I am awake when it happens. I am awake because there is some kind of argument going on. It didn’t start out as a fight, it started out sounding like a party—the dull kind that mature types have, with not enough music and too much chat and hoo-hoo, har-har (oh-gosh-darling-you’re-such-a-hoot!). That kind of thing. This would not have kept me awake (I would hardly feel like I was missing out on anything, would I?), but when it started getting nasty…I hate that SO much, the sound of a fight. And I hate it even more when it’s muffled. (Not that I want to hear it clearly, just that it reminds me of parents fighting. My parents fighting.)
So, yeah, I am awake, doodling on that stupid pad and trying not to listen to the distant sounds of an argument I couldn’t even hear properly if I tried. I have drawn all sorts of things—raindrops and skulls and rockety things—but I have yet to scribble anything that looks like a word. I got a slap just for asking why they wanted to know this stuff; I feel sick inside thinking what will happen if I don’t do what I am told… But still…my hand has refused to write a single letter. My brain has tried to reason with it, but it is being very stubborn.
YAP! GRRR! YAP! NO! GRRR! snarls the argument as the door opens.
KZZZZ! The overhead lights are dazzling as a nurse snaps them on.
That’s what the argument might as well sound like. In reality I hear: “OUTRAGEOUS!” (that sounds like Beardy)—followed by the grrr of a low, cold voice (Dr. TVSOYMMSTTVCOMB?) speaking words I still cannot make out—followed by “… DISGUSTING!” (that’s someone else) and “NO!” (someone else again)…and then the low, cold grrr again before the door closes.
“I was just gonna do it,” I gibber at the nurse, waving the pad at him, squinting and blinking in the dazzling light. “It’s not my fault! It’s them!”—I jerk my head at the argument noise—“I can’t concentrate!”
“Ya gotta go, Ruby,” he tells me, chucking a biosuit down on the bed next to me.
“What?! Why?! Where?!”
“Shh! Sweetie! It’s OK! No one’s going to hurt you.”
But someone already did. I shake my head at him, terrified. “That woman slapped me.”
“Who slapped you?”
“That woman—the doctor that asks all the questions.”
He frowns. “She’s not a doctor,” he says.
I feel an exhausted tear crawl down my cheek.
“I just want to go home,” I tell him. In fact, anywhere but here would do. I hate this place. I hate these people. I trust no one…and I have the eeriest feeling everyone is LYING TO ME AND TREATING ME LIKE AN IDIOT.
“We all do.” He sighs. “Come on, let’s put this on,” he says, and he helps me put the biosuit on over my gown. “Sorry about this,” he says, “but we’re all out of jeans.”
I am being dressed for the first time since I was little. And I feel little. I feel little…and scared.
“We’re all out of sneakers too,” he says, holding up a pair of ghastly white bio–rain boots.
“Sit down, sweetie.”
I sit on the bed. Trollish shudders of misery pass through my body.
He crouches to put the bio–rain boots on my feet. He does it very, very slowly, and as he does it, he speaks to me very, very quietly.
“Ruby…there’s a treatment. There is a cure now, thanks to you. There is a cure.”
That’s fairly stunning news, isn’t it? That can only be good, right? I’m going to be some kind of national hero or something. No! International! Probably there’ll have to be a new public holiday—maybe on my birthday. That’d be nice…
You will notice that this story is not over.
“Really?!”
“Truly. Beardsall’s cracked it,” he says. “He’s stewed up a whole tankful of your phage. You’ve done it, sweetie! You’ve saved the planet!”
“I have?”
“Sure! I mean, Beardsall’s trying to grab all the glory, but everyone knows you’re the real star.”
“They do?”
“Absolutely.”
He pats my successfully rain-booted foot, lets it go, then takes hold of the other foot.
“So…how come I can’t go home?”
I jerk my foot away.
“Why can’t I just go?”
He hesitates.
“Hey! I’m not a kid, you know. I’m not some stupid kid.”
And then it comes to me… I’ve seen what they’ve been doing to kids, haven’t I?
“Oh my … It’s because I know too much, isn’t it?”
“Um. No. To be honest with you, Ruby, I think there are plenty of people who know quite a bit more than you.”
“Just tell me the truth. Please, just tell me the truth. Am I sick? Am I going to die? Am I infectious? I’m infectious, aren’t I? That’s why I’ve got to wear this thing, isn’t it? Please just tell me. I swear—I promise—I swear I won’t tell anyone. Please…”
He reaches to take hold of my foot, and I let him.
“Oh my . I’m going to die, aren’t I? Or… Oh my ! Are…are they going to kill me?”
He shoves the other boot on and then stares up at me.
“No one is going to hurt you,” he says. “You are way too precious for that.”
Precious. I have never felt less precious in my life.
“They’re just trying to scare you. Even this,” he says, plucking at the biosuit, “there is no need for it. It is a ‘precaution’; that’s what they said. It is not necessary.”
My mouth thinks about opening. My brain tells it to shut up.
“Listen to me, sweetie,” he says. “The people who are currently in charge of this country want to keep this whole thing a secret.”
My mouth opens. Words fail to come out. My brain freezes.
“I know. It’s appalling. That’s what the fight is about. Beardsall told…too many people. They want to keep the cure a secret…and that means you too.”
That’s the thing about precious things, isn’t it? People don’t want to let them go…
“You’re being moved to the high-security lab,” he says. “There’s no need to panic.”
Yeah, right. I am totally freaking out.
“It’s just a temporary move to a more secure place.”
I stare at him, open jawed; ice from the brain freeze creeping into every cell of my body.
“Sweetie?”
Though my vision is fear blurred, I see the name on his badge. I do a thing my stepdad used to do when he wanted to win people over.
“Right. Thank you, Ibrahim,” I tell him.
“Don’t mention it,” he says, getting to his feet. He puts his hands on my shoulders…and squeezes. I think he’s going to start shaking me, but, “Really,” he says, eyeballing me, “do not mention it.”
I swallow—no spit to swallow because my mouth is so dry—and I nod.
“That’s what they’re worried about. Do you understand? They do not want this to get out.”
I nod harder.
His pager goes off; he reads it. “!” he swears—and he laughs, but in a shocked, dead kind of way.
“Honestly, you really are best off out of this one,” he says. “Beardsall’s on a bender,” he whispers. “Drunk! This is going to get ugly.”
He picks up the helmety-thing and holds it in front of me.
“I won’t tell anyone,” I say.
“Good girl,” he says, and shoves the helmet on. “Everything is going to be OK,” he tells me again through the plastic, shoving gloves onto my hands. Then he offers me his hand. “C’mon, sweetie.”
My gloved hand takes his gloved hand and, in that too-big plasticky-rubbery suit, I squeak and sblob out into the corridor.
Even though the helmet muffles sound a little, I detect instantly that the fight has heated up…but I really don’t care to listen to
the YAP! GRRR! YAP! NO! GRRR! of it. Behind the desk, a nurse is on the phone. It is not the nurse who tried to help me get out of here. I have never seen her again. It is some other nurse who is all composed until she puts down the phone; then she looks a little freaked out.
“They need you back at the party,” she tells Ibrahim. “Beardsall’s gone coco-loco.”
“I know!” he says, and laughs that shocked, dead—frightened?!—laugh, glancing at me.
“Yeah, well,” she tells him, “I think you might have missed the fun part.”
“Typical! Sweetie, I’m going to come with you in the ambulance, so just you wait there,” he says and goes running off.
I plunk my plasticky-rubbery behind down onto the seats where I sat the night I brought Saskia in. I want to go. I just want to go. I don’t like this place. I don’t like these people.
I try to look around me. Doing anything in the suit is hard.
“All right?” the desk nurse says.
I nod. Lying is super-easy inside this suit.
“You must be feeling pretty pleased with yourself,” she says—not in a nasty way, in a nice way.
“I guess.”
Her phone rings again. She listens, with a superb eyeball roll of exasperation for my benefit, to the shouty voice on the end of the line.
“He is in surgery,” she says.
She holds the phone away from her head as the shouty voice shouts louder. I swear, that’s Dr. Ms. TVSOYMMSTTVCOMB losing it, and the thought of that makes me shudder and smile all at the same time. Maybe someone will need to slap her.
“OK. I’ll get him. I—WILL—GET—HIM,” says the nurse, slamming down the phone. “, since when did Thurley become the voice of reason?” she says—to me, I suppose, being as how I’m the only other person there. “I mean, whose side is he on anyway?”
I shrug under the ten tons of rubbery plastic, but really, I’ve got other things on my mind.
She picks up the phone, jabs one digit. I’m guessing no one picks up, because she slams the phone down. “He’s such an asshole,” she says.
Sorry, Mom, I know I promised. I know you’d say even this “asshole” word counts. You hated swearing—no, just me swearing. And up until now, I’ve laid off it, because I wanted everything I had to tell to be…for you, really. To show you that I will never, ever forget you. But, Mom, I am about to have my heart ripped out.
Again, Mom, again.
And you, whoever you are, reading this, would you please read very carefully, and would you please…please just think what you would have done. Because I had sixty seconds to decide. I feel very precise about this, because I swear I felt every beat of my heart. But as that was already cranked up from the start and ended up totally hammer-hammer-hammering in my chest, we’ll just stick to seconds, shall we?
Sixty seconds.
1–2
“Right, back in a min,” says the nurse, getting up.
3–6
She stomps—just a few steps—to the nearest door. It is labeled “Prep 1.”
7
As the nurse bats open the door labeled “Prep 1” to call for Thurley, I get to my feet.
8
In Prep 1, I glimpse the Princess, sitting on a gurney. Some kind of sign around her neck. I feel I’ve been slapped across the face all over again.
9–10
Too shocked to stand, I sit back down.
11
The nurse comes back out, looking flustered.
12–20
“Are they still experimenting on kids?” I ask in a dead voice.
“Yes,” she snaps. “But it WILL be stopping soon.”
21–22
“Or not,” she says as the door at the end of the corridor bursts open and a blast of cool Earth night rushes in—cool but not raining. Outside, under the canopy, there’s an ambulance and a dark-windowed scary car (the kind drug-dealing gangsters in movies drive). A bunch of male versions of Ms. TVSOYMMSTTVCOMB are piling out of it, but these ones have guns. I’m guessing these must be the “Oh No, the Scientists Are Having a Fight Police” (plain-clothes division).
23
The nurse swears.
24
I swear. (Out loud.)
25
Thurley (the asshole) comes out of Prep 1, his blue gown splattered with blood.
26
Before that door swings shut behind him, I see the Princess again.
27–29
“No one leaves,” the last suit barks at the nurse as he and Thurley the bloodstained child butcher (asshole) barrel off down the corridor after the others.
30
The nurse swears again.
31
I swear.
32
The nurse sits down.
33–40
“This is not right,” she says, taking off after them all.
41–55
I sit alone in that corridor in a state of terror.
56
I decide.
57
I get up.
58
I sit back down.
59
I get up.
60
I do it.
I speed-splop through that Prep 1 door and grab the Princess by the arm; she cowers in fear. “It’s me,” I tell her. Not got time for this. “Darius said,” I shout at her, pulling her off the gurney, dragging her down the corridor.
I open the back door of the ambulance; a soldier is sitting there.
“All set?” he asks me.
My guts lurch, but I am NOT about to let this spoil our escape. I shove the Princess in.
“Yup,” I shout in the deepest voice I can manage—I have to; otherwise, I can feel for a fact that my voice would just be a frightened squeak.
I slam the door shut and go around to the front of the ambulance, the driver’s door.
Unfortunately, there is already a driver—having a ciggy that he flicks out of his open window at the sight of me.
My guts lurch, but I am NOT about to let this spoil the escape either. I must stay on mission. I go around to the passenger side. I get in.
“All right?” says the driver, rolling up his window.
“Yup,” I shout.
“Oo! Wait up!” he says, watching his rearview mirror.
I check the one on my side; Prof Beardy is being dragged toward us by suits.
“Oh dear, oh dearie me,” says the driver, tutting.
Beardy and the suits disappear from sight.
“Had too much of the hard stuff, hasn’t he?” says the driver, grinning.
The back door of the ambulance slams shut. There is a thump on this little window behind us that makes me jump—the driver shoves it open and our heads nearly bump as we both look: just the soldier, the Princess, and Beardy (who looks like he’s about ready to fall off his seat) in there.
I look back around. OK. OK. No suits. That’s good. Well, you know, not “good” good, but better than it might have been.
“This isn’t a cab, you know,” the driver informs the soldier, and shuts the window.
“Might as well be,” he laughs to me.
He starts up, puts the headlights on, and we roll away from that place.
“I used to drive one,” he tells me as we head off into the night, “and let me tell you, it’s true what they say—”
I don’t get where we are going; we are driving away from the buildings.
“—you really do get some funny people in cabs.”
We are driving away from where I think the main gate should be. Could possibly be.
“Not him though,” says the driver. “Had him in here before.”
I do a token micro-glance at him, to act like I’m listening when r
eally I wish he’d just shut up.
“That soldier? Sense of humor? Must’ve been surgically removed.”
We are driving away from everything.
“Surgically, geddit?”
We are driving into the night.
“Thought you’d like that,” he says. “You know ‘surgery’?!”
I cannot figure this thing out…but a move will have to be made, sooner or later, and I will have to make it.
“Surgery? Doctors?”
He sighs; he changes gear. Where are we going?
“So, what we got in there, then?” he asks me, jerking his head at the window.
I shrug.
“Little drama going on?” he fishes.
In the back of the ambulance, even through the glass, even through this stupid plasticky-rubbery helmet, I can hear Beardy—at the top of his voice—telling the soldier that he is a brilliant, brilliant, brilliant microbiologist. “Best in the world, mate…best in the world,” that kind of thing.
“Hush-hush, is it?” the driver asks.
I do not reply. I want to go home. I want to “And then I woke up.”
“Just trying to make conversation.” The driver sighs. “Ah! Here we go!”
We pull up at a gate. There are no crowds of the useless here. It is just a gate in the middle of nowhere. I will my guts not to lurch, but they ignore me.
“All right, mate?” grins the driver, rolling down his window.
“All right?!” A soldier at the gate grins back. “What you got in there, then?”
“Drunk guy and a kid.”
The gate soldier speaks into his walkie-talkie: “Exit confirmed.”
“Confirming exit,” a walkie-talkie voice says back.
“On you go,” says the gate soldier as he steps back and swings open the gate.
“Cards later?” the driver yells.
“Lamb to the slaughter!” the gate soldier yells back.
“We’ll see about that,” the driver laughs to me as we bump out into the night.
It is such a starry, moonlit night—so bright I can see exactly what the sky is thinking. It is happy to light our way for now, but it is cooking up other plans; a fat slice of sky is already missing, smothered by nimbostratus, a cloud so thick with rain not a single star shines through it. That’s pretty much how my brain feels: dark and deadly. Erm, and dense and dim. Obviously, the plan is to escape… It’s just that the precise details of how I’m going to do that are not known to me.
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