weather is changing – there’s a nip in the air and the wind is picking up.
“Can you smell the rain?” he asks as we fetch the halters from the fence and open the gate into the meadow. “When I first came out of the bunker, I thought it was amazing that you could smell rain.”
I sniff the air, thinking about going back underground to that gloomy bunker where you never see the sky. I’m not looking forward to it, but at least Alexia will be with me.
“Where did you live when you escaped from the bunker?” I ask.
In my head I’m seeing him sharing that faded red cottage with Samantha-Lee and her adopted family.
“Here and there. First with Chad Loubscher, then I moved to Silvermine Island and lived in the caves there. I was on the mainland too for a while, in a training camp.”
“A training camp? What kind of training?”
He pats Ponto, the big black stallion, on his neck. “Come on, boy,” he says, ignoring me.
I hear my voice becoming petulant and I hate myself for it. “Micah, what kind of camp?”
“Ebba,” he says, grabbing the halter from the fencepost, “I can’t tell you everything I do. It’s a security risk.”
I bite my lip, feeling slapped into place. He thinks I’m going to blab about him to the council. But I can’t stop seeing him with Samantha-Lee. Why did she kiss him? Why is he downplaying the time he lived with them? I know I should keep my mouth shut, but I can’t. I have to know.
“I saw you with someone – a girl. Sa … Samantha-Lee,”
He lifts one eyebrow, his body stiffening. “And?”
I shuffle my feet like a stupid child. It seems so petty now. I should just have kept quiet. But I’ve started, and the words are burning me up. “And … I saw her kiss you.”
“For god’s sake, Ebba,” he snaps, throwing the halter over Ponto’s neck. “Don’t start getting all jealous on me now. If there’s one thing I can’t stand it’s a paranoid girlfriend. Samantha-Lee’s my friend, alright? She’s like my sister. And she works with me for the resistance.”
“Oh.”
He hands me the reins. “Take him in. I’ll fetch the others.”
My stomach is churning as I lead the big horse down the driveway to the coach house.
“You’re getting brave, hey, Miss Ebba,” Shorty beams as he opens the stable door. “Just a few months ago you were scared stupid of the horses.”
I’m not afraid of horses anymore anymore, but I’m still scared stupid over other things. Like losing my boyfriend, and going back into the gloomy, claustrophobic bunker.
CHAPTER 6
The next morning, Aunty Figgy checks my shoulder and pronounces it healed.
“You needn’t wear the sling,” she says untying the knot behind my neck and letting my arm free for the first time in weeks. “But be careful. No sudden movements, and don’t lift anything heavy.”
I’m nervous about going to the bunker and her fussing is irritating. I stroke Isi in her basket, trying to absorb her calmness. “I wish you were coming with me, girl,” I murmur, and she thumps her tail on the floor. Her amber eyes are warm and relaxed as she looks up at me.
“I made you some sandwiches for breakfast,” Aunty Figgy says. “And there’s a flask of herb tea for the pain, if it starts to hurt from the drive. Now you look after Ebba, Alexia. Make sure she comes back safely.”
Leonid is ready with the carriage and we set off down the driveway, Isi running alongside until we reach the farm gates. The island looks magical in the early morning light. The sea shimmers cobalt blue, and the mountains are almost pink.
Alexia is fascinated by everything we pass – the pointed roofs of the citizen’s villages, the shrine where we used to worship, the offices.
“I’ve heard so much about it,” she says, gazing out of the window. “I never thought I’d see it for myself. To think that our dad’s family once lived in a big house like this,” she says as we pass the ruins of a house, the roof long gone, the walls collapsing into piles of bricks. “Imagine, they drove cars. It would have taken half an hour to drive this far from Greenhaven.”
We pass Devil’s Peak and now the full stretch of Table Mountain lies before us, the flat top covered with the white tablecloth of cloud.
“Did you really live inside there?” Alexia asks, staring up at it in awe. “Your whole life, and you never knew your family? Not a single member?”
“I didn’t even know my surname. Jasmine, Letti and Fez were my family.”
At last the road begins to zigzag up the mountainside towards Cableway Road. The horses are taking strain on the steep incline, and we jump down and walk next to them.
“My mom told me that there used to be a cable car,” she tells me. “It took people from here to the top of the mountain in a tiny cabin hanging on wires.”
I look up at the huge wall of pink-grey rock towering above us, imagining dangling above the cliff on a cable wire that could break any minute.
“I wouldn’t want to go up in something like that,” Alexia continues. “Not unless you went with me. You’re so brave, Ebba.”
Doesn’t she see that I feel like I’m dangling over a cliff most of the time, held by just a thin cable that could break any minute?
Leonid stops the carriage at the bottom of the flight of stairs – the same stairs I walked down with Mr Frye the morning I was elevated out of the colony. I was terrified by the feel of the wind, the height of the drop, the open space. For a moment I’m overwhelmed by that memory . . . and by the fear. But only for a moment, because I realise suddenly that none of these things frighten me anymore. I’ve moved on.
“Come on,” I say, and start climbing. “Let’s go.”
Maybe I am brave. Maybe I am the girl Alexia thinks I am.
MAJOR ZUNGU IS waiting at the entrance to the colony, in the glass-fronted room from which I first saw the city and the ocean. Where I first realised that they’d lied to us our whole lives. I linger at the window now, gazing at the island extending into the sea, at the mainland mountains purple on the horizon, and I can hardly bear to go back into the gloomy underworld that was my home for so long.
Alexia nudges me. “Come on. Let’s get the job done so we can go home.”
“We’ll start with the livestock level, Major,” I say.
Major Zungu raps out an order to the soldiers standing at attention next to the huge wheel that operates the elevator, and the door opens. I have to force myself to step inside the small wooden box. Major Zungu’s bulk fills most of the space, and Alexia and I are squashed against the walls. When the soldiers close the door, it’s pitch dark. I grab Alexia’s arm, my body shaking as we start moving downwards. The major could reach over with those huge hands and strangle us, and we’d have no way to escape. I shrink into the corner, my nostrils filled with the smell of his sweat and power.
At last the lift jolts to a stop, the door opens and we step out into the bunker.
It’s worse than I remember: stone walls, floors, ceilings. The light is dim and gloomy, the air stale with the smell of the animals kept on this level. There’s no sun, no wind. It’s like being buried alive.
When I lived here, everyone looked down on me because I was the girl with the red hair and no history. Their parents were all high achievers: Letti and Fez’s mom was a professor of mathematics, Jasmine’s mom had won sixteen Olympic gold medals for gymnastics and Micah’s parents were famous architects. All two thousand kids were genetically gifted, and then there was me: The youngest in the colony, who came from who knew where?
And now I have the power to choose who to s
ave, who to provide with a lifetime of sunshine and sky and fresh air.
I can hear the chickens clucking in the distance. We start walking, and around the corner are the banks of cages; the first thing that strikes me is how skinny and ragged the chickens are. Poor chickens that have never known what it’s like to scratch in the dirt for worms.
The second thing I notice is that nobody is surprised to see me. The six or seven boys cleaning the cages barely look up as we enter. Did they know we were coming? Or are they just terrified of the major? They keep on sweeping the chicken droppings into a pile to be sent down the chute to the compost heap on the second-lowest level. Like the chickens, the boys are much thinner than they were when I left the colony four months ago.
In the next section, some Year Twos are washing eggs and packing them into plastic trays. They’re listless and slow, and there’s none of the chatter that used to fill the room. One looks up at me and gives a half smile. It’s Isabella, the girl who knows the most about poultry farming. If she can get eggs from these miserable chickens, she’ll do wonders with the Greenhaven hens. And I’d like to see her with colour in her cheeks again.
Alexia consults Shorty’s neatly written list. “We need four poultry workers,” she says.
“Isabella,” I say, “would you like to come with me?”
Her face lights up and she’s filled with a brief flare of energy. “Oh, thank you, thank you. When they told us you were coming, we were so excited. I can’t believe it’s safe to go up above … I can’t wait to see the world. Will I be able to find my family, do you think?”
How do I tell her that Table Island only has about a thousand citizens, and none of them sent their kids to the colony? How do I tell her that she and all the colonists have been betrayed and abused? I can’t tell her here, not in front of the major. So I just smile and nod and say, “You’ll be working with my poultry. Can you choose another three girls to come too?”