A bell rang.
Keira froze, trying to sort out the code. But there wasn’t one. It was just a long, shrill line. And it was coming from somewhere nearby, not from the warning towers.
‘School bell,’ Gabe told her.
So those were real too. Unbelievable.
She shifted the backpack. Gabe had found this for her. It was a soft corduroy material, midnight blue. ‘That’s my favourite colour,’ Keira had said, when he pulled it down. He’d glanced at her and away again. Then he’d run downstairs and packed the bag with a ringbinder of paper, a zip-up case of pens and a wrapped sandwich, which he’d cut into two triangles.
‘The office is over there.’ Gabe pointed. ‘Tell them your name and they’ll give you your homeroom.’
‘My what?’
But he was turning away. Out of the crowd, a group was emerging and drifting towards them. Shelby, Nikki and Cody.
‘Hiya, Sophy,’ said Shelby.
‘Hey, Soph. Hey, Gabe.’
‘Sophy. How’s things? Got your schedule yet? You chosen your electives?’
Other kids passed, staring. ‘Who’s that?’ she heard someone ask, and then, ‘I think it’s Gabe Epstein’s cousin. She’s Edgian, I heard. Wild.’
Shelby punched Keira’s arm and wished her luck. Cody told her she should ask for a locker on the second floor cause they closed with a more satisfying click. He demonstrated the sound, tongue against his teeth. Nikki and Gabe pointed to the place where she should meet them at lunch-time. Then they were moving away.
‘Catch ya later, Soph.’
‘See you, Soph.’
‘Bye, Soph. Good luck today.’ And so on.
*
By midday, Keira’s wrist was aching and she had to actually slap her own face to stay awake. It had stopped being funny again. These people wrote things out by hand. She’d thought the papers in the ringbinder were meant for an origami class or something, and the pens for art, but no! Turned out that in every single class a teacher stood at the front of the room and said, ‘Write this down.’
‘Why?’ she asked the first time it happened, and people snickered and twisted in their completely-ergonomically-unsound chairs to look at her.
The teacher pretended not to hear.
But seriously, why? Didn’t they have this on datafile somewhere?
She’d been about to pursue her line of questioning, when the teacher started talking. Then, as the talking continued, a terrible suspicion came over Keira. As far as school went, this was it.
A teacher talking.
That guy up there, all by himself? He was going to talk at them in that deep, slow voice, without even basic laser technology. No soundtrack. Not a single virtual representation.
How was anybody supposed to see what he was saying? Let alone stay awake? His words kept sitting on her eyelids.
As the day went on, it kept happening. The only variation was the method of monotony chosen by each teacher—high-pitched voice with regular upward sweeps in intonation; long, unendurable pauses midway through sentences; repetition of particular, inane phrases (‘which is why . . .’; ‘as to which, see . . .’; ‘I’m waiting . . .’). Some of the other kids yawned, she noticed, their heads sort of sprawled onto the desks, and a couple of times she saw people quietly napping. And they weren’t even night-dwellers like her.
Mathematics seemed okay at first because they were allowed to solve problems themselves, from a book. But when she asked if she could borrow an algorithmic machine, people turned and stared. Some even winced, like her weirdness was hurting their faces.
They didn’t have algorithmic machines. They used paper and pens and their brains! to solve these problems. The teacher seemed triumphant about this, which was truly mystifying. Not ashamed, but proud.
*
At lunch-time she sat in the school grounds with Gabe, Shelby, Nikki and Cody. They all did their ‘Hey, Soph!’ ‘Soph, how’s the day going?’ thing, which was already beginning to feel like a shell being constructed around her. She wanted to punch it open.
She tried to make things real by saying, ‘Is it just me or is this system inefficient? I mean, are the teachers seriously reciting the same facts, over and over, to different classes?’
The others widened their smiles and said, ‘You bet, Soph. Hey, want to come out to the dam at Sugarloaf later?’ while their eyes slid towards each other, smirks around their mouths.
So she stopped talking and ate the sandwich Gabe had made for her. It was good. Fresh bread. Butter that tasted sort of bright. And some kind of fruit jam with little bits inside it that burst open and shot flavour.
*
The last class of the day was Computing Studies. It was held in a small, dark room which was labelled ‘Computing Machine Room’. That was funny to her. The idea that CMs needed their own room. Sort of like labelling a room ‘Electric Light Bulb Room’ and then closeting all your electric lights inside it. Instead of hanging them up around the buildings where they might, say, come in handy?
Shelby and Nikki were both in this class, and Keira was smiling at her thoughts when she saw them. ‘What?’ they said, smiling back. ‘What, Sophy?’ But she shook her head. They wouldn’t get it. They were probably all in favour of locking away those three, boxy old Roxburgh computing models that were lined up at the front of this classroom.
Everyone sat, and the teacher, an old guy wearing a loose tie, sat at one of the CMs. He half-turned to the class, hands on the keyboard. So he was going to demonstrate, Keira guessed. Well, at least there’d be something to look at while he talked. Something other than facial tics and bad fashion choices.
The old guy was typing.
Keira watched the screen.
He typed a while then stopped. He swivelled so he was facing the machine squarely. He typed again. He curled his hand into a fist and tapped his mouth, frowning. He switched off the machine, waited while it powered down, then started it up again. He frowned and pushed his chair along (with a shriek of floorboards) to the next machine. He went through the same process. Same with the third.
At last he turned to the class.
‘People,’ he said, ‘I’m afraid we have a problem with the machines.’ He glanced towards the window at the back of the room. ‘Why not have us a breather? Looking mighty sunny out there.’
There was a great slide of chairs moving backwards and people standing.
‘You’re kidding, right?’ Keira said. Her eyes ran down the lines of print on the three screens.
‘Excuse me?’
‘It’s just the straw-hat virus.’
‘The what?’ The teacher peered at her. ‘Not sure I know you. You sitting in today?’
‘I’m Sophy. I’m new,’ she said. ‘You know that your machines have the straw-hat virus, right? It’s common on the old Roxburgh models. You just need to use the Carlisle fix.’
She felt the room still around her, and felt herself blushing. Maybe she was missing something here. Like this was a trick way he started every class and there was some procedure they were supposed to follow next.
‘Now, what language do you speak where you’re from, Sophy?’ the teacher joked. ‘The Carlisle fix, what?’
There were one or two obliging laughs, but otherwise the room stayed quiet.
Keira moved to the first computing machine. She put her fingers on the keyboard and let them fly. A few seconds later, she sat back.
‘There,’ she said. ‘Fixed.’
She moved to the other machines and did the same.
‘Well, what do you know!’ the teacher exclaimed, studying each machine. ‘You went ahead and fixed them! Looks like we’ve got a class after all! Go ahead and sit down, guys!’
She felt a glow for just a moment—the beauty of computing machines; the pleasure of fixing a simple glitch; the old guy’s smile—and then she turned and the glow snapped out. Every face was scowling.
She was an idiot. They’d wanted to go out in the sun. (Day-dwellers.
Of course they did.) She’d just killed a break for them.
Then the nice old guy spent an hour teaching them a programming language she’d known since she was two.
*
Gabe drove her back to his farm at the end of the schoolday.
He was silent. She watched through the window.
‘Seriously,’ she said, ‘do you need this much space to grow food?’
Gabe blinked and adjusted his hands on the steering wheel.
‘I guess I do eat,’ Keira admitted.
There was another silence, then Keira piped up again. ‘I mean, you could fit my entire city in that field, right? That’s probably the reason for crop failures,’ she went on. ‘Too much space. We should suggest it to the Farms Provincial Council. Try crowding your crops.’
She looked at Gabe again. His eyes were on the road. His jaw had a sort of set look.
‘I guess you guys know what you’re doing. Still. Could be the crops are just lonely and want some company?’
She was kidding. She was finding herself funny. Gabe wasn’t. Unless he was laughing very deep within himself.
Ah well. They passed a field of animals. Some kind of sheep, she guessed, or goats. They were chewing and looking miserable and thin. Or did they always look like that? Maybe they’d just been shorn. She remembered the word ‘shorn’ just as she reached it in the sentence. She thought about telling Gabe that, but changed her mind.
He turned into his driveway sharply and they hit a rut. Her head bounced against the window. Ow, she thought.
*
That night, a Dark Grey thundered into town, and Keira huddled in bed while it pounded on the security shutters, shaking the windows in their frames. It swept around the farmhouse all night, so that sometimes the hammering dimmed, and she drifted to sleep, but then she would wake with a start to find it back outside her room, pummelling so hard that her bed rattled. In the distance, she could hear glass shattering, animals shrieking, and once the voice of a farmhand yelling abuse at the Grey from inside the barn. The Grey retaliated with a series of mighty thuds against the barn roof and the farmhand’s voice fell silent. In the morning, she and Gabe walked outside to survey the damage, which was not nearly as bad as she’d expected in the night.
9
Over the next few weeks, Keira began to see how you dealt with school. You powered yourself down to a point of semi-consciousness. That’s why the kids had half-closed eyes, she realised. You draped yourselves over the furniture. You sketched humorous doodles in the margins of your notes and angled these towards your classmates, who rewarded you with crooked smiles. And when a teacher made a properly funny joke, or shared some anecdote about how their car broke down on the way to school that morning? You felt a jolt of pleasure. This sparked you up for a bit, then you dwindled again.
There was so much the movies didn’t teach about school.
Still, it was okay sometimes. Brainstorming, where everyone shouts, turned out to be more fun and strident, than virtual brainstorming. The History teacher, Mr Guthrie, was good. She started to look forward to his classes. His voice played games with itself, slinking so low that it was almost out of sight then leaping out with a boom, say. Also, it made stories out of facts. Keira found that if she closed her eyes she could sometimes see pictures of his words inside her head.
Still, she was skeptical. It was all relative.
*
At lunch-times, she sat with Gabe and his friends. They said ‘Soph!’ a lot, and otherwise talked amongst themselves. She spent her time staring at the crack through to the World. There it was, a strand of light, hovering at waist-height in the middle of the schoolyard, and she was the only one who saw it. Kids would brush right past it, or through it even, without noticing. It would tremble or sway at their touch, then right itself again.
It was tightly knotted—she’d done that after they’d got the Baranskis back, so that the Girl-in-the-World wouldn’t send something through and expose them. (You couldn’t trust that Madeleine. She’d seemed weirdly invested in the whole thing. As if it had anything to do with her.) But any time she wanted, she, Keira, could unknot the crack and send words to the World. Staring at the tangled light each day was comforting.
*
She still hadn’t figured out how you coped with a town like Bonfire. Its key problem, as far as she could see—well, its key problem was that it was in the Farms, and the best way to solve that would be to roll up the entire province and stow it in somebody’s hall closet—but anyway, its other key problem was the people. There were too few of them. So the same people kept showing up everywhere. It was like a comedian had written three jokes and kept running through them on a loop.
She’d go to the Town Square with Gabe and the others, and sit at a table at the Bakery café, and she’d think: Why? Why are we here? There is nothing new to see.
Another thing she’d noticed was that all you had to do was agree with a stranger that, yep, it sure was humid today, to become lifelong buddies. The girl who worked here at the Bakery café was practically Keira’s soul mate on account of that moment with the icepack for the headache that Keira never actually had.
‘Hey there, you! Why didn’t you tell me you were Gabe’s cousin?’ The girl had pounced, seeing Keira on the street one day, early on. ‘Ah, I should’ve guessed anyhow. You and Gabe both have those great cheekbones! Sort of sharpish? Of course you’re part of the family!’
That had not endeared her to Keira. Also, it underlined how poor the Farmers’ eyesight was: Gabe’s cheekbones were nothing like her own.
10
After weeks of summer, winter blew in one Saturday and Keira woke to a window spangled with frost. Outside rain fell steadily, and trees showered and drooped. Gabe was knocking on her bedroom door, calling her name. Before she’d replied, he threw the door open, tossed her coat onto the bed and asked if she could give him a hand.
‘You reckon you can drive a tractor?’ he said, once they were outside, huddled under coat-hoods, rain hitting their faces and hands.
‘Sure,’ she said, then shrugged. ‘I think.’
Who knew, to be honest, but she hadn’t ridden her bike since she got here—they’d locked it in a barn where it wouldn’t attract attention—and the idea of turning an ignition, the roar of an engine, the shifting of gears, was blissful.
It turned out he wanted her to hook up a trailer to a tractor and drive it across a field or something.
‘Take this route,’ he said, pointing. ‘I’ll meet you there,’ and he set off at a half-run. Rain splattered behind him.
She hooked up the trailer. Her hands were purple with cold. She climbed up in the tractor, started it and drove.
No problem. Easy. And ah, it was good. Rumbling along. Sure, it was slow, but this was machinery and she was in control.
Gabe was in the distance, crouched down, close to a fence. She followed the route he’d suggested for a moment, then reconsidered. It made no sense to track along the outside like that. He must have been distracted by the rain and the rush.
She cut across the field instead, moving at a good, steady pace.
Halfway across, she was suddenly moving at no pace at all.
The wheels spun, mud splattered. There was a curious tipping sensation, and she realised that the right side of the tractor was slowly sinking. Everything tilted. She leaned against the tilt in a panic, but the tractor ignored her. A moment later, like it wanted to make its own decisions, it stopped sinking and held. She half-stood and gazed around her. The tractor was wedged at a hilarious angle.
She looked across to where Gabe was, saw him stand, scratch the back of his neck and look down the field towards where she should be. She saw him turning slowly. She saw him see her.
Even from this distance, she could see the amazement in his eyes. Then, there it was again: the habitual resignation, the firm set to his jaw.
*
It took them almost an hour to get the tractor out of the mud.
&nb
sp; Gabe did not speak except to call instructions in his low, reasonable voice. Then he finished the work himself while she stood in the rain and watched. Back inside, they hung their coats, raindrops splattering. He handed her a towel and took one for himself. They went into the kitchen, towels still around their necks, and Gabe got out a frying pan. Keira made coffee.
The room crackled with their silence. It seemed to shout with every crack of egg into the pan.
But he kept right on frying eggs and bacon, slicing tomato and mushrooms, moving around her politely, not saying a word.
He was still wet from the rain. Drops of water slipped from his ears.
Those ears, Keira thought. Why would he wear his hair so short with ears like that?
In Jagged Edge, they’d have fixed them by now. An afternoon procedure.
Not that they’d been able to fix Keira’s acne, of course. She’d had five procedures and tried seven different courses of drug treatment, but it kept right on breaking out. She touched it now. She hadn’t had time to apply her concealant, and her fingers ran across the welts and bumps.
‘Try cappelroot tea,’ Gabe said.
Keira’s hands fell from her face.
‘What?’
‘Cappelroot. They grow it on Nikki’s farm. Might clear up your skin.’ He shrugged. ‘Might not.’
Her face burned and sizzled like bacon fat.
So that’s how you’re going to play it, she thought.
*
Later that day, Gabe drove her into town to meet the others in the Town Square.
‘Soph!’ they all agreed, as usual.
Then they settled down to their coffees and their Farms talk. Nikki was upset—something to do with a necklace her dad had given her for a birthday. She was sure she’d worn it when she took the harvester out that morning, but now it was gone. She kept feeling her neck for it. Keira asked what the necklace looked like, but Nikki ignored her. After a moment, she turned towards Keira and said, ‘I know, Soph! Right!’ and then returned her attention to the others.
Everyone told Nikki it was sure to be in the harvester. Just check when you get home. Cody was excited because some fancy new oil paints had arrived. He said he’d paint Nikki’s necklace back into being, that’s how good these paints were. Shelby said she felt like blowing something up today, and she’d be happy to blow up the harvester for Nikki. The necklace will sail into the air, she said, above the other shrapnel, and then Shelby would fly her crop-duster over the wreckage and catch it. Elaborate, she admitted, but effective.
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