by Sarah Govett
‘Noa?’
‘It’s…’ My voice faded away.
‘Don’t say it’s nothing. I know you.’
‘I just keep seeing those people dying. I keep hearing their screams.’
‘I know. It was awful. They were butchered. But that’s on the Ministry. That’s not on you.’
‘But you don’t understand. It is on me. Me is precisely who it’s on!’
Jack said nothing but just looked at me with his open face. Every freckle a patient question mark. Waiting. Not judging.
‘I told them, Jack,’ I whispered. ‘Back when me and Raf went to trade at the settlement, I told them we killed the Raiders and then they guessed we were breaking out and that’s why they followed us and climbed the Fence and were shot to pieces.’ It came out in a rush. My guts spilled in a pile on the floor.
Jack wrapped his arms round me and squeezed.
In a while he spoke again. His voice quiet and thoughtful.
‘If they hadn’t followed us, if they hadn’t climbed the Fence after us, we’d all be dead.’
It didn’t come out as a platitude, designed to comfort me, but a statement of fact.
‘I’ve been going over it,’ he continued. ‘The only reason the soldiers didn’t search for us more is that they thought they’d killed everyone. Think about it. If they’d responded to the siren and found a hole in the Fence, do you think they’d have stopped until they found the people? The Fish who’d escaped? Us? The settlers lives weren’t in vain. Our mission would have failed without them.’
‘But… But…’ I stammered. ‘How can we claim our lives are more important than theirs? Our mission more important than sixty other people?’
‘We can’t claim that. I’m not saying that.’
I was about to crumple into myself again when Jack put his hands on my shoulders, pushing them back, squaring out my frame and letting the energy back in.
‘You’ll get through this. We all will. We’ve done bad things. We’ll probably keep on doing bad things. But the alternative is giving up and we can’t give up. Too many people have died to get us where we are. We owe them, Noa. We owe them.’
And then he leant in and planted a single kiss on my lips.
We walked back to camp without talking.
It was as if the kiss hadn’t happened.
Jack didn’t mention it.
I didn’t mention it.
Had I had a weird low blood-sugar moment and just invented the whole thing?
But then I remembered the feel of his lips brushing against mine. The roughness of his chin.
It had happened.
The question was what to do about it.
I tried to rationalise everything. Dissect it as if it was some plotline on a TV show. It wasn’t exactly a full-on snog. Our mouths had been totally closed. It was the sort of kiss you might give a friend or a cousin if you came from one of those cool, passionate Latin families where everything is accompanied by hand gestures and drama. But the thing is, I didn’t. And Jack certainly didn’t. His mum’s hands and mouth were surgically attached to a wine glass and moving them around would have risked spilling the precious contents. And if it was just a friendly ‘comfort’ kiss, why had my heart beat a little faster than normal? It wasn’t the crazy fireworks that there’d been for my first kiss with Raf, but maybe nothing’s like that first kiss, that first boy. All I knew was that my arms had wanted to wrap themselves around Jack’s chest. To feel his solidity. His strength. That can’t happen in cool, passionate Latin families every time they kissed a friend or a cousin or they’d be having heart attacks left right and centre and lots of deformed babies as a result of incest.
I kept sneaking side glances at Jack but he seemed undisturbed, normal. Maybe it hadn’t meant anything at all to him. Maybe it was some nothing-y rebound thing after Megan. Or maybe, just as bad, maybe he had been going to go in for a full-on snog and got put off by something. I pretended to yawn but was really just testing my breath. It seemed fine. Not super grim or anything. I had to think about something else or I was going to scramble my brain. What went well with mushrooms? Garlic. JACK. YOU KISSED JACK. Maybe we’d find some wild garlic down another row of panels. YOU KISSED JACK. Shut up brain! YOU KISSED JACK AND YOU CHEATED ON RAF.
This internal fight – me against my brain – went on like this until we were back at camp. Everyone was awake again and Ella and Lee had returned too. Raf was signalling me over with his eyes, but my feet stayed put. I wasn’t ready to face him now. To tell him … I hadn’t even thought about what I would or wouldn’t tell him. Technically, it wasn’t my fault. Jack had kissed me. But I hadn’t moved away, had I? And, anyway, this wasn’t about technicalities. This wasn’t some court of law. This was about Raf and me and him being weird and me screwing everything up.
Nell was a released spring of energy and bounced over to check out our haul and, in an attempt to cover up any weirdness, I started talking weirdly (good one, Noa) in overdrive about finding the mushrooms and how different they all looked and how amazing they all were. Nell looked at me like maybe I’d had a bit too much sun and then started examining the mushrooms, separating them out using a stick.
By now the others were looking on too, drawn by the noise.
‘Successful trip?’ Raf’s voice from the edge. I turned to look at him. Eyes blue and green, but lined with red, shining through dishevelled hair. What had I done? He was wearing a smile but I could see the pain beneath. A bit of me crumbled.
‘Very successful, thanks, mate,’ Jack replied.
Jack never calls Raf ‘mate’. Oh no. Oh no. Please don’t let it all kick off.
Ella unwittingly came to the rescue.
‘Why are you taking out those ones, Nell?’ she asked, pointing at the umbrella mushrooms Nell was putting to one side.
‘These ones?’ Nell replied with a laugh. ‘Back at Ararat we called them Devil Clouds. They’re poisonous. Really poisonous. One bite and…’ Nell mimed a finger slicing her neck. She may not have had much in the way of schooling, but she knew how to survive, which it turns out is actually far more useful than trigonometry.
Jack and my faces fell. Provider to poisoner in one wrong pluck.
‘Noa,’ Raf said with a half-grin, channelling wolf but producing injured dog. He was trying to apologise. Trying in every way he knew how. ‘Are you and Jack trying to kill me here?’
There’s that phrase: hiding in plain sight. It’s how famous people go around unnoticed if they just wear a cap and don’t have a million bodyguards in sunglasses shadowing their every move. If you see them, you just think – there goes a slightly above averagely attractive short person. I guess that’s what the Server was doing, minus the attractive and short bit. The word, the idea –SERVER – had always had this air of mystery, of impenetrability, to it. The place where magical uploads that made other people clever were stored before being winged through the ether to pupils’ Scribes, the personal computers they took home with them. (This obviously before I realised the uploads were actually evil brainwashing devices that turned people into robots.) As Megan had confirmed, no one in the Opposition knew where it was. The Server made you think of high fences, machine-gun towers, a shroud of overgrown brambles and a sleeping princess. But the reality was much more mundane. It was sat on the crest of a minor hill in the middle of a solar field, with a single mast that scratched the sky. Probably no one in the Opposition had found it because no one had come this far or, if they had, they’d thought it was just another squat brick building, nothing special. And that’s what the Ministry had been counting on.
We didn’t know exactly what we’d be facing. When Ella and Aunty Vicki had been here unintentionally, as a pit stop on their way to the Arable Lands, they’d been found by soldiers here. We couldn’t see any now but that could mean that they were inside or it might be that they only station soldiers around the time of the TAA as that’s when people try to run. To escape the Cities. We had to assume the worst. Assume
there were soldiers. Assume they were watching. We had to view our approach as an attack.
Even when a hill’s more mole than mountain, attacking from below leaves you at a disadvantage. Loses you the element of surprise as your enemy can see you coming. To get round this we made the final approach on hands and knees, making sure no body part extended above top of panel height. The earth was rough and loose stones tore through my trousers and grated my knees. I bit my lip but refused to cry out. It felt like some sort of atonement. A punishment I deserved. Cheated on your boyfriend? No problem. Say fifty Hail Marys and then crawl on your hands and knees for an hour and your sin will be washed away. Or rather scraped off.
I’d told Ella what had happened with Jack. I hadn’t been able to sleep last night and had gone to sit away from the others. To try and lose myself in the stars. Ella had clearly had the same idea. She took one look at my face and demanded to know everything. I’d told her, hoping for some sympathy, I guess – not that I deserved it – or some advice, but she snapped at me. Told me I should tell Raf. Break up with him. That this wasn’t a time for secrets and lies. This wasn’t a time for messing around with people’s feelings. She might have been right but it didn’t make the night pass any faster. Didn’t stop my brain from spinning.
Everyone was struggling with the heat. It burned down from above and then bounced off the solar panels, frying us from all directions. Sweat plastered my hair to my forehead and trickled down my legs. We weren’t wearing mosquito repellent any more, no longer needing it now that we were on the right side of the mosquito grids, so we didn’t have the lavender oil to cover up B.O. And we didn’t smell good. Nell wasn’t so bad. Maybe because she was younger. Or maybe because she’d never used the oil, we didn’t notice as much of a difference.
No one spoke. But that had been pretty much the same all day. Ella had retreated into herself, shutting down more and more with every step towards the Server, towards the place of her mum’s death. Her torture and execution. I wasn’t talking to Jack and he wasn’t exactly seeking me out either. At least he hadn’t said anything else to Raf. No more cryptic comments. No more ‘mate’. Although this put the emphasis on me to tell him. I’d never thought I’d have to deal with this. Be the baddie. I thought I was a good person. Kind of assumed I’d meet someone special, and be with them for the rest of my life, like Mum and Dad. Aggggghhhhhh! Raf kept trying to get me by myself but I wasn’t ready so I was avoiding him. Avoiding my own guilt. Deflecting his whispered apologies.
‘I’m so sorry, Noa.’
‘I didn’t mean it. Any of it.’
‘I never meant to hurt you.’
‘I’m such a denser.’
‘Noa…’
Like he was the only one in the wrong.
I thought I was too tired, too angry at myself to be scared. But as we crawled closer and closer to the Server the now familiar stomach lurch feeling returned. The one that picks up your guts and twists. Performs an internal cat’s cradle.
The hum was obvious by now, so distinct. HUMMMMMMMMMM HUMMMMMMMMM. Pulsing from the Server. A warning. Stay away from the hive.
Another few metres and we could just about see through the windows. There were figures inside. At least three, maybe more. The windows didn’t give a clear view of the whole room. And we were looking up at an angle so couldn’t see anything below their shoulder height. There could have been a whole army of five-foot guys we would miss entirely. The people we could make out were dressed in grey. They didn’t look like normal military outfits but maybe this was some sort of casual Solar Fields version. A bit like the dress-down Friday Dad had at work.
Ella had stopped. She had abandoned crawl position and instead rolled up into a ball. Rocking and chewing her hand. Eyes blank. Lee was about to push her forward when I intervened.
‘She stays here,’ I hissed. ‘She stays outside.’
Lee didn’t argue. Something in my expression told him it would have been pointless. And he’d probably worked out that Ella in her current catatonic state would have been less of an asset and more of a liability anyway.
He signalled to our backpacks. We’d agreed this sign already. It meant weapons out. Me and Jack pulled out the hedge trimmers, switching to commando crawl so our hands were off the ground and free to wrap round the metal handles. Lee had his hands and Megan’s training and a hunting knife he’d taken from the Raiders’ settlement. Raf had a knife too – a stubby, not particularly sharp, short-bladed thing that he’d used for cutting kindling for fires and gutting rabbits. Nell, well, Nell had nothing. The plan had been to leave her at the back, to keep her shielded from the action but she was having none of it.
‘I’m going to be armed,’ she’d said, a trace of steel to her voice. ‘I’m not strong enough to strangle anyone or break anyone’s neck and I’m not going to be left, helpless … with the soldiers…’ You could almost watch the thoughts scan across her forehead. One of those paper books where you flip the pages and the little man moves, robot dance style. She’d seen what guys could do. How guys could treat their prisoners. How they could abuse their power.
Lee had been going to argue but Raf stepped in and handed her his own knife. He didn’t say anything – just pressed it into her hands with a tiny nod of acknowledgment. A sort of ‘I’ve listened and heard you’ nod.
He was a good guy. He might be going through an angry, unpredictable phase and been a bit slow to join in the Nell-in-the-river rescue, but he was still a good guy. I AM A DENSER. Ella was wrong. I shouldn’t tell him anything. To tell him would be to lose him and I wasn’t ready for that.
We reached the end of the row. There was nothing left to shield us now. Every second we sat and waited was a second in which we could be discovered.
The Server had a single door. A window to the left. Two windows to the right. Both barred. The door looked pretty serious – all thick studded metal and no glass panel. But that didn’t matter. It was open. A foot. Probably to let air in on this scorching day. No reason to lock it with people inside.
Lee pointed at us then straight at the door. ‘GO!’ his whispered command.
We were on our feet. My legs kept folding underneath me as I ran, the muscles cramped into crawling style for so long they’d forgotten how to operate normally, how to bear weight. My tongue felt abnormally large in my mouth. Like it was pressing into my teeth and the back of my throat. Like it might choke me.
Jack was first through the door. Kicked it properly open and then charged in, trimmers outstretched. A yell of surprise then this horrible sound of slicing and then gargling as one of the guys inside drowned in his own blood. Shouts from another as Lee was next through, followed by a muffled scream and then a simple but sickening ‘click’. It was my turn. I ran through the door, hedge trimmers thrust in front. The third guy, there’d only been three after all, had his hands to the side and was edging along a desk that stretched the length of the wall. A desk lined with computer monitors. He wasn’t a soldier. Hadn’t been trained for combat. He had the sort of hunched frame and super pale skin of Uncle Pete, that comes from never leaving an office. From avoiding all physical work and sunlight. Fear radiated off him in waves. The whites of his eyes so large I could see the veins towards the back of them. Worms in flour. He was talking to me, his voice a high-pitched whine.
‘Don’t hurt me! Please don’t hurt me!’
I was moving forward but I couldn’t do it. Hedge trimmers were just a big pair of sharp scissors. I couldn’t cut a person up with scissors.
‘Noa,’ Lee from the edge of the room. ‘You need to take him out. Before he sets off an alarm.’
I took another step forward but now I could see the blood vessels leaping in his neck. Vessels I’d have to sever.
His hand was reaching for a drawer. I didn’t know what was in the drawer.
‘Noa!’ Lee’s voice again, angry with urgency. I glanced towards him. In that split second, the guy had his hand in the drawer and had pulled out a gun. It was p
ointed at me.
‘Put down your weapon,’ the man said, his voice shaking as much as his hands. ‘Put it down,’ a sort of deranged scream this time.
‘Don’t listen to him!’ Lee shouted.
The man swivelled and aimed at Lee instead. His energy was properly crazy now. Any second and the gun was going to go off.
I could sense someone moving round to my right. Edging towards the guy.
‘I’m putting the cutters down,’ I said, slowly beginning to lower the cutters to the floor, trying to inject calm into my voice. What other option did I have? He’d shoot me before I could reach him.
I’m not exactly sure what order everything happened in next. Ella’s face, slightly dazed, appearing in the doorframe. Raf leaping for the guy and getting him in a chokehold. The gun firing as he span to the left. The scream. Ella’s scream as the bullet bit into her flesh. The crumpling sound as Ella’s limp body fell to the floor.
‘NO!’ I sprinted towards her.
There was a hole in the centre of her chest. A rose of blood spreading, blooming. A fountain, pulsing. I pressed my hands over the wound, trying to stop the flow, trying to push the blood back in. It seeped over my palms and trickled through the gaps in my fingers. Her face was so pale, too pale, and her eyes weren’t seeing me. Like she was already staring into a different world.
Nell wouldn’t approach, just hung back by the door. She didn’t want to acknowledge what was happening.
I talked to Ella. Kept up an inane flow of conversation.
About the past. ‘Remember that time when you came to stay and we stayed up all night doing rap battles. We were The Rhyme Masters. And you were so much better than me. Remember? “I’m the rhyme master/We’re heading for disaster.”
About the future. ‘We’re going to put everything right, you know. We’ll change the system and it’ll be a really great place to live again. We’ll get a good flat. Live together. I’ll help you meet some fit guy. Not that you need help.’