A Tangle of Gold

by Jaclyn Moriarty

  Ah. Seventh-level Green. That explained his body feeling like it had been trampled by a team of oxen then run through a spin cycle.

  Something else was coming to him. The most profound ache in his body—he was about to identify it.

  Three days he’d been out?

  He must be starving.

  The ache was hunger.

  ‘I need to eat,’ he said, immediately beginning to panic.

  ‘These are oat biscuits,’ she replied. ‘I had them ready. Eat slowly.’

  There was a rustling sound, and Elliot reached out to the space between the bunk beds and took a paper bag from her.

  ‘Appreciate that,’ he said, once he’d eaten the whole bag of biscuits. He lay back down, his head on the pillow. Now he felt nothing except sleepy. ‘How long am I supposed to stay here?’

  ‘This, and I cannot—ah, but I can say that the girl, Keira, she is working to clear your name with the W.S.U. so that you may walk free and fearless. Once that is done, we will arrange for your departure. She is now with your family in your hometown. I believe this is somewhere in the Farms.’

  ‘Bonfire, the Farms.’

  ‘This, and it is the one. She will contact you at some future moment.’

  Keira in Bonfire?

  Something seemed hilariously unlikely about that. Keira, the city girl, night-dweller, Jagged-Edgian, in the Farms? Keira with the Sheriff and the Deputy. Keira with his buddies back home. How would she even have got there?

  Elliot in the World.

  Also unlikely.

  He closed his eyes and tried again to see it, his time in the World. But it was nothing but shadows and mists. There was a dim light amidst the mist, and he couldn’t tell if that was Chime’s flashlight, still aimed at his face, or a trace of memory trying to get through. It made him want to raise a hand to his eyes to shelter them, to squint into the shadows, to try to see that light. As if the shadows themselves were a glare, blinding him. He fell asleep.

  3

  The next morning, the room was empty when he woke.

  Most of the beds had been made. A half-empty glass of water stood on the floor next to one bed. A boot lay on its side in the centre of another, making a dip in the blanket.

  At the end of the room, there was a basin.

  He washed his face.

  He looked up and there he was in the mirror.

  Elliot Baranski.

  He was about to consider why this perfectly ordinary fact kept stopping him in his tracks, when he noticed the yellow line crossing his forehead. At first he thought it was a mark on the mirror but when he moved his head around, it stayed with him. He rubbed at his forehead with water.

  ‘That will not disappear, no matter how you soap it,’ said a voice. ‘That will be your clearance level.’

  It was the voice he’d heard in the night.

  He turned to look at her. She was dark-skinned as you’d expect of someone whose mother was from the Sjakertaat, although her hair was the orangey-black that was common to Nature Strip. His primary impression, however, was that Chime had a lot more voice than her body could carry. Even as it had murmured in the darkness last night, it had seemed so full and complex. But she herself was thin as a bunch of twigs. Her skin seemed cling-wrapped to her bones. There was no room for error, no space for wear and tear. It’s all there, he thought, all of Chime. On display, without protection.

  Then he saw that she was pointing to her own forehead, and that it was also marked with a horizontal line. Only hers was blue.

  ‘It only shows up under the special lights of Hostile compounds,’ she explained. ‘Come. You must shower, and I’ll find you some clothes. All of yours, as that you wore when you came from the World, have been burned of course, as they’ve the plague there. And you yourself were scrubbed and disinfected while you were under the seventh-level Green.’

  She turned and led him from the room.

  *

  After Elliot had showered and dressed, Chime found him again and announced that she would take him on a tour of the compound and then to breakfast.

  ‘Let’s reverse that order,’ he suggested, and she considered her fingernails a moment.

  ‘No. Tour first.’

  It was larger than he’d imagined a Hostile compound to be, and also more neatly labelled. Corridors were lined with closed doors and each of these carried a small placard: Strategy. Medical Supplies. Recuperation. Communications. The doors responded to the stripes on their foreheads: his yellow stripe was the lowest clearance level, so he only had access to bathrooms, laundry, kitchen, dining, bunkrooms, recreation room, and exercise room (A).

  ‘Here, and you will see the weights, the stationary bike, and so on,’ she said, gesturing at this room. ‘When you are not working, you will enjoy these facilities.’

  ‘There are other exercise rooms?’

  Chime stopped and looked at him. ‘This one is not enough for you?’

  ‘Well, sure. I mean, I don’t know. I’ve never exercised in a room like this in my life. I like to run. Outside. In the woods. It’s just the A makes me think there’s a B someplace, maybe a C.’

  She nodded. ‘You are right. But you only have clearance for A.’

  Somehow this felt personal. They could exclude him from Strategy, sure, but what, the gym equipment in exercise rooms B and C was too fancy for him? It seemed mean-spirited.

  Chime carried on, passing doors labelled Briefing, Training, and around a corner: Debriefing.

  ‘They couldn’t brief and debrief in the same place?’

  Chime ignored him.

  ‘You mentioned me working,’ Elliot remembered. ‘How can I work if you won’t let me outside?’

  She laughed as if he was teasing her.

  ‘That wasn’t meant as a joke. But okay, if you find it funny.’

  ‘You will work in the kitchen with me. You’re from the Farms, are you not? This, and I hear they can cook there.’

  At an exit door, Elliot stopped.

  ‘So this door won’t open for me?’

  ‘This, and of course not,’ she replied.

  ‘What if there’s a fire?’

  ‘Come to me. I’ll get you out.’

  ‘What if I can’t find you? What if you’re at another exit, and everything between us is in flames?’

  She laughed again. ‘Come to breakfast.’

  In the dining room he was introduced to the other Hostiles. They didn’t seem especially interested in him. There were four men and three women, and they were finishing up their breakfast, some of them already pushing back chairs as Elliot and Chime arrived. They glanced at him, but then carried on with their conversations or with stacking used plates onto trays.

  The only exception was the man whom Chime introduced as ‘the Assistant’. He slowly scraped his knife across his almost-empty plate, gazing at Elliot, a slight smile forming.

  ‘You’ve woken at last?’ he said.

  ‘Seems so.’

  ‘Why do you think—’ The Assistant paused. ‘Let me rephrase that. What was it that finally woke you from a three-day slumber, do you think?’

  Having asked this question, the Assistant leaned forward on folded arms and scrutinised Elliot.

  Elliot stared back.

  ‘I guess I can’t say,’ he replied eventually.

  The man continued to gaze for several seconds, then nodded. ‘Okay. Welcome, Elliot. I’ve taken the liberty of outlining a program for you to follow while you’re with us. Chime should be your point-of-contact for questions, but if there’s anything else you need, ask for me—go ahead and ask for the Assistant!’ The abrupt swing into cheer at the end was alarming. The guy was trying for a Farms accent, Elliot realised. Well, he’d heard worse.

  ‘Is there a chief?’ he asked.

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘Or, I don’t know, a director or something? I mean, if you’re the assistant.’

  The man studied him again, eyes alight.

  ‘I see what you
’re up to,’ he said and grinned broadly. ‘Nice try. I admire you already.’ He returned to scraping his plate.

  Elliot was bewildered. It had just been a question.

  *

  Later that day, while she was showing Elliot around the kitchen, and explaining what his duties would be, Chime answered the question anyway.

  ‘I don’t see as why you shouldn’t know who the Director is,’ she said as she opened the pantry door and stepped back so he could see inside. ‘You know Keira already, and you know she has connections to the Hostiles, yes? Well, and you know her mother is a Hostile?’

  ‘I do,’ Elliot replied. He studied the pantry. It was a mess of crowded and spilling food. Opened packets of flour sat in their own dust. Something wilted in a corner. Potatoes rotted. A container of tomato sauce had split and the sauce had dripped from one shelf down to the next and then congealed.

  ‘Mischka Tegan,’ he added.

  Chime closed the pantry door.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Mischka, yes, but Tegan is not the name.’

  She was opening a double-doored refrigerator now. Those blackish leaves that were pasted along a shelf might once have been lettuce.

  ‘It’s the name she used when she came to my hometown,’ Elliot explained, ‘and tricked my father and uncle into helping with the Hostile cause. They thought she was a Loyalist.’

  He stopped. The memories were coming back to him like rocks riding a slope, and he was speaking them aloud before he’d checked them. What was he thinking, telling a Hostile that his father was a Loyalist?

  ‘Aaah.’ Chime nodded. ‘I recall this story. And that’s how your father ended up in the World, and your uncle dead.’

  Elliot was silent.

  ‘This is the deep freeze.’ Chime made no move to open it. ‘Well, and in any case, here’s another truth. Keira’s mother is officially Director here. Only, she is in prison now.’

  Another landslide of memories. He sorted through it cautiously.

  ‘Keira told me that her mother was in prison,’ he said eventually. ‘And she only avoided execution because Keira agreed to help the R.Y.A.?’

  Chime nodded. ‘Yes. It is our hope that Keira herself was secretly undermining the Royals from the inside at that point. Was she?’

  Elliot lifted the lid of the deep freeze himself. Cold misted up at him.

  ‘I guess,’ he said.

  But he was recalling that it was Keira who had calculated the locations of the Royals in the World, and who had given them each communication rings. Which was a lot more helpful than undermining.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Chime said thoughtfully. ‘This, and I think that Keira has never truly been Hostile. I think perhaps that Keira’s her own person.’

  Elliot relented. ‘I think so, too.’

  ‘I like people who are their own person. Are you?’

  ‘I hope. I don’t know. How do we know?’

  Chime was standing with her back to the counter. Now she hoisted herself up so she was sitting there, heels thudding a cupboard door.

  ‘This I also like. People who ask questions. Elliot, I like you,’ she said.

  4

  Over the next few weeks, Elliot followed the Assistant’s program. It turned out to be pretty simple: assist Chime in the kitchen from 9 am to 5 pm (with breaks as determined, erratically, by Chime); work out in the exercise room, 5.30 pm to 7 pm. Kick back on Sundays in the recreation room.

  Turned out that working out in an exercise room wasn’t so bad, once you got around the crazy notion of a bicycle fixed to the ground. He began to look forward to that part of his day, and felt agitated when the room got too crowded or was closed for repairs. In his first couple of sessions, Chime explained how the equipment worked, and which was for ‘strength’ and ‘cardio’. After that, she ignored him, exercising separately. She was a whole lot stronger, he noticed, than those skinny arms and legs might imply.

  It also turned out that the compound itself was more chaotic than he’d first imagined. There might have been only eight other regulars but it seemed like scores of people came and went. There were separate bunkrooms for the transients. So far as Elliot could figure, these were recruits coming in for training, envoys from other Hostile branches, sick or injured people who needed medical treatment, and delivery guys arriving with sacks of flour or rice, jars of honey or dried herbs, toilet paper, toothpaste and news.

  By listening to conversations, Elliot learned what had been happening in the Kingdom. It seemed word had got out that Princess Ko had been running the Kingdom on her own. People had got themselves in a real state about that. Didn’t like to think they’d been duped. The Jagged Edge Elite had placed her under house arrest in her own palace, along with two other members of the Royal Youth Alliance, Sergio and Samuel (who, it turned out, had been poisoned by Olde Quainte magic while he was working on the Alliance, and wasn’t expected to live much longer). But not Keira? And not Elliot himself, come to think of it. He supposed he would have been arrested if the W.S.U. hadn’t already chased him over a ravine and announced that he was dead. Which was sort of funny and a jolt at the same time.

  Anyhow, the idea of Princess Ko under arrest was even crazier than Keira in Bonfire, or himself in the World. That Princess had as much clue about being told what to do as he himself had about what ‘cardio’ meant.

  Another day, he heard that the King had been brought back from the World just in time to attend the Namesaking Ceremony in the Kingdom of Aldhibah. So the R.Y.A. had been partly successful. He felt proud. He’d been a major part of making that happen. But his pride clashed directly with the grave voices around him. Apparently, the King was now back from Aldhibah and was engaged in talks with the Jagged Edge Elite. He was asking for the release of his daughter, Princess Ko, the recovery of the remainder of his family from the World, and the restoration of the King himself to his rightful position. As King.

  This all seemed fine to Elliot. Soothing. Order on its way. But the way these people talked it was a gloomy, dreary sigh.

  *

  At first, Elliot assumed he’d make friends with the regulars here—in addition to Chime—and then he realised that was about as likely as a Nature-Strippian flat-headed jaguar strolling up and shaking his hand.

  The only time the regulars appeared from behind closed doors was meal-times, or on Sundays in the recreation room, and then they’d engage in their own conversations, leaning over their meals or their board games, backs to Elliot. Now and then, one would glance pointedly his way and their murmurs would stop, the others rolling eyes or twisting their mouths with impatience. He got it. There were things they couldn’t say. He was stifling them. But still, it was a lot like grade school—except that, in grade school, this hadn’t happened to him. He’d always had buddies. This was new. He wasn’t keen on it.

  Once, the man who slept in the bunk beneath him tapped on the side of the bed and said, ‘Hey kid, I hear you were a deftball player.’

  ‘I was,’ Elliot said. ‘I am.’

  He waited, but the man—Ming-Sun was his name—was silent.

  ‘You play yourself?’ Elliot said eventually, but the silence continued, and when he ducked his head over the side of the bed, Ming-Sun had turned onto his side and was asleep. Over the next few days, he made a few attempts to engage Ming-Sun in conversation, but each time the man either completely ignored him, or else furrowed his brow, like he couldn’t figure out what language Elliot spoke. So he gave up.

  5

  Nights, Elliot would lie in his bunk bed in the total darkness and ask himself just who he thought he was. But he found it changed all the time. He couldn’t get a hold of it.

  So he changed his tactics. He figured he’d sort through his memories. Starting with his childhood. The month when he ate a boiled egg and a mini-cheesecake for breakfast each morning. His first crush, on the dentist’s assistant. The complicated rules of the games that he and his buddies used to invent. He even tried to dig up the games the girls
played, their rhyming chants and the way they liked to spring up and down all the time. Over swinging ropes, or elastic bands they strung between their ankles, or just on the spot over nothing at all.

  One night he caught an even earlier memory of himself as a small boy sitting up on his father’s shoulders. There’d been some joke to do with his dad standing alongside Uncle Jon, to measure who was taller, and he, Elliot, had made his father the winner, by adding that extra height. His pride in this had made him twist his legs around his father’s neck, tight, and his father said, ‘Easy there,’ but easily, gripping Elliot’s ankles sure and firm, and then Uncle Jon’s hands had reached up, ‘Give the kid here, I’ll take him on my shoulders and we’ll see what’s what,’ and he’d tumbled into Uncle Jon’s arms.

  The memory ended there.

  Some nights he fished for glimpses of his little cousin, Corrie-Lynn, and he recalled how she’d sit in her pram as a baby, pulling out the ribbons that her mother, Auntie Alanna, used to tie in the child’s hair. He remembered taking one from her little hand, seeing the fine hairs tangled in it, turning back to her cool, steady gaze as she wrenched the next ribbon away.

  He took himself through grade school to high school, afternoons riding motorscooters with his buddies, going to Sugarloaf, falling in love, breaking hearts, working the farms and the greenhouse.

  He dragged himself through the night he found his Uncle Jon dead and his father missing, the year he spent hunting for his dad in Purple caverns. Getting snared by Princess Ko for her Royal Youth Alliance—the terrible day when he learned that his father was dead, and he himself was chased by choppers—finding his father alive in a doorway in the World, and then his memories hit darkness.

  There was still a thin thread of light in that darkness. He saw it every night. But it was always too dark in here, in this bunkroom, to see it properly. Noisy, also. The clattering and clanging, toilets flushing, and a general sense of water running. There were constant leaks, buckets everywhere—and more distant sounds, sometimes he thought he heard a drumbeat, but he couldn’t disentangle this from the thudding of his own heart. There were strange shrieks and distant howls, and now and then a sound like remote animals gargling, but again, that would be entwined with the noises in the bathroom pipes . . .