by Sarah Govett
What freaked me out most was the fact that he said ‘the patient’. Not Raf. ‘The patient’, as if he was distancing himself from the person, reducing Raf to a case study in case … OK I can do it, say the word – in case of paralysis. Which out here would be death.
Lee went in search of something and returned with a thin, sharp stick. Nothing but the best medical equipment for Fish. Starting at Raf’s neck, he methodically made his way down Raf’s body, prodding every couple of centimetres, checking for signs of nervous response. Each time Lee asked, ‘Can you feel this?’ and I’d hold my breath, only releasing it when a ‘Yes’ came.
‘Do you know what today is?’ Raf was propped up against a bale of dried reeds as I fed him our dinner of dried meat of some description and seaweed. There wasn’t really any need for me to feed him. I think that just fearing I’d lost him made me weirdly maternal towards him. And he said it was fine by him as it made him feel like a Roman Emperor. I was his little serving girl; we were just missing the togas and the grapes.
So, yes, Raf wasn’t paralysed. Just severely bruised with slight concussion-causing vertigo – making it difficult for Raf to raise himself. Difficult, not impossible. I’d never before thought what a glorious word difficult could be! Difficult, difficult, DIFFICULT. Shout it from the roof tops!
Lee had made Raf a makeshift neck brace out of a dead Raider’s shirt stuffed with dried reeds and secured in place with strips of leather and instructed him to rest for the next five days. The vertigo should go. There might be other complications – if there was a closed fracture there might be brain swell, or haemorrhage or blood clots could be developing on Raf’s brain. The only way to see, Lee explained, would be to do a CT scan which obviously we didn’t have access to. He sounded apologetic as he spoke, as if he was somehow failing Raf. As if he hadn’t been truly heroic. It’s a shame Lee won’t get to be a doctor. He would have been ACE. And as for there being proper brain issues, looking at Raf’s now grinning face and glinting eyes, my lay opinion is a big, fat, NO WAY!
‘Today? Do you know what day it is?’ Raf repeated. I’d been miles away. I shook my head. Today rang no bells. Our first day in the Raiders’ settlement? The day I found out Raf wasn’t paralysed? The day Jack sat in vigil while Megan continued to burn up? Lee had sent Ella out to look for willow trees – there’s something in the bark that if you chew it helps bring down temperatures. Natural aspirin. She hadn’t found any.
‘It’s the seventh of August.’ I knew this was supposed to be significant but I was still drawing a denser blank.
‘Our enrolment day at Greenhaven FES.’
The cogs finally started to turn and then spiral into a whirl of panic. This was it. There was no going back. We could have been unpacking in our new dorm rooms.
We could have been signing up for specialist subjects. We could have been beginning a new and easy life as society’s elite. Well Raf would be the elite, I’d be the slightly sub-elite category B. But we weren’t. We were on the wrong side of the Fence.
Raf started to laugh, slightly manically, and I joined in, mania and all.
Then one thought stopped the laughter.
‘Do you think they’ve questioned my mum and dad yet?’
Guilt filled me as I thought of all the horrific things that could happen to them. Maybe there’d be a few days before it got serious. Maybe they’d think that me and Raf had snuck off somewhere to be alone together and lost track of time. But I can’t kid myself. The time would come, even if not for a few days. They’d be questioned. We’d be labelled Opposition. The Ministry might think Mum and Dad were covering for me. Even if not, they’d be tainted. Dodgy genes and lax child rearing. Would they lose their jobs? Lose their rations? Be shipped here? Images of Aunty Vicki kept flashing in my head. Would they … not survive questioning?
I turned to face Raf, wanting to drown in his blue and green pools.
‘Are we doing the right thing?’
His forehead was a series of paper creases. Because his dad’s so horrific I keep forgetting that he might be worried about people at home too. That he’s got a mum out there as well.
‘I hope so, Noa. I really hope so.’
When Dad was trying to ‘broaden my education’ he made me reads lots of old poetry. Really ancient stuff. There was this one poem that’s really stuck with me. It’s narrated by these scary ‘hollow men’ and ends with a line about how the world ends not with a bang but a whimper. I didn’t use to understand it really. It gave me chills and spider leg feelings on the back of my neck but I didn’t buy that things could end like that, got out so quietly. Especially if we’re talking about people. People with passion and fire in their blood.
Megan showed me otherwise. No one knows exactly when she passed. She was breathing and making the occasional noise last night when Jack fell asleep next to her. He’d set up a straw mattress next to hers and hadn’t left her side since she’d fallen ill. Lee’s warning about the increased risk of infection should any mosquitoes fly by had been ignored, quietly at first, angrily later. Lee, recognising a losing battle, backed down and just made sure Jack had a bottle of repellent and was using it. Jack bathed Megan with cold water, pressed food to her lips, fanned her with his shirt and talked to her, trying to coax her back from the brink. These utterances of hers, whimpers I guess, combined with sleep deprivation had been driving him semi crazy. He was looking for meaning, trying to communicate with his loved one, refusing to believe they might just be fever cries and nothing more. It was like watching someone try to crack a code that they think will end a war but they just can’t do it. This morning she was dead. I was woken, we were all woken, by Jack’s cry. It was a bellow of grief. A call to a higher power, if there is one, to come and explain itself. A call for her return.
There’d be no rushed funeral for Megan. Jack had gone slightly catatonic so Lee and me organised everything. A team was sent to collect white stones. Another to search for sea lavender and rosemary. Another fetched buckets and tools to dig. I managed to get Jack to engage enough to help choose her resting place. At first Lee was against her being laid to rest here, in the Raiders settlement. He looked at the ground as if it was tainted. But Jack was adamant.
‘It’s what she would have wanted. This was a centre of evil but she stopped that. She led us and we cleansed it. Defeated the evil. And that’s what she did – she could be fiery, difficult,’ (he looked at me) ‘aggressive even, but she looked at evil head on and actually did something about it. She doesn’t belong in some valley of flowers or by some little stream. We should bury her here, at the highest point. We should remember her right.’
So that’s what we did. The mound of white stones rose three metres from the ground and the scent of the flowers and herbs filled the air. It was majestic, it was beautiful and it was proud. It was right.
I remember Mum saying that when she first moved me out of a cot and into a proper bed I didn’t know I could get out. I would just sit up and bellow for help, totally oblivious to the fact that I was already free – I just needed to swing my legs down to the floor. Mum said I must have thought there were invisible bars or something but I don’t think she was quite right. I think sometimes it’s what’s beyond the bars that keeps you from leaving. It’s the price of freedom. Maybe that price is too high.
It’s time to press on. With the Raiders destroyed I think we were all beginning to feel a bit ‘mission accomplished’, but really, our mission hasn’t even begun. With a detour to destroy an obvious and close enemy you start to forget about the real problem – the system that dumps half of society in a malarial swamp. The poorest half. Starvation, disease – these were hardly unforeseeable results. Raiders too, if you come to think of it, were pretty inevitable. When there’s no order, some fight to create a society, to protect others, some turn predator. Some make, some take, I guess. And the Raiders took. I wonder how long it will be before someone takes their place? We have to change the system at its core. Make the Ministry’
s accepted approach unacceptable. We have to find the server, hack the uploads and start some sort of rebellion. We have to cross the Fence.
Raf’s been declared ‘fit to move’. His vertigo’s practically gone – he gets weird feelings in his ears every now and then and a bit of dizziness if he gets up or sits down too quickly, but apart from that, he can cope. And there’s no sign of anything more horrific going on inside his brain – no nose bleeds, sustained migraines, that sort of thing – although Lee, voice of doom/medical saviour, says it’s impossible to tell at this stage. Thanks Lee!
Amy and Pete are heading back to the Fort. They’ll fill Adnan in on everything and help him rebuild and train. Try to increase recruitment.
The one massive issue and the whole point of the cot bit, Ella doesn’t want to come with us. I can’t quite get my head round it. It’d taken a lot of convincing by me for Lee to agree to take her. Raf was on my side, and I know Jack would have been too if he could have dragged himself out of his stupor of grief, but Lee was firmly against it. He said the decision ‘had to be unanimous’ and we couldn’t be ‘swayed by sentiment’. He banged on about ours being this ‘elite force’ and Ella not having any skills to contribute. We had to be a small team, he said. We had to be able to cross distance quickly, cross the Fence itself and be able to conceal ourselves on the other side. The more people we had, the harder it would be. Ella would just slow us down, put the mission itself at risk. She would be welcomed at The Fort or could return to a settlement with the Cells. Cara would look after her. They’d take her in at the Peak. I’d said myself how kind Annie was. The mission, the reprogramming of the Ministry servers, that had to take precedence over everything else.
I went mental at him. How could he be missing the massively important distinction? We could leave the Cells behind because they didn’t get ill. They weren’t going to die of malaria. They had special blood cells or skin or whatever. Ella didn’t. We couldn’t just leave her in the same way.
‘We’re going to leave the two other non-Cell girls behind,’ Lee said gently, trying to calm me.
‘I know,’ I yelled back, his tone and his logic having the opposite effect. ‘But they’re not my cousin!’ And with that I stormed off, running to the edge of the settlement. I sat on the ground and threw stones at a wall. Watching them chip bits away.
Lee caught up with me a few minutes later. We didn’t debate it. He just sat next to me and started throwing stones too. On his fourth throw, he said, ‘OK.’ And that was that.
I raced to tell Ella the ‘good news’. That’s when she dropped the bombshell. First Jack not wanting to be rescued, now Ella. I’m starting to feel less like a gallant, rescuing knight, and more like a bit of a weird stalker. At least Jack changed his mind. Ella’s seems set.
I get it in a way. If, and this is a big ‘if’, we make it across the Fence alive, we’ll be fugitives, always on the run, always looking over our shoulders. Ella’s tried to hide in the Territory before. She was caught. Her mum was tortured and killed within earshot. If you’re weighing that sort of existence against remaining in a settlement with some girls you’ve befriended – one, Nell, who clings to you like a limpet and sees you as a mother figure – maybe being hungry and probably getting malaria don’t weigh in quite as heavily as they might normally.
We had a last supper of sorts. It was a warm night, warmer than normal even. Jack made this massively long ‘table’ in the main square by resting planks of wood on top of reed bales. OK, so a few shacks had been sacrificed in the process, but since there wouldn’t be anyone living here soon, that didn’t seem like a big deal. It was supposed to be a parting feast, so Raf and Lee killed three of the chickens. The girls would take the others and the cow with them. I couldn’t face any more death so I volunteered for plucking duty instead, which was probably actually worse. It took ages and turned a feathered, quite beautiful bird into something kind of indecent. The chickens were roasted on spits and tasted ridiculously good. Hot, juicy, probably dangerously undercooked, it was far too dark to tell.
As we ate, Cara asked what our plans were. I thought they’d known, but how could they? They knew we were trying to cross the Fence. That was it. Her question seemed to hover in the air and all eyes turned to me, Raf, Jack and Lee. They were eyes full of hope. They wanted to believe life could be different. That we knew the secret to change. With Megan gone, Lee’s sort of assumed control so he answered. He kind of skipped over the actually crossing the Fence part but talked more about hacking into the servers, changing the uploads, unfreaking the freakoids. He’s not a natural speaker the way Megan is … was, but he must have enjoyed bathing in the girls’ rapt attention as he became more eloquent as he went on. That is, until Cara asked her second question.
‘Where are the servers?’
This was met with total silence. We didn’t know. We couldn’t answer. The big flaw in our plan had been laid wide open and you could feel the girls’ attention, their belief evaporate. They no longer believed in Santa.
‘We know some things,’ Lee continued, desperate to salvage something, for us as much as anything, to fuel us forward. ‘They must be in a remote location, or the Opposition would have discovered them. So… ’
Raf took over. ‘So we’re basically talking about the Woods, well probably not the Woods as people can holiday there, but the Arable lands or the Solar Fields.’
Ella spoke, her voice quiet and flat. ‘What sort of building are we talking?’
‘It wouldn’t have to be that big,’ Lee answered. ‘The most important thing is that it would be remote, heavily guarded and the electric fields would probably create some sort of energy or noise disturbance.’
‘Like a hum?’
‘Like a hum.’
Ella started to gnaw her hand and her left knee was slowly shaking, tapping a crazy beat on the floor.
‘Ella?’ No answer. ‘Els?’
Ella slowly looked up from the floor and looked me directly in the eye.
‘I think I know where the server is.’
Everyone was quiet as we packed up ready to leave, caught up in their own internal monologues. Lee distributed the remaining food stores and we all filled flasks of water, not knowing when we’d next reach a fresh source.
Amy and Pete were the first to leave and we wished each other luck with tight hugs. We told them to say hi to Adnan for us, and that we’d see them soon. On the other side. That phrasing left a spark of tension in the air. No one wanted to think of the other ‘other side’.
The Cells left next, Cara taking the lead. Well, all the Cells other than Nell. She’s coming with us. It was Ella’s condition of joining us, showing us the way, and Nell, who’d begun to howl at the prospect of losing her idol, looked instantly happier.
Finally it was our turn. We’d had to wait for Jack who, head bowed at the top of the hill, was saying a last goodbye to Megan. Lee was all for hurrying him up, but I begged him not to. He didn’t get to say a proper goodbye to Daisy. This time he deserved some space to do it right.
We donned backpacks, and were off, a rag-tag, supposedly elite team. At least we knew our target. The Solar Fields. They were north of the Arable lands so we consulted our compass and set off north-west. We were all weakened from the stress and the fighting and so we’d agreed not to push ourselves too much. However, before long, our strides were lengthening, fuelled by a sense of purpose. A mission. Our mission.
Ella caught me up and we walked in synchronised step. She locked arms with me and flashed a smile, the first smile that fully engaged her eyes too. They sparkled as she whispered in my ear, a trace of the old Ella bubbling through.
‘So, I actually got to meet the famous Raf.’
‘Yup. And….?’
Ella stayed silent but did a pretend deep-thinking face to wind me up.
‘Come on, Ella. He’s great, isn’t he?’
‘He’s got weird eyes.’
I dug my finger in her ribs and we both cracked up.
Huge thanks again to my husband for his constant encouragement and support. Thanks to Nina Duckworth, Sarah Brodie, Sarah Reid and Sarah Cornick for their invaluable feedback on early drafts. Thanks to my agent, Rupert Heath. Thanks to Penny Thomas at Firefly for being a brilliant editor and to Megan Farr for being excellent at PR. Thanks to Isabelle, Bona, Oliver, Lucie, Caitlin and everyone else who helped select the wonderful cover. And finally thanks to my parents and to my Aunty Jill for sending the first book to more distant cousins than I even knew I had.
First published in 2016
This edition 2018
by Firefly Press
25 Gabalfa Road, Llandaff North, Cardiff, CF14 2JJ
www.fireflypress.co.uk
Text © Sarah Govett 2016
The author asserts her moral right to be identified as author in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act, 1988.
All rights reserved.
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form, binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.