The Territory Truth

by Sarah Govett

  To say sorry. ‘I should have killed him, Ella. I shouldn’t have panicked. I wish I’d killed him.’

  ‘Noa.’ It was Lee’s voice, gentle. ‘Noa, she’s … she’s gone now. Noa…’

  But I refused to believe it. I kept talking and kept holding her hand until it went cold.

  I closed her eyes and wrapped my jumper round her and pretended she was sleeping. I hope the place, the new place she was seeing, is nice. I hope she meets Daisy there.

  The man’s body was slumped in a corner, Raf sitting by his feet.

  ‘Is he dead?’ I asked flatly. I wanted him to be dead. I wanted it so much.

  Raf shook his head. He’d kept up the chokehold until the guy had passed out but hadn’t killed him.

  ‘We don’t know anything about how things work here. We might need some help.’ He said it like an apology.

  I didn’t react. Didn’t know how to. The world wasn’t making a whole lot of sense and everything seemed distorted and surreal. Like I was watching it rather than living it. Noa looks concerned. Noa takes a step towards Raf. Raf hugs Noa.

  The next thing I knew I was crying. Sobbing into his t-shirt until it was damp and semi see-through. Releasing all the adrenalin I hadn’t even been aware had been stored in my body.

  ‘Shh!’ he whispered into my hair, rubbing my back, soothing me like you might a baby. ‘Shh! I’m always going to protect you.’ And then I started blubbing again. A cocktail of love and guilt and fear.

  Torture works, that’s what the Ministry taught us. It’s a horrible, horrible thing that you want to be shielded from, but it gets the information. The ends justify the means. Back in the First City we were always being told about yet another ‘evil Opposition plot’ to kill babies or something equally horrific that had been foiled using ‘heightened interrogation techniques’. Break the subject, crack the code, save the babies.

  I should have realised that, like everything else, it was lies. All lies.

  I know. We tried it.

  The man, the worker, came to after about fifteen minutes. From unconscious to conscious via a deep rasping intake of breath and a groan. There was already a purplish bruise circling his neck, an amethyst necklace, the colour deepening with time. I looked at it and willed it to hurt. Willed it to squeeze the murdering air out of his murdering throat. Raf had tied the man’s hands and feet together so when he tried to stand he only managed to lift himself to kneeling before collapsing down again … thunk … with no means to soften his fall.

  Ella’s body was outside, still wrapped in my jumper. We would bury her later. First we had to deal with the upload. Deal with the man.

  Lee was focused and stressed in a way I’d never seen him. Everything rested on him now. No one else had the skills to hack the system and alter the code. No one else even knew where to start.

  He turned on the monitors and perched on this swivel chair, staring intently at lines of code. His mouth closed in concentration, his dark almond eyes a focused beam. Like an extreme version of Dad doing Sudoku.

  ‘Is it an upload?’ I asked, my voice hushed, awed by what I didn’t understand. A sailor in the olden days looking at the horizon and hoping we weren’t about to sail off the edge of the world. I was properly malc at Computer Skills at school, not that we’d gone beyond really basic coding anyway. The more advanced stuff was reserved for the Further Education Schools. For the kids who had passed the TAA. For after the weaklings, the potential Opposition members, had been screened out and shipped off. No surprise there. It was difficult to wrap my head round the fact that Lee had understood it enough to go further independently, far enough to hack into the school computer system in search of more information, true information. Fact to replace fiction. I guess it’s a bit like an aptitude for language. Back at the start of junior school when we still did French, some kids just picked it up instantly, embraced it, whereas I never got much beyond BON JAW.

  Lee nodded but was still frowning.

  ‘So,’ I continued, unwilling to leave his side, ‘is there somewhere we just type something like wake up guys, you’ve all been brainwashed?’

  Lee laughed. A bark. Harsh. And it was definitely an ‘at me’ not ‘with me’ chuckle.

  ‘Sorry,’ he replied, icily. ‘But it’s a bit more complicated than that.’

  I didn’t take too much offence. I knew I was ignorant. And, more importantly, I knew that the fate of our mission, the fate of the Territory, of everything, now lay in Lee’s hands. He moved from terminal to terminal, his frown deepening and deepening, his mouth a Roman road of straightness. His fingers started connecting with the keyboard. This was it. He was doing it. Interpreting the code. Altering it.

  ‘There’s no point.’ A soft, squeaky voice from the floor. The worker. The killer.

  ‘Ignore him,’ from Raf.

  Then a few minutes later it came again. ‘You’re wasting your time.’ The voice again was quiet. Not much more than a mumble. Tired rather than goading.

  ‘What? Why’s that then?’ Lee was on edge, irritable.

  ‘You can’t change the uploads. They’re digitally signed.’

  Lee thumped his fist against the desk. I’d never seen him angry before. Not so angry that he was lashing out, losing control.

  ‘What is it?’ I didn’t get what was happening. ‘What does that mean?’

  There was a long pause and Lee showed no signs of answering me. He just stood behind the back of the swivel chair, flexing his hands, before laying them, flat palmed against the plastic. Guess he didn’t want to play teacher as everything fell apart.

  Instead, Raf filled in the gaps.

  ‘It means the Nodes will reject our upload. If the uploads are digitally signed then the circuitry inside the Node can check to see if the data has been tampered with during its broadcast and if it has, it’ll be discarded.’

  No one breathed.

  Lee’s hands were no longer flat, they were gripping the top of the chair, knuckles white where bones pressed against skin.

  ‘Can’t we just add the signature ourselves?’ I asked, aware really that if it was this simple, Lee wouldn’t be looking like he was about to go nuclear.

  ‘We need to know the keys,’ Raf explained. ‘The strongest digital signatures have two keys – a public key and a private one. The public one sits inside the Node so acts as a sort of lock. That’s fine. That’s there already. It’s the private one that’s the issue.’

  ‘How do you even know this stuff?’

  ‘Do you remember when France’s nuclear power stations all stopped working and they had virtually no power?’

  ‘Sure. I vaguely think I’ve heard that. It was crucial to stopping the Western invasion, right?’

  ‘Right. Well that was us. The Ministry. A computer virus with a digital signature discovered through insider knowledge and good old-fashioned spying. Dad told me once, when he was drunk. He was bragging about it. Some friends of his from the Ministry had been involved. I should have thought they might have secured the uploads like this. Should have realised there was a reason the Server wasn’t guarded more heavily. Why it didn’t need to be. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter,’ Lee was forcing confidence into his voice. ‘We’ll derive the private key from the system here.’

  ‘You can’t. The system’s been designed by the best. It’s impossible.’ The squeaky voice again. The worker.

  Lee released his grip on the chair but sent it flying across the room as he did so. His eyes were dark flashes. His mouth open, the gap between his teeth a tunnel where bats lived. He turned on the man.

  ‘Where’s it stored?’

  ‘In the Ministry.’

  ‘But you know it, don’t you?’

  ‘No,’ the man’s tone was guarded. ‘We’re not given it. It’s patched in by the Ministry before transmission. We don’t have it here.’

  ‘Expect us to believe that?’ Lee prowled up to the man, who was attempting to stand
again, and kicked his legs from under him.

  He turned to face us, forced us to meet his eyes.

  ‘This man knows the key to making our upload work. Without this information our plan fails. The freakoids remain brainwashed. The Ministry remains unquestioned. All of our efforts, everyone who’s died, it will all be for nothing. We need him to talk. We need to make him talk.’

  ‘I don’t know it. I honestly don’t.’ We ignored the man’s protestations. Blocked out the note of desperation in his voice and nodded at Lee. We were with him. The man had lost all his rights when he’d pulled the trigger and killed Ella. If he didn’t give us the code, Ella died in vain, Megan died in vain. Those sixty people were gunned down on the Fence for no point whatsoever. The two other workers we’d just taken out. We’d basically murdered them all.

  Whatever we did now, it was justified. Whatever we did, we had no choice.

  I don’t really want to go into what happened next. It makes me feel sick to the stomach. Sick with the world. Sick with us. Sick with myself.

  I can’t even tell you exactly who did what. We were acting as one. An organism. Someone stamped on the man’s hand. Stamped till he cried out in pain.

  ‘I don’t know anything.’

  Kick to the kidney.

  ‘I don’t know anything.’

  Kick to the other kidney.

  ‘My name’s Fred. Fred Jones. I just work here. We don’t get told this stuff.

  Stamp on his head.

  It was worse now, now that he had a name. It was easier when he was ‘the man’. Easier to hurt the man than Fred. Fred was a person. Fred might have a family. But Fred killed Ella.

  ‘Tell us and we’ll stop.’

  ‘I don’t know anything. I swear I don’t know anything.’

  Hedge trimmers opened. Glinting in the overhead bulb. Pretty, almost. Like jewellery.

  ‘I’m sssssssorry about your friend. It was an accident. The gun went off. OK. It went off. And … and … you were going to kill me. No, STOP!’

  Nine fingers instead of ten.

  ‘I don’t know anything. Make it stop. Make it stop.’

  Eight.

  ‘OK, OK, I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you everything. The code, the key it’s, it’s…’

  Stamp to the hand. ‘Keep talking.’

  ‘It’s in the computer. It’s stored in the computer.’

  ‘Where?’

  Silence. The man’s eyes were darting round the room. There was no unguarded exit. There was no escape.

  ‘Don’t hurt me. Please don’t hurt me.’

  ‘Where?’

  The man’s breaths were these shallow pants. Rex in the car on a hot day.

  ‘On the main hard drive?’

  ‘Exactly. Exactly. On the hard drive.’

  Lee walked towards the monitors.

  The man must have used this distraction to reach for the hedge trimmers as the next thing we knew he’d sliced open his own throat and was bleeding out on the floor. A pool that spread and stained. Scarlet. Viscous.

  It was like we’d all been bewitched and his death broke the spell. We stared at the bloody, bruised, mutilated figure on the floor and it was like being sucker punched.

  That was us.

  We did that.

  To another human.

  That was us.

  ‘Lee?’

  Raf’s voice. But it was also all of our voices. A communal prayer. Please have found some information. Please let him have given us some valid information. Please let it have meant something. Please let it have been the only way.

  ‘Nothing.’

  Lee’s voice was flat. The man had been telling the truth. I could see that now. We all could. He didn’t know anything. He’d just made up stuff to make us stop. And then killed himself as the only way out.

  The ground was hard and stony and we didn’t have proper spades. We’d left them at the Fence so had to use whatever tools we found in the Server building. A wrench. A saw. Two hammers. The old metal side of a computer terminal.

  The grave was shallow, no more than a foot deep. We wrapped Ella’s body in a tarpaulin we’d found in a cupboard under some spare uniforms and then covered it with earth. When we’d finished it looked more like a mutant molehill than a grave. It was the best we could do but it wasn’t enough. Wasn’t good enough for my cousin. Wasn’t good enough for our friend.

  Raf and Jack both tried to comfort me. Tentatively placed hands on my arms. Tried to hook arms round my shoulders. But I shrugged them off. I didn’t want the contact. This wasn’t about them. This was about Ella. Only Ella. I wanted to lie down and cry. To pummel my feet and hands against the earth and scream. Over and over. To rage against the unfairness of the world that took life indiscriminately. The Greeks got it right. Gods don’t love people. People are their pawns and playthings that can be hurt over and over and then left to die. But I knew I had to package my grief. I had to bundle it up and store it away or I’d break, crumble into a hundred pieces, and I couldn’t break now. We had to keep going.

  Nell couldn’t package. She was younger. She’d lost her mother figure. The only ‘mum’ that had ever cared for her. Loved her. She fought and scratched Jack as we laid Ella in the ground. Bared teeth and nails like a wild thing.

  ‘We need stones,’ she kept screaming. ‘She won’t be at peace without the stones.’ I remembered the burial sites in the Wetlands. The mounds of bodies surrounded by concentric circles of white stones that ranged from boulders to large pebbles, topped with bundles of sweet-smelling sea lavender. I hadn’t realised that the stones were more than decorative. That a whole mythology had sprung up around them. That they were an offering to the underwater God who guarded the entrance to the Sea of Tranquillity.

  There were no white stones in the Solar Fields. None. There were small gravelly stones, bits of orange and brown, uneven and tooth-sized, but nothing with any majesty.

  I took Nell’s thin, wiry frame into my arms and held her there. Enveloped. Trapped. I told her about Ella’s God. About a different version of heaven. Where you didn’t need white stones. Where it didn’t matter if or how you were buried as long as your conscience was clear and your heart was pure. About how Ella was now at peace and always would be. And as I spoke these words I understood. Understood why, despite the horror, despite the unfairness, or rather because of it, we needed the concept of heaven. That without it death destroyed the living too.

  We buried the dead workers down the next row. I don’t know who suggested it but it seemed the right thing to do. Not that it made amends or lessened what we’d done.

  When we’d finished I headed away from the group into the Solar Fields. Picked up my backpack and walked down a row, crossing into parallel rows, moving until the others were small dots and I could lie down behind a panel and block them out completely. I needed to be by myself. Needed not to be an ‘us’ any more. I kind of hated ‘us’. The trouble is there’s still a me and I can’t leave me behind. I don’t know anything anymore and I’m no longer sure we deserve to win. That we’re any better.

  We regrouped the next morning after a night apart. A group of flawed humans with soil in their hair and ghosts in their eyes.

  I found Raf and pulled him aside.

  Deep breath.

  ‘There’s something I need to tell you.’

  Raf looked surprised by the seriousness of my tone as much as anything. ‘What is it? Is everything OK?’

  I struggled to keep my focus. Struggled to ignore the way his eyes sparkled with concern, green and blue plunge pools on a hot summer’s day, and the way the left-hand corner of his mouth lifted up fractionally higher than the right. But I knew I had to speak. I had to set things straight.

  There was only one way to do it.

  ‘That night in the Solar Fields when I went to pick mushrooms with Jack he kissed me.’ I rushed out the words before I could chicken out.

  A sharp intake of breath and Raf took a step back. Like my words had pun
ched him in the solar plexus.

  ‘You … kissed … Jack?’

  ‘He kissed me…’

  Raf’s shoulders relaxed a fraction, but I knew I had to tell him everything. I couldn’t lay all the blame at Jack’s feet.

  ‘He kissed me but I didn’t pull away. I’m sorry, I should have told you sooner.’

  ‘Why are you even telling me now?’ Eyes narrowed to green and blue slits. The sparkle was gone. They were frozen shards of ice. Coloured popsicles that taste of nothing. ‘Do you want to be with him? Are you choosing him?’

  ‘No. It’s not that. It’s that … we’re not good people, Raf. We’re becoming bad people. What we did yesterday…’ I swallowed. Raf swallowed. Trying to swallow images. Nine. Eight.

  ‘I don’t want there to be any more lies. I want to be a better person.’

  I wanted to be someone Ella could be proud of.

  ‘So? That’s it? We’re over?’ I couldn’t tell anything from Raf’s voice. It was completely flat. Controlled.

  I paused.

  My mind swung like a malc pendulum clock. Raf the sexy wolf. Raf the massive pain. Having a go at me. Telling me to give him space. Kissing Jack. My heart accelerating. Ella telling me I had to be honest. Had to stop messing people around.

  I’d paused too long.

  Raf’s eyes found the floor. A beat. Then he looked up. Straight at me.

  ‘Well, Noa, I don’t want to be with someone who doesn’t know. That doesn’t really do it for me. It’s not the dream I had as a little boy.’ His tone was harsh now, mocking and rising in volume. ‘To fall in love with someone, and yes, Noa, I love you – loved you – completely and then have them not know how they feel in return! It wasn’t supposed to go down that way. So yes, Noa, we’re over.’

  He span on his heels and started walking back to the group. I willed him to turn and look back. To flash me just one more wolfy grin. To storm back and shout at me. Anything. But he didn’t. He kept on going, only stopping briefly to dead arm Jack as he passed.