The Territory Truth

by Sarah Govett

  This was clearly not the right answer. He kicked my side and a bullet of pain ricocheted up my body. I dropped to my knees. Prayer position.

  ‘Don’t lie to me. That’s the first rule, OK? Rule numero uno. DO NOT LIE TO ME.’

  I was going to be sick. I was being attacked by a crazy Ministry interrogator and I was going to be sick. Was this karma? Was this divine payback? We’d tortured a man and now it was our turn? Eye for an eye. Tooth for a tooth.

  ‘So, again, how did you find us?’

  My silence earned me a slap to my face. Cheek hit teeth and ripped open.

  Raf and Jack both shouted out and tried to stand but were knocked back down.

  ‘This is nothing, little girl. This is me flirting. You don’t want to see me serious. Your friend here,’ he pointed at Lee, ‘came to our door, asking for Simon.’

  A smile spread over my face and my muscles unknotted themselves. This guy wasn’t Ministry. He was Opposition. It was all a terrible mistake. Lee must have forgotten the password.

  ‘What are you smiling about?’ Milk Teeth’s voice was dangerously quiet now. Little more than a murmur.

  ‘Icarus 34,’ I said as loudly as I could and then repeated it, volume maxed for luck as a kind of victory lap: ‘ICARUS 34!’ In my head a pair of oversized cymbals crashed and an imaginary orchestra reached crescendo. Abracadabra, open the door to the cave full of jewels. We would all laugh. He’d apologise. We’d graciously accept. Love and war and all that.

  SLAP! The back of his hand hit my other cheek. It went numb. I could feel nothing for six seconds and then this terrible burning sensation spread across my face.

  ‘Wrong password!’ Milk Teeth shot back. ‘I’m telling you, like I told him, your information is out of date. Get a better snitch next time, soldier scum!’

  ‘But Megan…’ I started, but couldn’t continue as the air was knocked out of my ribcage by another punch.

  ‘Noa, it’s no use. I’ve tried explaining, but he won’t listen.’ Lee from the corner. His voice, like his body, broken.

  Milk Teeth raised his boot again and I braced myself for impact, when the door burst open and another man, older, tall and wiry with grey-streaked hair and a short mottled beard entered.

  ‘Any luck with the prisoners?’ Silver Fox asked.

  ‘No. But I’ll break them. I’ll find the leak,’ Milk Teeth boasted.

  ‘No, this is taking too long. I’ll take it from here.’

  Milk Teeth tensed up before nodding and retreating to the wall. He didn’t like it, but he did it. Silver Fox was clearly in charge. He pulled two chairs into the centre of the room and placed a black tool roll on one and began untying and unrolling it. Slowly, calmly – this was an everyday business event for him. Bread and butter work. Like he was attending some regional managers’ sales meeting and was about to demonstrate the superior suction power of the VAC3000. Every cell in my body screamed run. Run. NOW. But there was nowhere to go. I shrank into myself and stared at the floor. Tried to make myself look as small and insignificant as possible. Kept my eyes from the chair and the glinting silver instruments shining on it. Examined the boards and focused on the tiny ant that was weaving its way round my feet. Willed my consciousness to jump into its body and scuttle away under the door. As if reading my mind, Silver Fox reached forward and squashed the ant with his right index finger.

  ‘And what did I say about girls?’ boss guy continued, taking hold of my chin, turning it through a 180-degree arc, anger finally infecting his voice. ‘Not their faces. The Ministry won’t exchange her for a comrade if you mess up her face. They’ve got a thing about it.’

  ‘Sorry, boss.’

  Silver Fox stepped away from me and I breathed, pin-pricks of tears forming in the corners of my eyes and leaking down my face.

  I knew this wasn’t it, though. It wasn’t going to end just like that. Silver Fox wanted information and was damn sure he was going to get it.

  ‘Bring me that boy over there.’ He pointed to the far wall. To Jack.

  ‘No!’ I screamed. I couldn’t let this happen again. Couldn’t let Jack take the fall for me again. ‘There’s no leak. Listen to me. Megan…’ a sweaty palm was clapped over my mouth. This was like the Server all over again. Except this time we were on the other side.

  Jack was prodded and then walked over by himself, hands in front, groping at the darkness.

  I couldn’t do anything.

  ‘It’s better this way, Noa,’ Jack said, hoping I’d hear him. My good, strong Jack, wanting to take my place.

  Silver Fox reached forward and pulled the bag off Jack’s head. I closed my eyes, waiting for the first blow to fall.

  There was silence. Taut, crackling silence. The kind you can see and feel.

  Then Silver Fox spoke, a single, staccato word.

  ‘Jack?’

  ‘Dad?’ came the strangled reply.

  Jack’s dad isn’t dead.

  Jack’s dad isn’t dead.

  It doesn’t matter how many times I say it, it still doesn’t seem real.

  It is, though, real that is. And now it seems absurd that I didn’t recognise him immediately, as soon as he walked into the room.

  OK, I hadn’t seen him since I was seven and there’ve been some significant changes since then. He’s about ten kilos lighter than the Jack’s dad of old, his skin is now creased and furrowed and his hair is more grey than red. However, the fundamentals haven’t altered.

  Same slightly hooked nose.

  Same grey eyes flecked with yellow that should be striking but end up just looking cold.

  Same full mouth that straddles the line between passion and cruelty (but a slightly saggier version).

  I think I would have recognised him sooner if it hadn’t been for the context. Context is everything. They’ve done experiments on it. Made people watch uberly good sports teams play indoor matches in poor lighting with rubbishy seats and no one could tell that they were any better than the local amateur squads ’cos they weren’t expecting them to be. OK, it’s a pretty different scenario, but in the storage locker of my brain, Jack’s dad was someone who used to pass the cereal at the breakfast table, someone who would shoot his mouth off at something the Ministry had done, someone who was kicked out by Jack’s mum, and – here comes the biggie – someone who was DEAD. Not someone who prowled underground chambers ordering around psycho thugs and unrolling torture instruments.

  Jack, totally understandably, can’t seem to wrap his head round it either and appears to be going through something slightly like a stages of grief thing.

  Stage 1: denial

  He can’t be alive. He is but he can’t be. Like a corpse that’s been exhumed and resurrected. Of course there hadn’t been a corpse. Or a funeral. Jack’s dad just didn’t return to his house one day. Didn’t turn up to pick Jack up on one of his appointed visitation Tuesdays. That night there’d been a picture of him on the news as one of a number of ‘evil’ Opposition members that had been picked up in a ‘brave’ Ministry swoop to prevent some atrocity. I never learnt what. Dad turned off the TV as soon as he’d seen the photo and Jack never spoke of it. Never. What I did know was that Jack’s dad was going to be ‘eliminated’. Shot. ‘Thank God I left him when I did,’ had been Jack’s mum’s response. That had been Jack’s truth for the past eight years and no one had doubted it for a minute.

  Stage 2: euphoria

  Jack had a dad at last and all his not-having-a-dad issues evaporated like a puddle at noon. After a staring, open-mouthed standoff, (blink first, I dare you) they’d hugged and embraced. Silver Fox a.k.a. Jack’s dad explained how he’d escaped Ministry custody and then gone underground, turning the Opposition into a more organised, efficient weapon of dissent. Jack told his dad how we’d battled our way through the Wetlands, destroyed the Raiders, attacked the Server and of our plans to hack the Childe uploads. It was like witnessing the inaugural meeting of a competitive mutual appreciation society. You’re amazing. No, you
are. Well, you’re better…

  Then Jack’s dad took us upstairs, to the kitchen at the top of the building to be fed and showed us to the bathrooms and our sleeping quarters – a series of dorms – introducing everyone we met along the way to ‘his son’. Jack’s chest was puffed so full it was like it’d been attached to an automatic bike pump. Dinner was followed by showers. Actual hot showers. Getting clean, properly clean. Then to real beds. Mattresses. Sheets. After three months of sleeping on the ground, lying on them felt like the greatest luxury imaginable. I now get why Rex always tried to sleep at the end of mine, no matter how many times I pushed him off. The floor sucks. Beds rock.

  Nell couldn’t wrap her head around the lights, well electricity in general. OK, she’d seen it briefly at the Server, but then none of us were in any state to process anything. And I guess if you’ve never been up close with it before it must look like a cross between a miracle and some kind of dark magic. Even for us who’d grown up with it, three months’ absence restored our wonder. A fireless oven. Staying up later than the sun. Nell sat or rather squatted next to the light switch – lights on – lights off – her mouth an open ‘O’ of wonder. I had to drag her away before she fused the system.

  Stage 3: anger and despair

  Being introduced to Simon was the tipping point. He came into the living area just as everyone was finishing eating. You just had to look at him to know that he was Megan’s brother. Same colouring. Same cheekbones. But more importantly, the same energy – the same slightly wild, dangerous edge. A blade that should be stored on the top shelf, out of reach of kids. Both me and Lee had told Jack we’d break the news of Megan’s death to Simon, that there was no reason he had to put himself through it, but Jack insisted. We could do nothing but watch as he relived Megan’s last days, relived everything she’d stood for and done. Watch as two strong guys who looked like they could take anything, do anything, dissolved into tears, and seemed to lose height and weight before our eyes. We all turned in for the night soon afterwards. I lay there, staring at the ceiling, when there was a knock at the door to my dorm.

  I opened it and Jack shuffled in and slumped at the end of my bed. He looked so small and so vulnerable that I instinctively wrapped my arms round him and we just sat there. He didn’t try and kiss me or anything and I didn’t want him to. Not because there were ten other girls (albeit sleeping) in the room. It wasn’t about that. It was more like we’d taken all these different chaotic emotions we’d been going through these past days and blended them together to come up with a smoothie of pure friendship. Platonic plus. It must have been an hour or so before he even spoke, and when he did his voice was low and cracked.

  ‘Thanks for being my friend, Noa. I know I’ve been pushing things lately, and I shouldn’t have. I guess if you’ve wanted something for so long you just kind of keep chasing it. Like it becomes part of you. Even if you’ve moved past it. Even if your heart now lies elsewhere. Does that make any sense?’

  I nodded. In its own messed-up way it made a lot of sense. Jack wasn’t over Megan and I wasn’t over Raf. We’d been trying this thing, this ‘us’, as it’d always been there in the background. An unspoken, unacted upon presence. Now we’d done it, we’d acted and somehow or other we’d banished the ghost in the process. We sat there in silence again although I knew Jack hadn’t finished. Knew he had something else on his mind. Something else messing with his thoughts. Finally it spilled out.

  ‘He didn’t try to contact me, Noa. All these years, he let me just go on thinking he was dead. How could someone do that? Just walk away from their son?’

  I didn’t get much sleep last night. I got stuck in a nightmare/wake-up/nightmare cycle and I kept returning to the same point I’d left off. Like I was watching a horror film while being trigger happy with the pause/play button on the remote. They weren’t gory dreams. No one was being killed or chased or hurt or anything, but in a way that made it worse. I was in an ice cave, or rather a series of ice tunnels. The walls contained people and furniture and stuff from everyday life, but frozen into weird artificial positions – like they’d been ice-taxidermied. I was the only creature alive, moving. The first scene was of kids from school, no one I recognised, just random kids, sitting frozen at desks, while a teacher, no, an exam invigilator, stalked the back. I could handle that. The second I couldn’t handle at all. There were three figures. Three girls standing still and pointing at me. I peered closer and made out their crystallised faces. Daisy, Megan and Ella, just standing there and pointing at me. Accusing me. I’d killed them. It was my fault. Befriend Noa and you die. I shut my eyes and hurried past and then wished I hadn’t. Round the corner, in a cave, an ice scene of their own were Mum and Dad. They were sat on the brown sofa in our living room, holding a picture, a photo of me. Mum’s face had aged by about ten years and Dad was thin and stooped. I tried yelling at them, telling them I was OK, that I was alive and they didn’t need to worry anymore, but they couldn’t hear me. Nothing I could say or do reached them. I screamed, but no sound came out. Instead shards of ice started shooting out of my windpipe and then burying their way backwards, choking me.

  I woke, covered in a film of sweat, surrounded by the other girls in the dorm, finding Nell sat next to me, stroking my arm. Apparently I’d been calling out in my sleep. Woken everyone.

  ‘Sorry,’ I mumbled. But my thoughts were elsewhere. My thoughts were on Mum and Dad. I had to visit them. I had to tell them I was OK. Since we’d reached the First City, Raf, Jack and Lee had all independently warned me against trying to make contact. The Ministry would be watching them for sure and it was the quickest way to get caught.

  ‘I get it, Noa,’ Raf had said. ‘I want to check on my mum too. Desperately so. But it’s too risky right now. And you’d be endangering them too.’

  I’d listened to him, nodding in all the right places, but I couldn’t sit here and not at least try. They were my parents. A girl can’t just walk away from her parents.

  This morning, I dressed quickly, planning to leave straight away. I didn’t want any questions so I hid in the bathroom while everyone was having breakfast. Ten minutes became twenty became thirty. It was quiet. Peering through the banisters, the stairs looked empty.

  Now.

  I went for it. But, I couldn’t have timed it worse. Racing down the steps, two at a time, I collided with Jack’s dad, flanked by Jack, Lee and Nell.

  ‘Glad to see you’re keen, Noa,’ he said. ‘I was worried you’d forgotten.’

  My confusion must have shown as he continued, ‘The tour? Remember?’

  Of course, he’d mentioned it last night. He was going to give us the proper tour of the building, get us up to speed on their projects and then find out more about our plans to alter the uploads. There was no getting out of it. Finding my parents would have to wait till later.

  ‘Where’s Raf?’ I asked Lee, suddenly conscious of his absence.

  ‘Headache,’ Lee replied. ‘A bad one,’ he added and then speeded up so that he was out of step with me. Whatever was going on, he clearly didn’t want to talk about it.

  I wasn’t going to let him avoid me that easily. Grabbing his arm, I slowed him down and span him round.

  ‘Lee, what aren’t you telling me?’

  ‘It’s nothing, Noa.’

  ‘We need to get him to a doctor. To a specialist.’

  Lee didn’t reply. His look was enough. And I knew he was right. We couldn’t take him anywhere. We’d need a proper high-up brain consultant and the only access was through Ministry-approved channels. Channels obviously closed to us.

  I rejoined the group, reluctantly at first, but soon became interested, drawn in. The Opposition headquarters are really quite something. Obviously, the basement torture cellars aren’t anything to write home about, but the rest of the operation is staggering.

  From the outside the building looks like any other in the street. As run down as you’d expect in this part of town. There was a shop front on the gro
und floor selling wholesale kitchen equipment, in keeping with the residential/business mix. The manager was a guy called Sam. He didn’t know everything, but he knew enough. Enough to never go up or down the stairs. Enough to have a panic button under the sales desk to press in case of unwelcome visitors.

  Next to the shop entrance were letterboxes and doorbells purporting to belong to flats on the floors above. All in the names of law-abiding, card-carrying citizens of the Territory.

  ‘Loyal to us,’ Jack’s dad explained.

  If anyone came investigating the front would obviously only hold up so long. And then they’d have to disappear and restart from scratch. They’d done it before, Jack’s dad said almost proudly, and they’d do it again if need be.

  At the top of the house sat the dorms, kitchen and rec room. I already knew that. Below them was where the real work was done. First we were shown a computer room, filled with terminals, monitors, servers and bundles of wire attached to lots of little black boxes that left me confused but Lee in ecstatic glee. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a smile so wide. Like it was eating his face.

  ‘For surveillance, and organising campaigns,’ Jack’s dad explained. ‘If someone in the Ministry sneezes, we know about it,’ he said smugly.

  His smugness irritated me so I couldn’t resist throwing in a, ‘Well, why do Opposition members keep getting caught the whole time then?’

  Jack’s dad’s smile remained in place but became a good few degrees colder. ‘Sometimes we need to make calculated sacrifices,’ he replied. God! So they gave certain people up. Let them go so the Ministry would think they had total control. This man was a robot.

  The surveillance room was ruled by Mina, a really short woman in her late twenties with mousy-brown hair. The mouse comparison ended there. Everything else about her was big. Big personality. Big, bellowing laugh. Super loud yelling at Lee when he started to tap at a keyboard without permission. I liked her immediately.