by Sarah Govett
Another radio report crackled in.
‘They’re approaching the doors. They’ve broken through the first police cordon.’
The Head Minister stared at the transmitter and we waited, shoulders hunched to our ears. Waited for him to give the order. Waited for the massacre to come.
One-Mississippi. Two-Mississippi.
‘Bring me a megaphone,’ he barked. ‘We’re going outside.’
A minion scuttled off and returned with one. Then, plastering on his best 1000-watt smile, the Head Minister grabbed my arm and Jack’s and pushed the balcony door fully open, dragging us outside with him.
The megaphone squealed into life and thousands of heads swivelled to watch us.
‘Greetings fellow citizens!’ boomed out the Head Minister’s voice. Warm, welcoming, you’d have thought he’d called this rally himself and was addressing his supporters. I almost admired his nerve. Almost.
‘Thank you for joining us on this most joyful of days!’
What? Where was he going with this?
There was a softer buzz as the crowd was as puzzled as I was. A swarm suddenly stumped as the queen pulls an unexpected U-turn.
‘I am here to announce two important new policies that we have had to keep under wraps until now due to security concerns. Firstly, the Childe programme is being decommissioned.’ The crowd, quietened, deflated.
‘Secondly,’ the Head Minister continued quickly, pushing home his advantage, ‘thanks to the resolve and ingenuity of my young friends Noa Blake and Jack Munro, here of their own free will I might add, we have at our hands a most wonderful discovery. A gene. Yes, a new gene that confers malarial resistance. That will allow us to colonise the Wetlands and significantly increase our population!’ At this point he grabbed one of each of our hands and held them aloft in a kind of victory salute. He was linking us to him. Gaining credit. Crushing resistance.
A beat and then the crowd let out a roar of approval.
‘What’s going on?’ I whispered to Jack.
‘They’re forgiving him,’ he replied, furious. ‘They’re letting him get away with it. Dad always said people like to be governed. They like strong leadership. As long as certain lines aren’t crossed. And he’s just stepped back from that line.’
I nodded. I got it. No one wants full-on rebellion, civil war. So many people would die. So many lives wasted. He’d given people a way out. Reform rather than revolt.
But we couldn’t trust them to follow through. Couldn’t leave our fate in their hands. The protestors would go home. The moment would pass. But what was there to guarantee that the Ministry would actually use the gene? What was to stop them pretending to trial it and then declaring it ineffective? And what about our security – mine, Jack’s, Raf’s, Mum’s, Dad’s? What would happen as soon as those balcony doors closed again? I had to act.
Summoning every last reserve of energy, I snatched the megaphone from the Head Minister’s hands.
‘What are you doing?’ asked a startled Jack.
‘Controlling the situation,’ I replied.
Clearing my voice, I started to speak.
‘I’d like to thank everyone for coming here today too. You are our witnesses. It is you, the people, who will hold us accountable on our promises.’ Another roar of approval. The Head Minister tried to grab the megaphone again, but I sidestepped out of his reach and he couldn’t tackle me to the floor without shattering the pretence of friendship.
‘And I have another couple of announcements to make.’
‘Stop it now!’ hissed the Head Minister, through a strained smile, but I just smiled back at him, matching him watt for watt.
‘My mother, Rachel Blake, an eminent scientist at the Laboratory will be heading up the gene programme and providing weekly televised reports to citizens on her progress.’ Try and kill her or Dad now! ‘And Jack, Raf and I will be assisting her at a much lower level. We will all be leaving the building in half an hour to meet people in person and answer any questions you might have.’
‘Don’t think you’ll survive this,’ the Head Minister whispered, all trace of a smile now gone. My stomach twisted. I thought I’d been so clever, but he was right. We might get out the building, but another day, maybe not tomorrow but one day, he’d send his bodyguards after us. And that day we wouldn’t wake up.
He lunged for the megaphone again, but I managed to keep hold of it. Time for one final announcement.
‘And, saving the most important till last,’ I said, addressing the crowds below, hearing my voice bounce from street to street. ‘I would like to thank the Head Minister for his years of dedicated service to the Territory as it is with great sadness that I announce that this will be his last day in office. He has decided to step down to spend more time with his family. Our new leader will be Mr Cartwright, previously the Minister for Allocation. So it’s both goodbye and welcome.’
The Head Minister found my right wrist and was pushing it back, grabbing at the megaphone. Pain seared up my arm. The bones were going to snap. I screamed as he wrenched it from my grasp.
‘Wait…’ he began. But no one could hear him. The roar of approval at his replacement was so loud that all his attempts to drown them out failed.
‘Fire on them, Fire on them!’ he barked into the radio transmitter instead, but the Minister for Allocation stepped forward and snatched that from him.
‘Abort order,’ he shouted. ‘Stand down.’
No shot was fired and the Head Minister seemed to crumple in on himself as he saw his power vanish before him.
Then. Ever so calmly, the Minister for Allocation seized the Head Minister’s hand and held it aloft. A forced victory salute. I handed him the megaphone.
‘Thank you for your support.’ The crowd quietened as they took in their new leader.
‘It is time for a change,’ his voice rang out. ‘And that change starts now.’
He spoke fluently and articulately for a good twenty minutes.
And he didn’t rub his glasses once.
Life’s now settled into a kind of rhythm. A pattern. Days are spent with Mum at the Laboratory, studying the gene. Making sure we know the exact sequence of base pairs and how to cut it out, splice in and reproduce it using bacterial plasmids. The first human trial is next week. A volunteer. A mum whose son is in the Wetlands and whose guilt at staying behind has eaten her up inside. She’d do anything, try anything to be with him again.
I like working with Mum. Really like it. She’s so good at what she does … knowledgeable, in charge and totally calm when a machine breaks down or an emergency button pings. Lots of the time I catch myself looking out for someone else walking by just so I can say, ‘See that top super-scientist – that’s my mum!’
And finally I can smile when I look at her, too. And Dad. I couldn’t for the first few weeks. They were both so thin, gaunt. Mum’s hair is now streaked with grey and Dad has lost his completely. Totally bald. Eyebrows gone too. Just a forehead that stretches on and on. Huge stress can do that to you. I cried when I first saw them, when the door to their cell was unlocked and opened. Assaulted by guilt and love and remorse.
‘I’m so sorry,’ was all I could splutter between sobs. ‘I’m so, so sorry.’ And they ended up comforting me as if I had been the one caged and tortured, the one abandoned and betrayed.
‘It’s OK, Noa bean,’ Mum murmured as she stroked my hair. ‘You’re safe and that’s all we care about. That’s all we’ve ever cared about.’
They’ve never told me exactly what happened to them and I don’t think they ever will. It’s like a chapter of their lives has been torn out and burnt. Only to be revived, phoenix-like, at night, in their dreams.
Outwardly, they’ve recovered quickly though. Extra rations, rest, every luxury to get Mum looking presentable for her first televised progress update. We’ve been given a new flat too. It’s larger than before, with four bedrooms instead of two. It seems a bit like blood money, but we’re not in a position
to turn it down and the extra rooms have been filled quickly enough anyway as Jack and Nell have moved in. Nell obviously had no family of her own in the Territory and Jack, well Jack couldn’t face going back to his mum’s, and his dad’s wasn’t exactly an option. His dad has disappeared again, despite being officially pardoned. We went to the building, the Opposition headquarters, and it’d been totally cleared out. The bodies of the policemen had gone. There wasn’t any sign of a struggle, no blood-spattered walls or anything, so they must have got out straight after transmitting the upload.
A parcel turned up yesterday from Jack’s dad. The note inside apologising for leaving again but saying how important it was that the Opposition kept going, that someone kept watch over the new Head Minister, to stop history repeating itself. I expected Jack to be hurt again, angry again, but he seemed to be at peace with it. Wrapped inside the note was an illegal mobile phone with a sticker saying ‘speed dial 1’ attached. This time his dad hadn’t just walked away. Contact hadn’t been severed and Jack knew, understood that he was still special. His dad’s way of protecting him, being there for him, was being away.
Most of my evenings are spent with Raf. He’s doing really well. The doctors said full recovery could take three to six months, but the dizziness is mainly gone. The mood swings over. And we don’t have to hide anymore. We can wander the streets together, hand in hand, cap-free. A Norm and a freakoid in a new world that’s finding its way.
Change isn’t instantaneous. It’s not like you make a speech, swap a leader and suddenly the water recedes, an endless supply of manna drops from heaven and everyone dances around together. The Fence hasn’t fallen yet. It’ll stand, its mosquito grids in place until malarial resistance has been achieved for every citizen. But the TAA won’t take place this year. And the Childe production facility has been closed. Changes that I’d always dreamt of, but never thought I’d see.
The biggest difference though is in the atmosphere. The feel of the place. Fear has a smell. A stultifying effect. It dulls and hunches and leaches energy. That’s gone, replaced by a new fragrance: hope. It’s like it’s spring even though it’s actually mid-December.
Last night me and Raf had a picnic in the park. He’d brought a rug and we lay out on it, hours after sundown, talking, eating, just being there, savouring the evening and each other.
‘Annie from the Peak was right,’ Raf said at one point, rolling over so that his head blocked my view of the midnight sky, white teeth replacing silver stars. ‘We should never give up on humanity.’
‘Mmm,’ I replied, grinning back. ‘But what about wolves? What should we do about them?’
Acknowledgements
Huge thanks again to my husband for his constant encouragement and support. Thanks to Nina for her invaluable feedback on early drafts. Thanks to my agent, Jane Turnbull, for taking on these books with so much passion. Thanks to Penny Thomas at Firefly for being a brilliant editor and to Megan Farr. Thanks to Karolina Davison for being an unstoppable force of nature, really getting my books out there and for supplying the all-important ‘jazz hands’. Thanks to Caitlin, Ollie, Tom and all the pupils at Emanuel, Graveney, Ibstock and Waldegrave who helped choose the cover. Thanks to Jerome Smith for talking me through hacking and digital signatures – any errors here are my own. Finally, thanks to my parents for providing emergency childcare during editing sessions.
The Territory £7.99
978-1-910080-18-4
The Territory, Escape £7.99
978-1-910080-46-7
Simply impossible to put down … the whole series is a brilliant, five star read.’
Sarah J. Harris
http://www.fireflypress.co.uk
First published in 2018
by Firefly Press
25 Gabalfa Road, Llandaff North, Cardiff, CF14 2JJ
www.fireflypress.co.uk
Text © Sarah Govett 2018
The author asserts her moral right to be identified as author in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act, 1988.
All rights reserved.
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form, binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library.
Print ISBN 978-1-910080-70-2
epub ISBN 978-1-910080-71-9
This book has been published with the support of the Welsh Books Council.