“What am I going to do?”
“Have you told Nigel?”
“What if he throws me out?”
“Why would he do that?”
Margaret pauses. “It’s not part of his plan.”
Kate looks away from Margaret at the smashed tiles across the floor, at the fake plant she is leaning against, its leaves smothered in dust. The fragments of glass in the children’s hut flash into her mind, the grass covered in ash from the fires. The blood. The van, how she imagines it: hard and heavy with rusted spikes. The inside oven dry. Bea and Jack bound together, parched and bruised . . .
“Margaret. Children have to be part of the plan.”
They stand in the still and empty atrium until Margaret rolls Kate’s trouser leg back down and pushes the tube into her palm. “Take it with you tomorrow.”
“What’s happening tomorrow?”
“Tom said you’d go with them.”
Kate looks at the tube in her hand, at her infected leg, at her worn-out boots and the trails she has made in the dust. If she doesn’t go with Tom and Mark, where will she go?
“Kate . . . are they actually your kids? In the van. Yours and Tom’s?”
Kate bites her lips, which are suddenly trembling as everything wells. Those tests, in the lab in the tower, with Tom always at her side. The scans of their healthy, moving baby were Fed straight into their brains. Hers and Tom’s. Tom’s father absorbed them too, and even he had smiled: the full and growing form of their daughter, sleeping in her stomach, filling their brains as the world outside collapsed to utter hell. Her daughter was safe then. When she’d had her inside her, she could keep her safe.
“There’s enough room for you here,” Margaret tells her, putting a hand on Kate’s arm to try to stop her crying. “If you want to stay with us.”
They stand on the forecourt as the sun clears the tree line and birds turn in the early-morning air. Kate and Mark wait with their rucksacks on, watching Tom search through his. “My gun,” he says, and turns to Nigel, who shrugs. His mouth folds in on itself.
“Not yours.”
Kate watches Tom eye Nigel up and down. The gun is there in his waistband. Tom lifts his rucksack on. He stands aside, his face flushing. Then Margaret, in front of everyone, hugs Kate. She whispers, “Find a Pharmacist, Kate. Please.” Kate nods at her and looks at Margaret’s stomach. The others are watching them. Kate doesn’t say anything, but Margaret nods too, though her expression does not change.
They walk for a long time in silence around the vehicles, across the fissures in the road. They cross a stream over a collapsing bridge and follow the road through a wood until the facility is the size of a fist behind them. They wait until Mark stops behind a bush, and as they continue, the sound of the man-high barley mutation swaying in the field is all there is to hear.
“You left us.”
Tom thinks for a long time while the barley waves.
“You left me,” she states.
“But I was going to come back. I didn’t abandon you.”
“We promised.”
“I’ll never do it again. But, Kate, you’ve got to—”
“Don’t . . .” She turns her head. “You have no right to tell me what to do.”
“Kate, calm down. I thought I—”
“No you didn’t,” she snaps. “You didn’t think at all. Not about anyone but yourself.” She scowls at him and then looks down at her feet. “What was our dog called, Tom?”
“Are you serious?” he tuts. “It’s me, Kate. It’s me.”
Kate’s expression darkens. “What was our dog called, then?”
“Rafa,” he says, scowling too. “Thanks so much, that’s really nice, Kate—”
“No, it’s not, Tom! None of this is nice! From the fucking start! The way the world collapsed, what your father did to me, the way we’ve had to live. Living in fear every time I go to sleep. Every time you go to sleep, I’m terrified you won’t wake up as yourself. The way you fucking ran away, none of this is fucking nice!”
Tom barely blinks. His voice sounds weary in its intonation: “Your sister was called Martha. Your parents were teachers and they hated me too.”
“Oh, grow up.”
When she turns away from him, the barley, the sunlight catching its tops, is tear-blurred. She feels so many things: relief and fear, desolation and hope. Tiredness too. Exhaustion. Something in her has leveled out. She had hoped with burning fervor that Bea was in the facility, because where else would she be? Now something is numbed because she wasn’t there, but it’s focused. On this van. They must find this van with spikes. The road stretches on ahead. This is the road that Nigel set them on, that he said those people used. She sees that the few vehicles on it have been barged to the side. She stares at the horizon, looking for the silhouette that she can clearly see in her imagination: a low-slung oval, metallic and hard, led by horses, covered in spikes, and black with the sun behind it.
There is nowhere for her to wash her wound that day or the next. They hurry on. Her skin chafes her as she marches, and Mark’s constant talking chafes her too, texturing the air like pollen: a stream that smothers yet continues to evade, because no matter what he’s asked, he is impervious to revealing himself. He hides behind his stories like smoke. He knew a man who changed his name. He knew a hairdresser who was bald. He misses the Feed, he loved the Feed; he segues and twists and hides.
They crest a hill and examine the road below them, heading always north. Nothing. Maybe—is that something? Kate grabs Tom’s arm and points. A movement? Or just the reflection of the sun, sparking on something distant? Or nothing, nothing at all.
By the time they find a stream late the following day, salt stains Kate’s top. She leaves Tom and Mark to set up camp by the road and carefully descends to the water. In squatting to dunk her clothes, the wound on her leg tears. The ragged slit leaks pus and a pinkish flow dribbles out. She washes it and squeezes cream into it and waits for the water on her skin and the ointment on her leg to dry before she pulls her clothes back on and climbs exhaustedly up to camp, trying to hide her limp.
Whether it is a noise or a dream that wakes her, it’s gone the moment she stirs. Mark is lying on his side as he sleeps and Tom is . . . not there. Not watching them. She reaches over to wake Mark, but stops. How long can she leave him unwatched? How long would it take? In those vids it was only seconds. Mark breathes noisily, stuffed up, then gulps in some air and subsides again to peace. She crawls away before getting to her feet, reaching out into the darkness. With no light to see, her ears become sensitive: every clicking blade of grass; the branches of the trees getting nearer, knocking. Somewhere close by an animal skits away through the grass, gulping to itself. She waits for her pulse to calm and continues, wheezing Tom’s name into the night, and as she nears the shadowy, hustling trees, she collides with a form on the ground.
Tom, lying in the grass, blinks back his dazed look.
“What the hell are you doing?”
“I came to look at the stars. Just for a moment. I must have fallen asleep.”
She kicks him, actually kicks him, in the ribs.
“It was an accident!” he cries, pulling himself up. Something in his voice undermines her anger; there’s a weakness about it. He peers up into the night and grasps her hand, and when he speaks again, his voice has weakened even more. “I don’t think I could do it again, Kate.”
“Tom.” She closes her eyes. “You have to. Ben and Guy—you had to. You have to with me too. I have to with you. If you miss it, it’s gone. And if we’re taken, what will happen to Bea? How do you know I haven’t just been taken?”
“Because you keep calling me Tom.”
“Well, how do I know that you haven’t been taken?”
“Because I know it’s my name!” Evidently pleased with the functioning of his brain, he pulls her by the shoulder and she topples onto the ground.
“How do you know that we haven’t both been taken and
we’re double-bluffing each other?” she says after a while.
He kisses her neck. “My name’s Tom Hatfield. Our dog was called Rafa. I proposed to you with a ring pushed into an apple because they’re your favorite fruit. Our daughter is Bea and we’re going to find her, Kate. It’s me. I’m not taken. And all right, I promise to watch you, so you better promise not to get taken. Because now that I have you back, I’m never losing you again. Deal?”
She puts an arm around his shoulders. “Deal.”
No people, little shelter, and hard days against a sudden rain that lances in from the west. It cools the air thoroughly and threatens to dash the leaves prematurely from the trees. No sign of the spiked van either, although they follow what they think are its tire tracks, and then they find horse manure, scant piles but fresh. It’s like finding gold, and for a second they celebrate, before becoming steely, focused, following the tracks through the deluge.
“It’s best to keep moving,” Mark tells them, his voice raised against the drumming rain. “They won’t be slowing down, I shouldn’t think. We’ll find somewhere warm for dinner.”
“That’s a long time yet,” Tom mutters, and spits the rain off his lips.
“Not if we keep talking. Time flies.”
When the rain gets even heavier, they are forced to shelter beneath the enveloping branches of a chestnut, its bark thick-notched, its roots rolling through the earth. They hug their arms to their saturated bodies in a vain attempt to keep warm. As they watch the slowly settling mist of rain, Kate glances at Mark. His lips are quivering, his eyes darting as he looks.
“Where are you going, Mark? What are you traveling for?”
He stares into the miasma, at the rain-ghosted trees as the drops prickle-smack around them. It seems he has ignored her and Kate turns away. But then, still staring at the rain, he says, “Because I’ve not found anywhere like home.” She goes to probe, but he says the rain has lessened and makes them leave.
They walk and run at intervals, much faster than a laboring horse could travel. Tom reassures them regularly, driving them on, and points out the sporadic pats of manure, melting in the rain. They do find a warm place for dinner: an articulated truck, its front ripped and scattered away. Tom builds a fire in the mouth of the container and soon it’s so hot that he and Mark take off their sweaters, roll up their trousers, and laugh as Mark pretends to tan.
Kate doesn’t laugh and she keeps her trousers unrolled, wound hidden. There is no time to cause concern, no time for delay.
“It was late summer when it happened,” Mark announces as the raindrops, slow and fat, fall in the mouth of the truck. “Do you remember?” Kate glances at him, at his bitten nails, and how his fingers shake, at odds with the keenness of his gaze. “Despite everything that was happening, at least we could say the weather was good! Indian Summer. And then the Feed collapsed and we were like cows. Our lives were so fragile and we didn’t even know it. I didn’t know what panic meant until then. But . . . listen . . . can you remember when you first got it?” His eyes gleam. “When you realized the power, as you first slid in, and the speed of the world it opened up? Who did you first share your thoughts with? It was the most intimate feeling, wasn’t it? Nothing between you, no way to lie, just pure and perfect thinking. All of us, plaited together.”
Kate watches Tom’s back as he stares at the night. He can hear them, of course, but he’s pretending not to. “I’d rather not think about it,” she tells Mark. “It makes me upset.”
“Yes.” Mark sighs, sagging and rubbing his hands together. “Yes, I know.”
Kate gives him a slip of a smile as she rests against the side of the container, actually sad to have curtailed his reminiscence for once. The spark in his eyes reminded her of the goodness of the Feed, the flow of it, the absorption. The precision of its knowledge. If they’d had it now, they’d already have found Bea. She could never have been taken if they’d had her enabled. Kate rests her hands on her leg and tries to hide the spasm of pain that makes her body jerk. Every day it’s worse. Much worse. It’s burning now. She is burning too. The fire crackles and she untucks her T-shirt, trying to get some cooling air onto her skin. Her eyes droop in the embalming silence.
“So here’s a story,” Mark purrs, jolting her out of her slumber. “There was a time when thoughts were in the air. They wrapped the world in color: busy blues, bloody-colored arguments, the peridot flash of joy. All plaited together, the web around the world.” He leans back against the corrugated wall, the firelight scattering shadows over his face. “The patterns changed as thoughts did. In summer, vermilion swirls. Hard winter woven in darkness. The Water Wars created entirely new hues. Then the assassinations sparked violet in people’s thoughts, and the shortages a deathly blue. Confusion coagulated and instability spread like some stain. And, you know, actual thinking stopped. We reacted to it like animals.” Sparks fly into the darkness, drawn out on a plume of smoke. “When we discovered we were being invaded . . . that these assassinations were not accidental . . . well, the color of people’s thoughts turned dark. The terminal velocity of a society, burning that web away. Paranoia. Unthinking fear. Inhuman things.
“So then: there was a man and a boy. The boy’s mother was gone, lost through frays that no one expected. But still, these two, the man and his son, were linked by thoughts of the liveliest living green. Every day the boy hid and the father hunted through the city’s sudden ruins for food, but they were never apart, always linked at the speed of thought. Until the tapestry ripped. Like flesh tearing, everything was cleaved. The web of thoughts fragmented. People staggered, stopped, and crawled. The world on its knees when the Feed went down. When the man got home, it was empty. It may have taken him days or weeks, who knows? No boy. And the man can’t remember the color of his son’s eyes, let alone how he sounded anymore. It was all . . . too sweet . . . to store.”
Mark has been talking quietly at his hands; now he surprises Kate by looking at her. “I’m better at telling stories about others. I hope you understand.”
She gasps for air and comes quickly awake. Mark is squatting at her side, watching her, his hands out, close to her face, his fingers spread. “Kate?”
“Yes,” she chokes out.
“Are you . . . sure? What’s my name?”
“Mark,” she says, sweat streaming down her back as she sits.
“And who’s that sleeping there?”
She looks down at the sleeping body beside her, turned away, lying on his front. “That’s Tom,” she says. “Don’t worry, Mark, it’s me. It was just a dream.”
“Some dream. What was it?”
She looks around, but not at what’s there, fingering her clothes, pulling them away from her sweat-drenched skin to let some blessed coolness in. “I was in a tin. Burning hot. And . . . there were people there who I loved. My skin was scorching. Slowly it was dissolving away . . .”
Mark’s eyes are soft with relief. He nudges her cheek with a knuckle before leaning back and making the wall of the container clang. “Welcome to the tin, Kate. Welcome to the tin.”
She scrambles down from the truck. Leaning on its side and gulping from a bottle of collected rain, she tries to wash her dream away. She is very ill, she knows it. Her dream had merged with a fever dream she had before: she’d been weighted down and unable to move in a bed at the very top of the tower. The city was spread out below—she could glimpse it if she stretched—and Ben was there before her, although she knew he was dead. Tom’s father crept around, but he was so, so sly she could never see him: whenever she turned, he wasn’t there. She could feel his breath on her neck and the anticipation of his fingers, her swollen stomach lying prone. She could feel his soft, shuffling footsteps in her brain—
She rolls her trouser leg up. The veins around the wound are vividly colored and have now spread up to her knee. She can barely touch the flesh for the pain, and her hand is shaking wildly. A hard fever, taking hold. A gross infection. She wipes the sheen of swea
t from her face, unscrews the cream lid with her teeth, and rubs the ointment thickly in, flinching as she does so.
She rubs it in continuously, discreetly, whenever she can as they walk the following day across a rain-stained overpass and down beside a reservoir, desperately trying to hide her limp. The surface of the water is weed-encrusted and swollen. Insects skit while crickets carve away. She holds the tube in her pocket, worrying at its half-empty form, worrying the horizon with her eyes, looking for the van, for tracks, for clues, for the van, they have to find the van before she . . .
“I was in advertising,” Mark is telling Tom. Now that he has started talking about himself, he won’t stop. “The Feed made anything possible. Quickcode adverts were a dream. But where are your consumers now?” he asks, gesturing at the world. “And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how most stories end: with silence. Folks just disappear. Fin. It’s all horrifically unstructured.”
At the end of the reservoir a signpost directs them toward a village, and while Tom pauses to peer inside a car, Kate and Mark walk on.
“Kate?” Mark asks, and there is something in his voice, in the way it lowers, and the way he glances over his shoulder. “I’ve woken a few times and Tom hasn’t been watching us. Is he him?”
The starkness of the question brings her up short. Back to the world. The simplicity of how things can go very wrong. She looks back briefly. Tom passes a mossed-out coach, head down, and strides along the road toward them.
“Of course he is. I’ve asked our usual questions.”
“Well, maybe ask him something deeper. I’m getting worried about him.”
“So what can we ask you if we need to check?” she says tersely.
“Your names,” Mark replies, “of course.” Although he won’t look at her, there’s a softness now between them as he relents. “And my son’s name was John. You know . . .” His voice is suddenly ragged with emotion. “I’ll help you how I can, Kate. I’ll help you find this spiky van. But I must say . . . You have to know how unlikely it is that . . . From my experience . . . people just . . .” He places his hands palm to palm, then he shakes his head and smiles at her. “I’ll help you how I can.”
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