A Tangle of Gold

by Jaclyn Moriarty

There was no reply.

  Eventually, all the papers were piled on the table. She found the cover page.

  Design Essay

  Holly Tully, Student Number: 7891351 (C)

  She smiled. Sometimes her mother seemed so young. She flicked through and realised there were no page numbers. Sometimes her mother seemed like an idiot.

  How was she going to put it back in order? She’d have to read it.

  She sighed, turned to a random page and read:

  After all is the rage of the inconsiderate. However, the twinning of elastic forms a car wreck. This, in itself, cannot justify the flourished redbrick nor the pipings of the muddle. Bath water should always be sharp as a crisis of toadstools.

  1

  Elliot is tearing off the mask. It’s taped to his hair. It rips away hair as he pulls. There they are, the Greys, crushing the bones in his face. Elliot is tearing off the mask. It’s taped to his body. Strips of skin come away with the tape. There they are, the Greys, crowding in at him. He’s tearing off the mask. It’s taped to his eyes. Splinters of his eyes are ripped away. Elliot is tearing off his mask. There they are, the—

  ‘You have to stay still,’ says the voice. ‘Or the poison will reach your heart and kill you.’

  Elliot tears off the mask. The Greys are there with rakes. He tears off the mask. The Greys shine a flashlight in his eyes and the fine line of light turns to flame.

  ‘You have to stay still,’ the voice repeats, matter-of-fact, someone at the laundromat telling him he has to use the third machine along.

  Elliot tears off the mask. The Greys are tossing balls of flame at him. It’s a flame game. This, he can do. He’s a deftball champion. He springs, stretches, catches the flameball with both hands. His triumph cracks: his palms are alight! He shouts, incensed. ‘You’re throwing fire!’

  ‘You have to stay still,’ says the voice.

  He tears off his mask. The Greys get him in a pincer-grip.

  ‘Stay still,’ the voice reminds him. ‘And tell me this. What colour is the pain? How does it sound?’

  Elliot tears off his mask. A thin arm snakes around his neck. It’s the slender arm of a child. It’s a very fine snake. The snake has bristles. The snake is tightening, the bristles are sharpening, the—

  ‘You have to stay still,’ says the voice. ‘And tell me this. What shape is the pain?’

  Elliot is tearing off his mask.

  ‘You have to stay still,’ says the voice. ‘And tell me, how do you rate the pain? Out of ten, how do you rate it?’

  Elliot is reaching up to tear off the mask but he stops and snarls, ‘A thousand.’

  The voice goes still.

  Elliot sleeps.

  *

  The days were full of underhanded mountains.

  These mountainous days, he thought. Elliot slept but they were always there, the mountains, waiting to rise beneath him. Each one prodded his back until he woke, then it tore open his flesh, shattered his spine and kept on rising.

  ‘You have to stay still. What number is the pain? What does it look like?’

  Once, he opened his eyes and caught a snapshot. Close walls. A man in a chair.

  The mountain speared his spine again.

  ‘You have to stay still.’

  He dreamed that Chime appeared and spoke: ‘For now, what you will do, and what you’ll do is this. You will let yourself be sewn together. Your mouth will be sewn closed, your body will lie, perfect and still, while we fold you like a suit of clothes, your arms crossed at the front.’ Her voice turned low and mirthful. ‘Your legs, we will brush them down first, for they won’t fold up without they’d break.’

  He screamed, and the voice of the man in the chair said, ‘You have to stay still.’

  Days veered between mountains.

  He opened his eyes and a different man was standing above him, arms crossed, a muted smile. ‘What are we going to do with you?’ It was the Assistant. His voice leaked irony. The irony turned acidic and splashed on Elliot’s flesh.

  ‘Tell me,’ said the man in the chair. ‘What shape is your pain? What is its colour?’

  Elliot roared.

  The Assistant opened the door and it closed behind him with a thud. The thud flung itself back across the room, belting Elliot with a gasp.

  ‘You have to stay still.’

  *

  The days subsided. Elliot found patches of sleep. He knew the pattern. Between patches, the Greys attacked. The man in the chair asked questions.

  Once, he paused in a Grey attack and recognised the man.

  It was Ming-Sun, from the bunk beneath Elliot’s. He’d tried to befriend him before and got nowhere. Now with all the questions?

  ‘What shape is the pain?’

  Elliot turned to shout at Ming-Sun for asking questions. ‘It’s a stack,’ he screamed instead. ‘It’s all piled up in a stack!’

  Ming-Sun wound his fingers together, let the fingers flare and closed them again.

  Elliot stared at this, furious. He slept.

  2

  Chime was in the room.

  The pain was there in long pale shreds but he could see her through it.

  ‘You took me into a Colour cavern,’ he said, but he didn’t recognise his own voice and it tore at his throat.

  Chime nodded.

  ‘Without protective clothing.’

  Her face folded a little then she nodded again. ‘If we’d put you in protective gear,’ she said, ‘you might have guessed we were going into a Colour cavern.’

  ‘But you wore protective gear?’

  ‘Of course.’

  The pain took shape and colour, embracing him from either side.

  ‘You have to stay still,’ said Ming-Sun as usual. ‘What would you rate it now? What number is the pain, out of ten?’

  ‘Five thousand.’

  Ming-Sun pressed his fingertips together and arched his hands so they appeared to rest on an invisible ball.

  Chime watched.

  The embrace loosened. There were cobwebs of pale sidling up to him again, but he could speak through those.

  ‘You took me into a Colour cavern without protective clothing,’ he repeated, hoarse and breathless.

  ‘The Greys were asleep,’ Chime said. ‘All you had to do was be quiet.’

  ‘I was quiet. Why did they wake?’

  Chime looked down at him, silent.

  ‘Wait,’ said Elliot, but something struck him from the side and he lunged.

  ‘You have to stay still.’

  He forced himself to stillness. ‘Wait. That’s where Hostile compounds are. Hidden behind Colour caverns. That’s the secret. That’s why no one ever finds them.’

  Chime tilted her head, shrugging one shoulder.

  ‘You’ve been attacked by Colours before,’ she said. ‘You have the scars.’

  ‘Not like this.’

  ‘It was the year you were seeking your father in the caverns?’

  ‘But he wasn’t there!’ Elliot shouted. ‘He was in a Hostile compound. But he wasn’t there either. He was in the World!’ He lost himself then, in stacks of truth, stacks of pain, layers of colour searing his forehead.

  ‘Stay still. Stay perfectly still.’

  When he woke again, Chime was gone.

  3

  One night, he woke inside fierce clarity.

  He was better.

  It was deep night, but a small electric lamp burned beside him. Ming-Sun was asleep in the chair.

  Elliot sat up. Nothing hurt. He was cured.

  He swung his legs over the side of the bed. For the first time, he noticed that his arms and legs and torso were bound in bandages. He touched his face and felt bandaging there too.

  He didn’t need any of that any more. He was better!

  He went to peel a bandage back, then decided against it. There are more important things, he thought. He wondered what he meant.

  Ming-Sun slept silently, chin sagging, doubling. Elliot crept pas
t, opened the door and found himself in a night-lit corridor.

  Everything was quiet.

  Important things, he reminded himself. He turned left. He passed closed doors with their signs. BRIEFING. STRATEGY. That one had a screw missing and tilted. The familiarity was so beautiful Elliot thought he might cry.

  It was so good to be cured.

  He found the kitchen, switched on the lights, and the warm surge and flicker nearly did him in. He loved this kitchen. And its lights!

  The important thing, of course, was cleaning. He saw that now. A bucket of warm, soapy water, wipes, garbage bags, gloves (X-large, because his hands were thick with bandaging). He began to take items from the pantry and the fridge, stacking up tinned beans, pasta, stock, unopened packets of cornflour, jars of dried rosemary and cloves. The garbage bags he filled with rotten potatoes, cream cheese turned blue, rancid butter, tea bags crawling with maggots. The sagging bulk of the garbage bags delighted him. Even better was sliding out the fridge shelves, blasting them with hot spray from the tap; reaching inside the pantry with dripping cloth, wringing out the cloth, turning the water in the bucket an instant deep grey.

  ‘This, and what can you be doing?’

  He’d just lifted the bucket by its handle. Chime was standing in the doorway, dressed in the oversized t-shirt she always slept in.

  ‘I’m emptying out this water,’ Elliot said. ‘It’s turned black.’

  Chime watched as he tipped the water down the sink and refilled the bucket. She came over to the deep freeze and drew out a stack of frozen meat.

  ‘These are to defrost for the morning,’ she explained. ‘I had forgot.’

  Elliot nodded.

  ‘Your eyes are wild,’ Chime added.

  He was back at the pantry, scrubbing again. Chime leaned against the bench, watching him.

  ‘I believe as that you should be in bed,’ she said.

  He ignored her.

  ‘Elliot,’ she said, her voice the same low song. ‘You know that I meant to kill you when I took you to the cavern of the Greys?’

  The cloth stopped swooping in circles. It concentrated on a single mark.

  ‘This, and that was our plan all along,’ Chime continued. ‘You cannot bring the son of a Loyalist into a Hostile compound. Keira was a fool to ask us.’

  The cloth resumed its slow, circular movements.

  ‘We needed you to be killed by Colours,’ Chime explained, ‘so that we could tell Keira it was an accident. Keira’s mother still has much power, even behind bars, and we could not offend her daughter. Once in the cavern, it was I who signalled the Greys.’

  Elliot turned. He wrung out the cloth into the bucket again.

  ‘You woke the Greys?’

  ‘Not just woke. Signalled. We have learned to use Greys and Purples as weapons. This, and you should know that some amongst us even carry them, in concentrated forms. Mischka set one against your uncle, for example.’

  Elliot waited for the noise to quieten. The garbage bags, boxes of food, dripping cloth, kitchen lights, all of it had begun shouting at him. It didn’t quiet. He spoke over it.

  ‘But you brought me back inside?’ he said. ‘You saved me.’

  Chime shrugged. ‘I have failed,’ she said. ‘In the end, to watch them kill you, this and I could not do. I have failed.’

  ‘You might want to quit with the repetition of that phrase,’ Elliot suggested. He dropped the cloth into the water and looked at her. ‘Keira trusted you people.’

  ‘Some things,’ Chime said, ‘are bigger than trust.’

  Elliot remembered the Assistant’s face looming above him—What are we going to do with you?

  ‘But why are they keeping me alive now?’ he asked.

  Chime tilted her head.

  ‘We are not,’ she said. ‘We expect you to die. None survive such an attack. Once you are gone, we will along and tell Keira that you were lost. For now, while we wait, we keep the signals scrambled. Thus, she cannot get in touch until too late.’

  ‘But, I’m better,’ Elliot whispered.

  ‘We have given you Ming-Sun. He is a magic-weaver. He cannot cure you, this is sure, but he helps to ease your pain. Ah, I should have let you die at once, out in the cavern, but here and I have failed. Hence you suffer a long, dark death. I am sorry. Does Ming-Sun help?’

  ‘I’m better,’ Elliot insisted, and then he was tearing off his mask again, the Greys coming at him with their carving knives and scalpels, dropping from the ceiling and straddling his shoulders so they could run their nails across his face and wrench out chunks of hair.

  *

  Someone carried him back to his room. ‘Stay still,’ Ming-Sun intoned through the night. ‘And tell me, what tune does this pain play?’

  This time he only answered with curses and shouts.

  ‘You may feel well again,’ Ming-Sun told him the next morning, when he was still curled up, groaning. ‘It’s an illusion. Do not leave this room again. Do not clean the cupboards! It will only make your suffering worse. Now, tell me, how does the pain sound?’

  ‘Tractor in a bathroom,’ Elliot breathed.

  He watched Ming-Sun’s hands flutter and felt the sharpness soften. He slept.

  When he next woke up, the room was dark again. Two thoughts were vibrant in his mind: They expected him to die. He planned to live.

  He breathed the second thought into the darkness a while: I intend to live.

  But then what? If he did live, they’d stage another accidental death. Especially now he knew the secret of their compound location. (Dumbest hiding place ever: behind Colour caverns. Also, ingenious.)

  He thought about the exit doors and the line that crossed his forehead. The answer was there in that line. The only way out was a different-coloured line.

  And the only way to get that was to become a Hostile.

  He’d have to pretend.

  The next day, he asked Ming-Sun to pass a message to Chime, asking her to visit him.

  She came in the late afternoon, defiance in her eyes, but her head darting about like a dragonfly, and Elliot realised she was nervous.

  ‘I just want to ask you a question.’

  Chime inclined her head.

  ‘Why did you become a Hostile?’

  ‘This, and I cannot tell you.’

  ‘Why not?’

  Ming-Sun moved his seat so it squealed along the floor. Chime stood by the bed, staring at Elliot, her shoulders rising and falling.

  ‘I see as what you are saying,’ she said eventually. ‘Very well. I came to be a Hostile through my father. He is a Colour Bender, as I have told you. The Hostiles need Colour Benders, and pay them well, for to monitor the Colour caverns while they build their compounds, and to train and concentrate Colours.’

  Elliot nodded. That made sense.

  ‘And then,’ Chime continued, ‘he fell to agreeing with their notions, as did I.’

  She folded her arms and waited.

  ‘So now,’ Elliot said, ‘will you tell me about these notions?’

  She blinked. ‘Why?’

  Elliot sorted through sentences, looking for something with enough truth to sound convincing. ‘It’s like this,’ he said eventually. ‘Time is so darn strange. You have to live in it, then your mind shrinkwraps it, so when you look back, it’s all compact. But you know what happens when I look at the year my father was missing? The year I was fighting and searching for him? It’s not shrinkwrapped at all. It’s one slow piece of memory after another.’

  She was frowning.

  ‘It was Hostiles did that to me,’ Elliot explained. ‘They tricked my father and chased him to the World. They killed my uncle. I can’t unhappen any of that, it’s part of me now.’ He shrugged. ‘But it’d be good to know why it happened.’

  Chime glanced down at Ming-Sun. As usual, he sat straight-backed, eyes half-closed, hands on his thighs, silent.

  She sat on the side of the bed. After a moment, she swung her legs up, stretched a
long beside Elliot, stared at the ceiling and began to speak.

  ‘I’ll start ten thousand years ago,’ she said.

  Elliot laughed.

  But she did. She took him through the history of royalty in Cello. King Sartor used to ride with bow and arrows, hunting peasants for the sport; Queen Veneze first invaded Aldhibah, wanting their silkworm farms for her gowns. Various monarchs further undermined relations with their neighbour, through treachery and deceit—the famous unnaming of the Undisclosed Province; the breach by Prince Murving of the Twenty-Year Peace. Over the course of their consecutive reigns, each King Parashi (I, II, III and IV) appropriated most of Cello’s land and livestock, leaving their subjects to starve.

  Chime told more than twenty similar stories. Some, Elliot had learned at school, but they’d always seemed like fairytales to him.

  ‘But the Royals are not like that these days,’ he said, beginning to feel drowsy.

  Chime said, ‘That is enough for now.’ She slipped from the room.

  *

  The next few days fell into a pattern. Afternoons, at three, Chime would visit, lie down on Elliot’s bed—she was so slight, it was like someone gently placing a coat alongside of him—and talk.

  One day, she described a concept called democracy. He argued that regular people could never know how to run a kingdom, or what was best for everyone, and Chime explained how the place could be divided into regions, people voting for their own representatives. That sort of made sense.

  Another day, she told him how the Royal marketing and PR people supervised the media, fostering a particular image of royalty.

  ‘Did you know that King Cetus is a quarter Carthanian and a quarter Southern Climean?’ Chime said. ‘And that the Queen has Mahlian blood?’

  Elliot shrugged. ‘I guess. I don’t know. Did I know that?’

  ‘It’s a matter of public record,’ Chime said, ‘but never discussed. Well, and the King’s skin is quite dark, but his photographs are altered to lighten him. The Princesses, you must know, have dark skin also, and dark hair: yet and do they wear makeup to change this, and dye their hair golden-blonde? They do.’

  Elliot thought back to Princess Ko and how some days her hair had seemed impossibly blonde.