“The Feed going down is the best thing to happen for books for years, Tom. My Chronicle shall be a bestseller.”
“Still the Resister.”
“Listen, young man, we need to remember basic knowledge. Metalwork. How to make clothes rather than patch and repair.” The old man points to their few ancient books. “Quantum Mechanics Made Simple. What use is that? Think of all the knowledge that was lost because it was never printed. Stored on the Feed, or some computer thing.” He splays his hands. “We’re doing our best with you all, Jane and I, trying to remember everything before we croak. And I record it in my Chronicle. That’s why one of you simply must learn to read. I honestly don’t know why it’s proving so difficult!” He looks sideways, lost in thought, then changes his tone. “You should get some pictures on the walls in here. Brighten the place up. We’ve got some spare. Or make a commission, Tom. A family portrait. I always told Jane she should try portraits. Good money in portraits.”
“Not anymore. No money.”
“Find her some more orange paint and she’d do anything for you.”
“And what’s your . . . what was it called? Cut?”
“Commission?”
“Right. Your commission.”
A crease pulls at Graham’s eyebrows. “That she be happy,” he says eventually, and then, after a while, “What do I do if she’s taken?”
“You’d get through it. We’ve all coped with loss.”
“No,” Graham says steadily. He raises his hands. Flexes his fingers. “How do I do it? Show me what you did to Guy.”
Guy’s face, then Ben’s. Tom’s heart swells, his chest contracts. He nearly chokes, but hides it. “Don’t you remember the vid?” he coughs out, and he has barely said the word before something clicks in. Sudden swathes of his memories of the vid, as Ben had first shown it to him in the family’s apartment at the top of the tower, and the ensuing argument, one of so many, as they’d been caught in the sunset’s amber glow while the first black tendrils of terror tightened the streets below them.
A man had slept, camera close, his face filling the screen. real-time signs, it had flashed. The man breathed deeply, then his eyebrows rose. He winced. The movement took his mouth. More contortions. A grimacing of his jaw . . . and then he had relaxed. A timer in the bottom of the screen had glowed red: barely five seconds was all the time it took. The man breathed out again, in again, and opened his eyes. His fiery bloodred eyes. Their color leaked away to the densest black, like orbs of glass were staring out of his face, and watch out had faded in across the screen.
“Tom?”
Tom jerks at Graham’s touch. He can feel him, hear him somewhere . . .
“You’re fitting, Tom. Listen to me!”
. . . but this is what’s real: the man, the signs, the eyes, the argument with Ben, telling him to take those eyes out, those ridiculous, untrue eyes. Ben’s vid would breed paranoia and intense fear, he knew. It would tip people somewhere dark. But Ben had sprayed it. That instant, the vid had gone live onto the Feed, sprayed out from the Hub in the tower. The signs to watch out for. The twitches. The fear. As you suspected your loved one’s mind was being carved away—
“Tom!” And the sound and the slap on his cheek thrum away between the past and the present like reflections between two mirrors, and Graham is there, lit by the sun through the open windows, holding his shoulders firmly, sweating, his gray hair falling over his eyes, worried. “You were fitting, Tom!”
Tom squeezes his eyes shut. Opens them, blinking the images away, concentrating on the interior of the hut. The smell of the warm wood. The countryside silence from outside. The world’s reality around him. His hands are frantically trembling.
“It’s . . .” he says. “I c-can’t explain it.” He points at an invisible thread from his mind to the sky, and rests it in the end on his head. “More must have been saved than we thought.”
“Remembered, Tom,” Graham scowls. “We’re not computers.”
“Whatever,” Tom says with a sigh, because other memories have come, and he sinks—
“Tom!” Graham’s grip on Tom’s shoulders, despite his age, is strong. “Tom, look at me.”
Tom brushes the man away and wipes a hand across his face. “I’m here. It’s fine. I’m here. And in terms of what you do, Graham . . .” He slumps into his chair. He raises his hands and weakly squeezes the air. “You just do what you have to.”
He wakes from troubled sleep to the sound of stifled tears. They are in the children’s hut tonight, watching the kids. Kate is in the armchair, feet tucked under, the cold moonlight catching her skin, trying to keep her sobbing silent, trying not to disturb the children.
“Kate . . .”
“Go back to sleep, Tom,” she whispers. “You’ve got a big journey tomorrow.”
“Hey . . .” he murmurs, stretching his fingers to caress the curves of her ribs, leaning up. Jack is buried in a rug. Bea’s face is scrunched up, like she’s working things out in her sleep.
“I don’t want to worry every day that you’re never coming back—”
“I’ll be fine. Danny’s coming too.”
Kate rubs her nose. Checks the children. Lowers her voice. “Can you trust him?”
Tom squints, trying to see her better through the darkness. “It’s Danny.”
“Can you, though? Even if it is him?” She pulls back as he tries to take her in his arms. “I feel like it’s all falling apart again. Why’s it so difficult, Tom? Why do we argue all the time?”
“We’re fine, Kate. It’s just that we’re scared, and we show it in different ways. Guy being taken has—”
“But if you get a cut, you might die. You eat the wrong food, you die. You sleep unwatched and . . . It’s a time bomb, Tom, any time it could . . . one of us could . . .” She turns her face away. She shudders and moves back as he touches her arm again. “Why weren’t you watching me last night, Tom?”
“Kate. Listen. Sometimes I—”
“Is that you in there?”
He closes his eyes and exhales. “We met at Ben’s wedding. Our dog was called Rafa. If she’d been a boy”—he nods at Bea—“we’d have called her Daniel. I proposed to you with a ring pushed into an apple because they’re your favorite fruit. We—”
“I’m just scared,” Kate says, but a smile quivers her lips. “So please . . .”
“Kate,” Tom whispers, wrapping his arms around her, “listen. Guy was taken. It hadn’t happened for so long before that. It’s unlikely it’ll happen again. Can we be sure of that? No. Okay, it’s a time bomb, but it’s one that might not go off. It will happen or it won’t. So we have to live. What other choice do we have? And you’re the most important thing in the world to me. I’ll protect us all, I promise. Come on now, you know that.”
He reaches up to lean into the chair and wraps his arms around her. She runs her fingers through his hair. They both smile and close their eyes. In the darkness, Bea opens hers.
A gentle breeze ripples across the lawn and the ground is hard and dry: perfect for their journey. Even this early in the day, the sun has started to bake the air, and the trees’ susurrus fills the camp. Tom watches the woods. He scans the track running up the hill and away, over the top to the road and the storage facility, miles and miles away. A clatter knocks across the lawn as Graham stumbles out of his hut and loses his footing on the steps.
“She was taken,” Graham moans, his voice cracked.
Tom’s thoughts reduce. They contract to deal with the enormity of this, and he feels Feed reflexes judder in. Forces them back as he unsteadily climbs the stairs. As he takes the old man’s arms, he realizes how terribly thin he is. This can’t be, can’t be happening. Another? His skin contracts. Their hut is bare inside: some books, Jane’s pictures on the walls, including the half-completed painting from before. And Jane in bed. Her hands are clawed. Her eyes glassy. Her hair spills like a silver floe, while earth-red finger marks grip her crushed throat and thumb-shaped w
elts push up under her chin.
All other plans are discarded as they prepare to bury Jane that afternoon. They’ve learned it’s unsafe to delay with a corpse. They climb the hill from the farmhouse to a plot above the vegetable patches. Tom and Danny carry the body and the others trail up behind them. With a clear view of the hills where the sun rises, Sean stands back from the hole he has barely finished digging.
There is little formality; few rituals have a point anymore, and they have not had time to create new ones of meaning. “She loved the sunrise,” Graham tells them when they have lowered her into the ground, wrapped in a tarpaulin and covered with planks to stop the dogs. His voice is empty, barely more than air weakly shaped by his shaking lips; his cheeks, daily shaved, are rough with points of silver. He can’t stop kneading his hands, his squeezing fingers marking his skin with white like Jane’s neck was seared with red. “The orange of the clouds at sunrise was her favorite color. You know? She was simple like that, content with the beauty of the world. I think that was why her pictures sold so well. Windows of peace in a frenzied world. She was . . . my peace . . . She was . . . everything that . . .” His jaw trembles so much that he cannot speak. He gulps—air, words, who knows. Tom can barely watch. Only when Graham pulls his swollen eyes from the grave and turns them on the others can he continue with what sounds almost like a plea. “I know you call us old Resisters, but she never needed the Feed. We didn’t want it. The real world was enough.”
Everyone surrounds the hole, the shallow valley around them vast in the summer’s heat. Tom and Kate hold Bea’s hands; Jack is cocooned in Sean’s stiff arms, crying. Sean stares fixedly ahead, the tendons in his neck tense, his face juddering as his eyes tether him to the world, fixating on Jane’s grave. For a long time everyone is still. Who should move first? They don’t have rules for this. When Danny eventually pushes the soil back into the hole, it somehow ends up level with the sides. Still, no one else moves. As Danny plants the spade deep into the earth, Graham unleashes a wail, and Kate takes his arm and leads him toward his hut. Sean lifts Jack onto his shoulders and marches stiffly toward the woods. For all their differences, Tom considers following him—first Guy, now Jane; it will be reminding Sean of his past, surely, and what he did to Jack’s mother, so soon after the boy’s birth, and he probably needs to talk—but Bea tugs his finger.
“What is soil made of, Daddy?”
“Um . . .” He watches Sean disappear into the woods with Jack slumped on his shoulders. “It’s a good question, Bea. I’ll put it on the knowledge board.”
He starts down the hill, with Bea at his legs. Danny sidles over, looking at the ground, his pale hands shaking. Suddenly his green eyes snap up to Tom’s. Who’s next? he mouths, his eyes ghost-wide. Tom blinks, stops, thinks—
“Why did Jane die, Daddy?”
He looks down at Bea. “In her sleep, darling.”
“But what of?”
Tom realizes with a lurch how destructive knowledge can be. He sees his daughter, days off being six, and feels with unachievable urgency the need to stop her aging, to protect her innocence from the world, to shield her from all of this. But how is that possible? They had thought it was over, but Guy, now Jane. Any of them could be taken as they sleep. Who’s next? He glances at Danny, who, hands in pockets, avoids his gaze now, staring, staring at the ground.
“She just died,” Tom tells Bea. “In her sleep.”
He feels the utter weight of the look she gives him then and knows it will lodge in his mind forever. Something in the upward tilt of her eyes, while the sides of her mouth droop down. She plainly knows he’s lying, even if she cannot work out why. She doesn’t need the Feed to see this, and Tom is left with the echoing realization that his daughter doesn’t trust him; there is a distance in her withdrawing gaze that he’s never seen before. Danny catches his eye and nods Tom’s attention across the lawn. Kate is coming back. She is pale. Hollows are carved into her cheeks.
“Graham’s not good. He’s just . . . making this . . . noise. I don’t know what to do.”
All Tom can do, while she looks to him expectantly, is work his mouth while no ideas come. Are they under threat? Are they in danger? No one taken for years, and now this? Two of them? Over days? Five seconds. That’s all it takes. His jaw opens and closes but no sounds come out.
“I’ll just take her in,” Kate says stiffly, and Bea silently takes her mother’s hand.
Danny, chewing on his lip, looks fleetingly at Tom before examining the ground until they’re gone. “She asked me why we watch her and Jack while they sleep, Tom. She’s not stupid.”
“What did you say?”
Danny shrugs. “For safety. Are we going to tell them?”
Tom sees Bea in his mind’s eye, her dubious face as he dodged her questions. She will grow old. The age is waiting within her. How long can he hope to protect her?
“I can’t believe Jane’s gone, Tom,” Danny says quietly. “What’s happening? Are we being . . . targeted here?”
“Don’t be stupid,” Tom mutters. “And she’s not really gone. We can still remember her.”
Danny snorts. “How?”
Tom touches his temple. “And we must.”
Danny shakes his head disgustedly. “Then your brain’s working better than mine. Nothing goes in without downloads.” He nods down the hill after Kate. “Listen, should we take Graham with us to the facility? You know, to distract him?”
“That’s a good idea. We’ll leave . . . tomorrow if we can.”
“Sure. But, Tom . . . the kids will need to know. What happens. Sometime they will. I know you say we shouldn’t talk about the past,” Danny says uncertainly, “but we have to. We can’t ignore the pain. We have to talk about it. I’m scared that if I stop talking about my uncle, he’ll . . .” He raises a hand to his head and blows his fingers out. His eyes are achingly sincere. “When Mum was killed . . .” His head goes down and his shoulders shudder. “I want the Feed back, Tom. I want to talk to them, even if it’s just their BackUps. Do you think I can find them at the facility? Do you think they were saved? And what can we do? What can we do to save ourselves from . . .” He turns, pointing around, at himself, pointing at all of this.
Tom’s mind stalls. His thoughts shift. “There is nothing,” he says, “that we can do.”
That night, with Danny watching the children and Graham in with Sean, Tom sits up against the headboard, watching Kate sleep. Somewhere in the darkness things merge and his mind goes back before the Collapse, while he was training, reading Freud and Lacan late into the night. He had found expensive paper editions of the books because he had wanted to understand them slowly, thoughtfully, rather than gulping them down with the Feed. (He’d told Ben he was doing this, of course, just to piss him off.) He had watched Kate, his fiancée then, sleep in their new house, this person who had come from nowhere and with kindness had changed his world. The world had then changed around them, unstoppably: a fragility they must have been living over for years without knowing it, their lives paper-thin. Bea’s distrusting expression resounds in his memory, and Danny’s question—“Do you think they were saved?”—and Tom nearly sees his parents again. His father’s face doesn’t quite emerge from the shadows of his mind. The tower. His mother blocking his Feed after Ben had died. Were they saved? His father must have had plans.
A wind heaves and brings him back to the world where Kate frowns beside him. She clenches her jaw. She gurgles and rolls her head. Tom watches her move, aghast, and gets up and stares out the window. He pulls the curtains tightly shut behind him to block out her sounds, forehead pressed against the cool, cracked glass, eyes closed. Could he kill her? Even the thought of it, of Guy, of Ben, of that vid, makes his hands shake, his breath tighten, his face go numb, panic rising as he tries to hide from what might be happening to Kate right now. The huts are dark, the night sky deeply black, as she coughs behind him, smothered by the curtain, coughs—and then goes silent. Two ghostly clouds are spe
d across the sky by a wind that ripples through the forest and rattles the window.
When he ducks back out, she is awake.
“I’m here,” he says.
“I can see that.” She smiles and pats the bed. When he doesn’t move, she observes him across the room. “Leave the facility to rot, Tom. Let’s go. Let’s go now. Let’s take Bea and find somewhere new. Don’t leave me, Tom. Please. Let’s be just us again.”
“There’s safety in numbers.”
“Guy and Jane are dead. Danny thinks we’re being targeted.”
“I won’t be long, Kate. You’re going to be fine.”
“But what if—”
“Listen,” he says impatiently. “I promise you’ll be fine. You and Sean, you can both sleep in with the children. I know it’s not ideal, but . . . I’ll be back in a few days. And listen, Kate. Listen.” He takes her chin, which only then he realizes is wet with tears, and raises her face to his. Her lips are salty and slick. “If we can’t find food and the plow doesn’t work, we’ll leave after Bea’s birthday. If Danny can’t get the turbines to work, we’ll just go. Like that. Okay?”
“It’s just the fear’s bigger than everything else sometimes.”
“I know. Come on.” He holds her for a while and then encourages her out of bed, past Sean’s room where Graham’s sandals wait outside, down the stairs, and outdoors. He pulls the kitchen door shut behind them, his thumb fitting snugly in the latch as they pause in the doorway.
“It’s so quiet,” she murmurs, spreading her arms out into the night. The sky’s eastern edge is already starting to melt. The blades of grass tickle Tom’s feet and he loops an arm around Kate’s waist as they walk. A lick of candle comes from the children’s hut, where Danny watches them. They walk until the house is murky-dark and then he kisses her. She holds his head. His hands move to her back, her neck, her waist, and undo the little buttons between her shoulders. She lifts his shirt. The grass is long and cool beneath them.
The Feed Page 5