“What happened to your leg, Tom?”
He folds his arms to loosen her hold. Light sparks through the canopy, but before he can answer or avoid the question, Bea is beside them, her arms full.
“Bank, please!”
Kate holds a basket out, barely looking at her daughter, her eyes fixed on Tom. The basket is already half full with leaves and dandelions, and the new batch tumbles on top. They look in and make appreciative noises for the little girl, who shouts, “Thanks!” before she points up at them sternly. “And don’t you eat any until we’re home. I know what you two are like.”
“Bossy,” Kate remarks, watching Bea dash back to the undergrowth.
“I wonder where she gets that from.”
“So?” Kate prompts, glaring at his leg. “I’ve seen gunshot wounds before.”
“It was shrapnel.”
Kate purses her mouth.
“There were people there, Kate.”
“Shit, Tom. Why didn’t you see them before?”
“Maybe they were hiding. Maybe they’d just arrived! There was one group in a spiky van like a hedgehog with horses, and another group on motorbikes.”
“It’s not worth it, Tom—”
“We got fuel for the plow and cabling for the turbines. It was worth it all right!”
“Not worth losing you.”
“You didn’t, Kate. Come on, why are you—”
“There are always other options, but there is only one us! And . . .” Kate glances at him. “Bea keeps asking why they’re watched while they sleep. She’s become obsessed. She said you told her Jane died because she was asleep. She’s upsetting Jack. Sean says we have to tell her; he says if we don’t, he will. He’s not slept at all since you left.”
Tom scowls. When they had first arrived, he had found it hard to understand Sean through his mutilated language and the sleep-deprived hallucinations of his addled brain. It had been painful to watch the man, eyes determinedly open, trying to hold his terrors at bay, the things he was keeping silent. Sleep. Sean’s obsession and theirs.
They have reached the peak of the hill and left the forest now, walking along an old field on a rich seam of chalk. A fur of trees nestles in the pit between the distant hills, and low clouds hint at the only straight line. Bea is behind them with another armful.
“What are we going to do with these?” Tom’s voice is raw.
“It’s for a stew,” Bea informs him, and rushes off again. There is a worm in this deposit.
“Tom, listen,” Kate continues. “We promised each other. It’s us, that’s all there is. We take priority. We agreed. It’s not like SaveYou is working anymore—there are no second chances. We can’t be saved. So please. No risks. You’ve been so lucky with that leg. I washed it. I don’t think there’s anything in there.”
“We could always find a Pharmacist.”
Kate rolls her eyes. “Don’t joke, Tom. Still the same: blind, blind hope! Even if there are any Pharmacists, why would they help us? Come live with me in the real world. Just—don’t—get—shot. How does that sound?”
Finally he intertwines his fingers with hers and pats her stiff hand. He hugs her, and her hair, taken by the wind this high up on the hill, whips his eyes. “Okay,” he concedes, “I promise not to get shot if you promise too. Deal?”
She pulls back to look at him guardedly, not sure he’s being serious, then pledges: “Yes. But remember what else you promised: if those turbines don’t work, we leave.”
They meet on the lawn, and Danny and Graham answer Sean’s and Kate’s questions while Bea and Jack play by the shower stall. Without Guy, without Jane, their numbers are diminished. Their absence brings Tom up short. Soon, he notices the children edging nearer, can clearly see the hunger for knowledge in Bea’s determined eyes. He shoos them away while the others continue to talk. He sits there, and it’s like a dream. Was the man shot dead? Dead dead? Were they travelers or were they settled? They had horses? Bikes? He feels enervated. The wound on his thigh throbs, and pain, for a while, is all that tethers him to the world. Why should they stay here anymore? Why shouldn’t he take his family away? They have to look out for themselves.
“Did they follow you here?” Sean demands. His eyes are dull, his voice lethargically slurred but driven, his deeply scarred hands wringing constantly. “Because if you’ve exposed the camp,” he intones, “we’re dead!” And with that echoing in their thoughts, with nothing more to be said, Danny goes back to the house to lay the wires to the turbines while the others disperse and Tom remains alone. Will the cabling work? Until now it’s been a dream, a hope to aim for. But it’ll become real now, one way or the other. It will work or it won’t. They’ll survive, for a while, or not. He surveys the woods, the distant mouth of the track. He remembers the hazy curves of that van through the trees like an armored creature, moving strangely, silently, for its size, pulled steadily on by the horses. Its spikes. Is Sean right? Are they in danger from the group on motorbikes? Can they protect themselves from harm? There are people at the facility who are looking for them. Have they led them here? And there’s the permanent threat from within. He has to tell Bea about sleep.
With timber they were saving for another hut, Tom and Sean build a rough gazebo on the lawn. Sean won’t be drawn into talking. “Tell her,” he grunts at Tom, and scowls over at Bea. She suspects they’re building this thing for her birthday, and she watches them askance from around the corner of the farmhouse for a while before openly parading around. By the time Graham is teaching her and Jack to write that afternoon, she’s asking for words like presents and cake.
As the afternoon turns gray, Tom and Sean erect a pole, and Danny leaves his work with the turbines on the farmhouse roof to rig some cables to the moldy car battery by the generator for the lights. They string them up, fanning them from the pole to the gazebo to the house. Turned on in the daylight, they look like dew on a huge spiderweb.
That night, Tom and Kate are in Danny’s hut with Graham. Danny watches them first, surrounded by the dusty mess in which he lives: stick-bound contraptions litter the place, drawings that could have been better done by a child. Tom lies there, listening to the hut as it creaks in the night, the hushed sounds as Danny turns the pages of his book. Then he gets up and creeps past Danny, tweaking his ear as he goes. Danny flips a finger at him, barely distracted, flops out his tongue, and returns to the book he’s examining.
Sean is on duty in the children’s hut in the slight candlelight there. Tom observes him through the window for a while. Sean’s scarred hands are flat on the tabletop, but as Tom watches, they twitch and curl into strangling shapes. Then it’s as if he notices what they’re doing. Dazed, he spreads them flat once more. His lips move, murmuring some unheard word again and again and again, his face creasing up in confusion. One word. Sorry? It’s difficult to tell, but with a jolt, Tom sees that Bea is watching Sean too, peering out from under her tatty comforter. Her expression is blank, but what on earth will she be making of this? Tomorrow Tom will tell her; what choice does he have? Tomorrow she’ll know why they’re watched, what Sean is doing now. He’ll tell her the signs to look out for—the signs from the vid, Ben’s vid—and she’ll never sleep well again.
Dying inside, he runs across the lawn and up past the vegetable patches to the barn, where he uncovers the music machine from the facility. His thoughts about Bea agitate his mind, but he buries them, embalms them with hope and distraction by carrying the machine carefully down the dark hill, the house looming out of the night, and setting it up in the gazebo. In the generator shed he flips on the battery and outside, with a faint hum, the lights come on, crazed above him in the night sky. The nature of their light is foreign—it pulses and its color is too consistent—but instantly familiar too: a second after the surprise of seeing the bulbs incandescent, they have become normalized again already. Back in the gazebo, the small fan in the music machine starts to whir. It’s been a decade since he used a machine like this, and he
scrolls through menus clumsily. With a quickening heart he finds the song he wants before returning to Danny’s hut. He winks at him, puts a finger to his lips, and gently brushes Kate’s hair.
“What?” she says, jerking up. “What is it?”
“Come with me.”
“Is everything all right?”
“Just come. Quiet. Graham’s sleeping.”
Danny smiles at them tightly and looks away. Does his duty like they’ve been trained, watching Graham for signs while, outside the hut, Tom puts his hands over Kate’s eyes. Her body relaxes into his as he guides her over the night-shadowed grass and under the strings of fairy lights that hover like laced-up fireflies, converging on the makeshift gazebo.
“What is it?” she whispers, and as he murmurs in her ear, “You’ll find out,” he feels the heat of her earlobe on his lips and the curve of her cheeks as she smiles. Is Danny watching them? He doesn’t care. It reminds him of the moment they first entered their house, their lovely house on that hill, the city’s lights spread out beneath them, and he is relieved that such memories survive. It seems that as more time passes more come back to light. “Don’t you dare peek,” he says, then positions her in the doorway. “Okay.”
Kate takes a deep breath. Goes up on her toes. Opens her eyes and gasps.
Tom presses a button and a display cascades to life. HELLO, it says. The machine engages with a soft sound as he pushes another button, and then, after a pause, the music starts to play. Kate’s hands go to her face, her mouth, her eyes, which fill with tears. She hasn’t heard music in years—none of them has—and she hasn’t heard this song for longer. She smiles. She laughs. She sways away from him but doesn’t move her feet.
“Would you like to dance?” he asks.
“You couldn’t remember the steps on the day!”
“I bet you forget them first.”
“You’re on,” she says, and gives him her hand. “And be careful of your leg.”
Tom leads her outside and holds her close, his heart beating against her chest as they clasp hands beneath the lights. Neither of them can remember the steps but neither of them stops dancing.
On the day before Bea’s birthday, Tom and Kate forage with the children until Danny declares that the turbines are finally wired and ready. This moment has been years in the making. If they work, it will change everything: heat, light, and cooking powered eternally by the wind. Guy’s legacy, they’ll call it, to remember him by. They’ll be safe. There will be progress and Kate has said they can stay—if it works. All depending on Danny as he climbs out of a window and, once atop the roof, raises his hands in unstable victory, the transistor clasped between them. He teeters toward the turbines trailing a cable tied to his belt. The other end reenters the house like an umbilical cord.
On Tom’s shoulders, Bea clutches his hair and whispers, “Daddy, he’s going to fall!” but Danny reaches the first rusty turbine, its blades spinning quickly, and grabs its column for support. He gropes toward the next one and fumbles the transistor into place. Jack, on Sean’s shoulders, puts his hands over his ears. Sean stares, stares, stares.
“Okay!” Danny calls. He has to duck to be seen under the air-slicing blades. “Are we ready?”
All lights in the house are on but the fuel generator has been disconnected. If the turbines work, the house will light up—“In a blaze of glory,” Graham had muttered wryly as Danny had explained this glorious plan before starting his ascent. But Graham is rapt now, his lips white as he whispers to himself with his fingers, Tom notices, crossed.
“I said, are we ready?” Danny does a little rolling of his hips to excite the crowd and grabs frantically at the turbine again when he slips. “Then let there be light!” he cries as he flips a switch and raises his arms dramatically.
By evening the clouds have condensed. They haven’t reconnected the generator now that they have to save the fuel. Whether they will do so for Bea’s party is moot; the celebration feels like a thin veneer, the hope it should represent harshly defined by the darkness this afternoon’s failure has left them in. Tom places a candle on the kitchen table—it seems to be burning faster than before—and puts crockery away while Danny sits there, waiting.
“What are you going to tell her?”
“The truth. I have to.”
Danny nods. He has been very quiet since the afternoon, the quietest Tom has ever seen.
“Why d’you want me here?”
“Because it’s not an easy truth to tell.”
Danny nods again, tightly. “But does she have to know, Tom? It seems such a shame . . .”
Tom doesn’t say anything, stands by the table with a hand on the back of a chair. The candle hisses. The shadows in the room seem darker tonight, the ceiling lower.
“I remember,” Danny continues quietly, “when she was being born. I went into the fields and the fuckers were still furrowed under this crust of ice. I could smell vegetables there, I swear it, I was that hungry, and I thought how this planet doesn’t give a damn. It barely notices us. But I got back and there you were, you three, and Bea was this tiny scrawling little thing, and she made it worth it. The hope, you know? It’d be miserable to starve for no reason. But starving for the good of a child meant something. We meant something. Bad times are when goodness can really show. And I’m sorry about the turbines, Tom, I’m so, so sorry. I just don’t have the knowledge Guy did. I don’t know about electrics; I was learning to be a lawyer! But I promise I’ll do everything I can to protect Bea. I’ll defend her with my life!”
Tom has no words for this or to respond to Danny’s sincere eyes filling with tears. There is joy in this world; the camp, the trust and friendship they are building here, is support enough, isn’t it? It is structure. It is protection. And surely they can save it. Surely there’s no need to leave like Kate wants. She’s just scared. They need people around them, they need safety in numbers. Don’t they?
The latch rises and Kate ushers Bea in. Kate is pale. The little girl is clearly suspicious.
“Hey, come on, Beaty-Bea,” Danny says, and laughs. He jumps up from the table, chirpy again, does a little wiggly dance and gives her a smothering hug. “We just want to have a chat. It’s nothing to worry about. Why don’t you sit on down?”
Bea does, and her head droops toward the table. “Am I in trouble again, Daddy?” she mumbles, and glances dolefully at Kate, who sits beside her, unsmiling.
“Noo-oooo-oo,” Danny reassures her.
Tom swallows. “Of course not. But . . . Bea, darling. We have to talk—”
The door opens again and Sean prowls in, bending under the lintel. He scrapes a chair back and sits. Clasps his scarred hands. Nods at Tom and Kate, commanding them to continue. He won’t look at Danny, won’t even spare him a glance, and, Tom notices, Danny’s tears well again.
“Listen, Bea,” Tom says, knitting his hands. “You asked me why Jane died. Remember? Well, the truth is . . . You’re six tomorrow, that means you’re a big girl and you’re old enough to know about a . . . responsibility we have to each other. And to everyone else in the world.” He takes in Sean’s steely expression. “Jack’s not ready to understand this yet, but you are, Bea. So can you keep a secret?”
Bea glances uneasily among the adults, her small mouth slightly open. When Kate had taken her from the hut, Graham had been telling Jack a story. The sense that maybe being six won’t be quite all she thought it would be furrows her brow, but she nods nonetheless.
“When we sleep, we are vulnerable,” Tom continues. “Our minds can be invaded. Do you understand? You know the world Graham has told you about? That Mummy and Daddy lived in before? There were assassinations and accidents. People started behaving in strange ways . . . There were too many incidents that became too . . . targeted, too common to be coincidence . . .”
Bea frowns at Kate in confusion.
“You know that old tech you and Jack found a few days ago, darling?” Kate takes over, but her voice is wavering
so much that her words clog her throat. “You asked what it did? Well . . .”
“It’s hard to explain, Bea,” Danny continues when Kate falters too. His voice is gentle. He leans forward and uses his hands to portray things as he speaks. “But the world used to be different from what you’re used to, right? There were big buildings, and cars, and airplanes, and we could all talk to each other in our heads . . . There were loads and loads of people then. But someone invaded us in our sleep—”
“Invades us,” Sean interjects.
“—and for a long time we didn’t realize it was happening. So many people were taken, and there was no way of knowing. Because everyone looked the same, right? But these normal-looking people suddenly started doing bad things. Very bad things. Killing other people. Destroying buildings, power stations; trying to disrupt the airports. They killed the president. We didn’t know who was themselves and who was someone else. It was . . . terrible. It was the not knowing that was the killer. People were terrified. They did awful things they’d never otherwise have done. But we realized people were being taken over in their sleep. So it became law: never to sleep alone, never to sleep unwatched. And . . . there were signs we had to look for. It stopped being a law that you couldn’t . . . Basically, Bea, if you saw someone being taken, it wasn’t against the law to . . .”
Now Danny stops too, and the small girl, sitting alone before them, nods as if she has to tell them it’s all right to continue. Kate reaches out to her. “Maybe we should—”
“Watching doesn’t save them. Nothing saves them. You have to kill them when it happens,” Sean states. “Miss that moment, when you see the signs, and you’ll never know. Your mum and dad will look like themselves, sound like themselves; you’ll think they’re themselves. But they won’t be. You’ll think Danny’s himself, but he’s not. There’s something else in their brains. They’ll kill you. That’s why everyone is watched. That’s why everyone wants to be watched. Because you wouldn’t want something in your brain, in your body, would you, Bea? Killing your parents? Killing all of us? You wouldn’t want that, would you?”
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