The Fail Safe

by Jack Heath

  Unfortunately the explosion four weeks ago had cracked the springs and burned away the mesh. His leather shoes would have to do.

  Downstairs he grabbed an apple and a small packet of mixed nuts from the pantry and tossed them into his schoolbag. The food landed atop the muesli bars he had filched yesterday and the dried fruit he took the day before that.

  Fero filled a water bottle at the sink and threw it in, along with yesterday’s full bottle. He had been trained to go days without food or drink. He still remembered the dizziness, the headaches, the pain as his stomach shrank. The supplies in his backpack weren’t enough to attract attention, but he could make them last a week.

  At the bottom of the pantry was a nine-volt battery and some steel wool. Fero put them in separate pockets, as Ulrick Vartaniev had taught him.

  He hadn’t heard her come in, but suddenly he sensed Zuri behind him. Perhaps it was the smell of her shampoo, so faint that he could only detect it subconsciously. Or perhaps the echoes of his movements were coming back differently, the sound waves absorbed by her body rather than bouncing off the door.

  We all have superhuman senses, Vartaniev had told him. But most people don’t listen to them.

  Fero kept rummaging in the cupboards until he found a jar of instant coffee, then he turned around with it in his hand. He blinked. ‘Mum!’ he said. ‘You startled me.’

  ‘You’re up early,’ Zuri said. She wore a terrycloth robe and tattered slippers. Now that Fero had some memories of his actual mother, it seemed ridiculous that he had ever believed this impostor was related to him. She was too tall, and her hair wasn’t curly. Her eyes were gold-rimmed brown, much lighter than Fero’s.

  ‘Are you okay?’ she asked.

  ‘I haven’t been sleeping well. Want some coffee?’

  ‘Sure. Why haven’t you been sleeping?’

  Fero shrugged and turned on the kettle. ‘Schoolwork, I guess. I have lots of assignments due.’

  Zuri got two mugs out of the cupboard. ‘Do you need help? I can—’

  ‘No, no. It’s under control.’

  ‘Okay. But let me know if I can do anything, all right?’

  Fero clenched his teeth. Was it not enough to lie to him and spy on him? Now she wanted to watch over his shoulder as he did his homework too.

  ‘I care about you,’ Zuri said. She sounded maddeningly sincere. ‘You know that, right?’

  He took a deep breath. After today he would never see her again. ‘I’m handling it,’ he said.

  The kettle clicked. Zuri poured the boiling water into the mugs. Fero stirred in the instant coffee.

  A newspaper rested on the counter. The Coralsk Chronicle – a free weekly publication that was ninety per cent advertising and ten per cent stories stolen from more reputable papers. It would do nicely.

  ‘Did you see this?’ Fero asked.

  ‘Hmm?’

  He pointed to a story at random. ‘“Kamau’s oldest church vandalised”,’ he read. ‘That’s right near my school.’

  ‘How awful,’ Zuri said, and she sounded like she meant it. Fero supposed that she must be a fierce patriot – who else would volunteer to abandon her life and spy on a teenage boy for a year?

  ‘Yeah,’ Fero said. He rolled up the newspaper and jammed one end into his pocket, as though planning to finish reading the story later.

  ‘Wilt’s gone to the office already,’ Zuri said. ‘Would you like me to drive you to school?’

  Fero fought to keep his expression level. Wilt might be reporting his suspicions to Noelein right now. But he could have left early for any of a thousand other reasons.

  ‘I’ll take the train.’ Fero gulped down some coffee, tipped the rest into the sink and climbed back up the stairs. He threw a baseball cap, some sunglasses and a grey jumper into his schoolbag. He had a vague memory of some special face paint developed by the Bank that was invisible to the naked eye but fooled the facial recognition software in cameras. But he had no access to anything like that here. The hat and glasses would have to do.

  In the bathroom he took off both his shirts and casually, in case there were cameras in here, sprayed his torso liberally with deodorant. The exposed end of the newspaper in his pocket was also doused with the highly flammable spray.

  The scar on his chest throbbed. It didn’t hurt except when he was looking at it or thinking about it. He could vividly picture the car accident – the tiny cubes of shatterproof glass, the stink of burned rubber, the airbag slamming into his face like an elephant sitting on him. But he knew this memory was fake. The scar was actually a bullet wound. Dessa Cormanenko had shot him.

  Fero didn’t remember this. According to Cormanenko, Troy had been about to cut the throat of a Librarian who was undercover in Besmar. She had shot him to save the Librarian’s life.

  Cormanenko must have lied. Everything else she had told him was true – it was only thanks to her that he knew who he was – but the Besmaris were the good guys. Vartaniev wouldn’t have sent him to murder someone in cold blood.

  Fero pulled his shirts back on and returned to his bedroom. One last look revealed nothing else he wanted to take. None of these items were precious to him. The birthday cards were forgeries. The books were written in Kamauan, a language he had learned in the Bank and which he now loathed. The clothes were linked to memories that weren’t real.

  He wouldn’t miss this place.

  ‘Bye, Fero,’ Zuri called as he clomped down the stairs.

  ‘See you later,’ he lied.

  The cameras were everywhere. On lampposts, in ticket machines, behind fast food shop windows. Most pedestrians didn’t even seem to notice them. Fero walked out of the apartment building and strolled through the crowd towards the subway entrance, fighting the urge to look up.

  Anyone travelling down the escalator towards the train platform would be filmed the whole way. But because of the angle of the camera, someone coming up the escalator would be invisible for three or four seconds before they emerged onto the street.

  Fero couldn’t use the dead spot yet. He was sure Kamauan intelligence operatives were watching him on their screens right now. If he went down the escalator, turned around and came back up, they would be immediately suspicious. He wouldn’t have time to trigger his distraction. He would have to go to school first. Pretend everything was normal until this afternoon, when he could put his plan into practice.

  Other green-uniformed students shoved past Fero as he flicked through the deodorant-soaked newspaper, pretending to scan it. He threw it into a half-empty bin at the top of the escalator. Over the last three weeks he’d peered down into this bin every time he passed it, and it was always full on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons. He thought the garbage truck came on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Today was Tuesday, so the newspaper should still be there when he came back.

  He stepped onto the escalator and descended into the grimy subway. He didn’t look at the camera fixed to the wall, but he did notice the graffiti beneath it. Some enterprising vandal had noticed the blind spot and taken advantage of it. Besmaris burn in hell, the scrawl read. If it had been anti-government graffiti, it would have been cleaned up and investigated within hours. But since the explosion at the Botanic Gardens, protests against the state had withered away. Blind patriotism had sprung up in their place. Kamauans were united in their hatred of Besmar.

  Some of the other commuters glanced at the graffiti as they passed, but none reacted. This made Fero feel threatened. These people may not be spies, but they would have no sympathy for a Besmari boy hiding in their midst.

  Fero stepped off the escalator at the bottom. A distant rumbling became a deafening howl as a train swept into the station. Fero stood huddled among the other commuters in the chill blast of wind.

  The doors hissed and parted. Fero shuffled into the carriage. There were some free seats today. There had been yesterday, too. Many workers were probably taking leave, to be with their families in case of a nuclear alert. Or maybe a vi
rus was going around.

  During Troy Maschenov’s training, he had been exposed to weakened strains of almost a hundred viruses. If something was spreading in Kamau, Fero was probably safe. Just the same, he stuffed his hands in his pockets so he wouldn’t accidentally touch anything. He sank into a seat by the window and watched the reflections of the other passengers in the glass.

  An old woman with short bleach-blonde hair boarded the train just before the doors closed. She sat down behind Fero. He had seen her before, following him. He was sure she was a Librarian, and she might not be the only one. The group of chatting students could be spies. One of them, a boy with dreadlocks and an eyebrow ring, was in some of Fero’s classes. The woman in the bright apricot trousers was a less likely candidate – she stood out and couldn’t easily change her clothes.

  Act normal, Fero told himself. He knew his true identity, but he was clinging to the hope that the Library didn’t know he knew it.

  ‘Hey, Fero!’ said Olaf, the boy with the dreadlocks. ‘How are you?’

  Fero smiled. ‘I’m good. How about you?’ Was Olaf trying to keep an eye on him, or was he just being friendly?

  ‘So I made it onto the soccer team,’ Olaf said. ‘You think we’ll beat Towzhik on Friday?’

  Fero was one of the school’s star players. He suddenly wondered if Troy Maschenov liked soccer, or if this hobby had been programmed into him by the Library.

  Olaf sounded like he was trying to speak casually. Either he was studying Fero’s reactions – or he was simply desperate to be congratulated.

  Paranoia was exhausting, and intelligence organisations thrived on that. Fero had heard stories of spies who turned themselves in just so they could find out if their spouses, parents or children had been working against them.

  ‘With you on the team?’ Fero said. ‘They don’t stand a chance.’

  Olaf shrugged, but he looked pleased.

  Fero got off the train at the next stop and followed the crowd of students into Coralsk High School, a red-brick building with ivy growing up the corners. A spiked fence of black-painted metal surrounded the campus, supposedly for the students’ safety.

  Inside the front doors, Fero held out his backpack to the security guard. After the explosion a month ago, schools had started searching bags for weapons.

  The security guard had hazel eyes and a polyester shirt that was too big for her. If she knew who Fero really was, she might hesitate when she saw the extra food in his backpack. But she just pawed through it and then handed it back.

  ‘Thank you for your cooperation,’ she said.

  ‘No problem.’ Fero put the backpack on his shoulders and walked to class.

  ENHANCED INTERROGATION

  ‘There’s a refrigerator and a rope,’ Mr Grigor said. ‘Fixed to the ceiling is a steel bar. Let’s say the fridge weighs a hundred kilos and you can only lift fifty. How do you get it off the ground?’

  ‘A lever,’ Gliyana said. Gliyana was a freckled girl with bright eyes. She was on most of the school sports teams with Fero, and in most of his classes. If any of his fellow students was a spy, it would be her.

  ‘We covered leverage in the last lesson.’ Mr Grigor was sketching a stick figure and a fridge on the whiteboard. ‘This time you don’t have a lever.’

  ‘You ask a friend to help you.’

  ‘You don’t have any friends.’

  The class laughed. Mr Grigor ignored them. ‘Come on, people. Think.’

  ‘You fill the fridge with helium,’ said Cerah.

  That got a laugh too. Cerah was a smart, cynical girl with braided hair and a deep voice. She rarely spoke up, but what she said was always worth hearing.

  Fero looked around at his classmates. He wasn’t friends with any of these people, and he doubted he would miss them. But he would miss this mood – the safety of the classroom. Unlike in the high-stakes world of espionage, here he wouldn’t get killed for saying the wrong thing.

  ‘There’s no way helium could provide enough lift,’ Mr Grigor said. ‘Even hydrogen wouldn’t work. Think about the steel bar on the ceiling.’

  ‘You throw the rope over the bar,’ Gliyana said, ‘tie one end to the top of the fridge – is there a hook?’

  ‘There is.’ Mr Grigor drew a hook on top of the fridge.

  ‘Then you pull on the other end. Your own weight plus your own strength equals a hundred kilos.’

  ‘You’re on the right track. But let’s say you only weigh forty-nine kilos.’

  The class groaned. Mr Grigor beamed. ‘Irla,’ he said. ‘How would you make up the missing kilogram of force?’

  Fero turned to look at Irla. For a long time she had been Fero’s only friend at school. One night she’d invited him to a political protest. When the protest turned violent – a masked woman threw a brick at a man making a speech – riot police showed up and arrested everyone. The Library had arranged for Fero to be released before anything bad happened to him, because they needed him to find Cormanenko in Besmar. Irla hadn’t been so lucky. At school the next day she was hollow-eyed and pale, bruises on the back of her neck. Ever since then she had avoided Fero. She had started to dress more conservatively, with no protest badges or ribbons adorning her uniform. Her enthusiastic talk of a career in politics had stopped.

  ‘Throw the rope over twice,’ Irla mumbled.

  ‘Excellent,’ Mr Grigor said, drawing on the diagram. ‘You tie the rope to the fridge, loop it over the bar, attach it to the fridge a second time and throw it over again before you pull on the other end, like so. Why would that help?’

  Irla lowered her gaze to think about it. The bruising on the back of her neck had gone a sickly yellow.

  Fero suddenly realised that he knew exactly what had caused her injuries. He gripped the sides of his chair. The classroom vanished. The voices faded away. He found himself in a dark, cold room. His heart rate accelerated to a dangerous pace.

  He was Troy Maschenov again. He was twelve years old, kneeling on bruised kneecaps, head down, looking at the blood-spattered drain in the tiled floor. Clamps were fixed around his neck and wrists. He couldn’t move at all.

  He was in Velechnya.

  ‘It’s not a standard guillotine,’ the Investigator said. Troy couldn’t see him but could hear his voice echoing around the stone walls. ‘This one has two blades – one blunt, one sharp. If I decide you’re not useful, you get the sharp blade.’

  ‘Please,’ Troy said. ‘I didn’t do anything wrong. Just tell me what you want.’

  ‘Let’s be clear on the rules,’ the Investigator continued. ‘I already know the answers to several of the questions I’ll be asking you.’

  Ulrick Vartaniev’s voice echoed through his head. Show your fear. The braver you seem, the harder they will push.

  ‘I haven’t done anything!’ Troy cried. ‘Let me go. Please.’

  ‘If you lie to me, you get the blunt blade.’

  ‘I’m just a kid. I don’t know what you’re talking—’

  There was a metallic rushing sound, like a giant knife sliding along a sharpener. Something slammed into the back of Troy’s neck. He screamed. The pain shot down his spine and up into his brain. He couldn’t believe his head was still attached to his shoulders.

  ‘That was the blunt blade,’ the Investigator said mildly.

  The more frightened you seem, Vartaniev said, the more convincing they will find your lies.

  ‘Please,’ Troy whimpered. It wasn’t hard to seem scared.

  ‘Let’s start with your name, shall we?’

  ‘I told you my name,’ Troy said. ‘I’m Fritz Heschev. I live at—’

  Shing! The blunt blade came down again. It landed right between his vertebrae, sending a shock of agony through his body.

  ‘Your name,’ the Investigator said.

  ‘That is my name!’ Troy screamed. ‘I’m Fritz Heschev!’

  He sensed the Investigator reach for the handle.

  ‘No, no, don’t—’

>   The blade hit him again. Tears stung his eyes. How was he expected to endure this?

  ‘We know you are Troy Maschenov. How did you find your way to—’

  ‘Fero.’

  Fero looked up. He was back in the classroom, breathing heavily.

  ‘Fero,’ Mr Grigor repeated. ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘Fine,’ Fero said, too loudly, too sharply. Everyone was staring at him.

  ‘Okay. Tell me why throwing the rope over twice would help?’

  Fero stared at the whiteboard. The square box under the rope didn’t look like a fridge anymore. It had become the blade of a guillotine.

  ‘The fridge weighs no less than before,’ Mr Grigor said. ‘You’re pulling with exactly the same amount of force. How is it possible that it will rise when the rope is looped over the bar twice?’

  Irla saved him. ‘The force is the same,’ she said. ‘So the fridge rises half as fast.’

  ‘It wasn’t rising at all before.’

  ‘You know what I mean. If you pull a metre of rope through the pulley, the fridge only rises fifty centimetres, but it takes half as much force to lift it.’

  ‘Ah, we got there in the end. Thank you, Irla. Does everyone understand?’

  Fero made eye contact with Irla. She was Kamauan, but she had suffered like him.

  I understand, he thought. And I’m sorry.

  Irla looked away.

  ‘Your assignment will be to work out how much rope you would need to lift the car of a parent or relative,’ Mr Grigor said. ‘Assume the ceiling is three metres high. You’ll need to know how much you weigh and how much the car weighs.’

  ‘Can we try it?’ someone asked.

  Mr Grigor laughed. ‘If your parents provide the car, I’ll provide the rope and the steel bar.’

  After class, Fero caught up with Irla in the corridor. She was walking by herself.