I feel sick at the news. ‘And you? Did they come after you?’
‘Probably. But I’ve been below the surface for years.’ He is speaking quickly, softly, clearly anxious about being overheard.
I look up. Chimo is tapping his long fingers against the flat of his hip, also nervous.
‘There are a lot of people looking for you,’ Lewis says.
‘Miss Margaret?’ I ask.
He doesn’t hear me or he chooses to ignore my question. I don’t know.
‘You need to stay low. Your group has broken up. They’re on the run. It’s very difficult for them to use you in the way in which they’d like,’ he says. ‘BioPerfect wants you as well. I don’t know what their intentions are. I’ll try to find out whatever I can, I’ll try to help, but you need to be careful.’
His image is dissolving.
‘Lark?’ I ask.
The screen is fluid now, a wave of lines. I’m about to close it up when he appears again, briefly, his face pressed close. ‘Trust no one,’ he tells me. ‘I mean it – even people who you think you can trust. Everyone is out for themselves.’
I look quickly at Chimo, who stands only feet away, who knows so much about me while I know so very little about him. Surely I can trust him if Lewis does. Unless Chimo has been using another set of data, a different identity to trick Lewis into thinking he is someone else? My paranoia is like poison.
Lewis tells me he will be in touch again soon. ‘I’ll come up with a way of reaching you. But you need to learn how to go much deeper than you have. Your last message was too close to the surface.’ He grins. ‘I thought you were meant to be taught all the tricks at that school of yours – waste of time, if you ask me.’
The screen is suddenly blank.
Chimo leans over me, one hand switching it off, the other pulling me up and drawing me close so my back is to a group of people walking right past where we are standing in behind the wall.
‘Datascanners,’ he whispers once they’ve passed.
In the afternoons, Ivy and I sat with Lark. Sometimes Lark was awake and would talk with us, but often she slept, her eyelids waxy with fever, her fine limbs almost too thin now.
‘How do you think they got me so wrong?’ Ivy once asked.
I looked across at her. She had dark blue eyes and curly black hair. Her skin was creamy white and her nose was small, upturned. There was a stubbornness about her, but I also noticed a prettiness I’d never seen before. ‘You’re not …’
She shook her head, her smile slight. ‘Don’t lie,’ she reminded me. ‘You never used to.’
‘I don’t know,’ I admitted. ‘There’s something about all of us. Something we haven’t been told.’
‘Not you,’ Ivy said, pausing. ‘Did you know Wren tried to run away?’
I shook my head, surprised.
‘In junior school. She did it several times. She would pack her bag and sneak out to the gates. There was no way she could even get out let alone get home, but she kept trying. She and I never talked to each other about how unhappy we were there. You couldn’t do that.’
‘Do you think Lark was happy?’ I whispered. I counted Lark as my closest friend, but there seemed to be so much I didn’t know. I felt ill as I contemplated that she, too, may be very different to the person I thought she was.
Ivy considered my question. ‘Mostly. She tried hard to be grateful for all she had, but I think she would have been just as happy if she’d been left with her parents.’
Once junior school finished and we were allowed home, the three of them regularly returned to their families for holidays while I chose to stay at school. Wren would say it was insufferable, but I wonder whether she really felt like that. I thought of her trying to sneak out of the grounds at night, and I realised home might actually have been a place she cared for far more than she ever let us know. Lark would often be withdrawn when she returned, and Ivy would be angry.
I asked her if she remembered the time she shouted and swore in class.
She smiled. ‘Of course I do.’
‘I was terrified for you. I couldn’t believe how brave you were.’
‘I wasn’t brave,’ she said. ‘I just couldn’t cope anymore. It was like I couldn’t breathe and it became harder and harder and harder.’ She looked down at her practical square palms, slightly calloused now. ‘I was a mistake. There’s no doubt about it. Sometimes I dream about being back there and I wake up choking, like someone has been sitting on my chest.’
When I wasn’t with Lark or helping Marcus or Hamish, I began to create media again. Miss Margaret told me there was no reason for me to let my skills go rusty.
‘You made such beautiful streams at Halston,’ she said.
The equipment wasn’t as sophisticated and I was confined to their own networks, forbidden from downloading or uploading via the main streams, but it was enough. The first piece I made was about the bees, capturing the intricate beauty of the hives. I spent hours on it, lost in the trance of creating again. When I was finished, Hamish helped me put it up on the internal networks so that it screened around the compound when the late-afternoon light flooded through the windows.
The first day it was up, I walked into the kitchen to find Hazel leaning on the workbench watching it.
‘Not bad,’ she told me. ‘Useless but not bad.’
Next, I started working on an idea about luck, using seeds and seedlings. I wanted to look at what flourished and what didn’t, to play with chance.
I was in the greenhouse, lost in my work, when Miss Margaret interrupted me. She wanted to teach me how to use the dataports to communicate.
‘I know you learnt a bit at Halston and that you were good at it,’ she said, ‘but this is purely sieve communication – and you need to be adept at ducking low and hiding.’
I wasn’t sure why she wanted to show me. To continue my education, I suppose.
‘In a sense,’ she said, as we walked back up to the compound, ‘it’s how we talk to other communities, how we exchange information and, where possible, commodities.’
She was fast, far more dexterous at finding her way around the sieves than I would have guessed.
‘It’s not a talent I advertised at Halston.’ She smiled as though she were aware of my thoughts. ‘I had to pick up a few tricks when I first began this work, and most I had to learn on the hop.’
She soon let me try, guiding me at first and then, when she saw how rapidly I picked it up, letting me find my own way. She was impressed and, needless to say, I basked in her praise. Old habits die hard.
One afternoon, she told me she had someone she wanted me to meet. She’d been setting it up for weeks.
‘His name is Rahim,’ she said. ‘He’s an instrumental part of all of this. Of everything.’
‘What do you mean?’ I asked.
She began to search through the sieves, delving deeper and deeper as she talked. ‘He’s with another related community and he’s been working on Operation Environment for some time.’
‘Operation Environment?’
‘It has involved coordinating a lot of subversives. He’s so excited to finally talk to you.’
I could feel the irritation rising in me, a sense again that I was being denied information. But she was concentrating now, even more distracted as she dived a little deeper, sending out signals, small signs that only those in the know would be able to read, scattering them like breadcrumbs along her path. I could see what she was doing, but the speed with which she was doing it made it hard to keep up.
‘Here.’ She drew me closer. ‘It’s all in the balance. It needs to appear to have an element of the random to those who don’t really know what they’re looking for, but there also needs to be enough of a design to make your intention clear.’
‘Wait.’ I could see, just off the edge, a repeated signal that seemed to be following her, no matter where she dived. ‘It looks as though someone is wanting to contact you.’
She fr
owned. ‘I need to be sure.’
She plummeted, leaving her trail cold behind her. The signal reappeared with an insistence that was difficult to ignore.
‘It could be a trap,’ I said, caught up in the chase despite myself. This was always the danger with communicating on the sieves.
‘I’m taking us to a safe house,’ she told me. ‘It will know the code to enter if it’s legitimate.’
We resurfaced at a startling speed, emerging in a chat space.
‘I’m not sure if I’m being followed,’ Miss Margaret said.
Suddenly, I was afraid. I glanced across at her. Her face was white. When I looked back at the screen, I saw the code, the alarm signals scattered everywhere. The space had been invaded by datascanners.
‘Leave,’ I told her.
She needed to get out before her location could be tracked. She knew that but fear had frozen her. And then the signal reappeared, more insistent than ever, hovering around her, scanning her.
‘Get out,’ I told her, louder and more panicked now.
It was only an instant before she took us offline, her fingers trembling, but it was long enough for us to have been marked.
‘They got us.’ I was breathless, wide-eyed, as I looked at her.
She was breathing rapidly, hands frozen above the screen.
‘Can they find us now?’
‘I don’t know.’ She stepped back, arms folded across her chest, almost hugging herself in fear. ‘They were waiting for us there. They must have had some information already – and my hesitation has given them more.’ She looked ill.
I took her hand, and it was cold.
‘We have to assume we’re no longer safe.’ She bit her lip, the flesh white beneath her teeth. ‘It’s too dangerous not to.’
‘So you are a laydee,’ Chimo whispers, his smile infectious.
‘Of course,’ I reply, nudging him with the tip of my toe.
We are lying in his hammock, under the lit-up sky, brilliant against the darkened buildings towering above us.
Some metres away, Sala is on her mat. She unrolled it as soon as we finished eating, neither of us uttering a word to each other. She is usually here, swinging above the dirt, talking to Chimo before they drift off to sleep. Tonight it is me instead. I glance in her direction, her eyes open, a small glint in the night, but it is too far for me to know if she is watching us.
I have been telling him about Halston. ‘I wasn’t the same as the other girls,’ I say as he rubs his calf against mine. ‘I didn’t come from money.’
He likes my tales of how beautiful it was there. My images of the grounds and the food we ate, the dining halls, the clean crisp sheets and feather-light quilts all paint a picture of a princess in a fairy story. ‘From Halston to here – now that’s a fall.’ He whistles. ‘And you were only sick that once?’ He looks me up and down in admiration. As he shifts in the hammock, moving closer to me, he asks me where I came from originally.
I remember Lewis’s warning – trust no one – an echo of Miss Margaret’s final words to me. Chimo’s breath is sweet in my ear. There seems no point in pretending. He knows my name, he knows Lewis is my brother, he trawls the sieves. I have so little left to hide.
‘I lived in a PureAqua compound a little better than this,’ I tell him. ‘Our place was two rooms, high up above the courtyards. My father was a security guard. He kept watch over reserves from the control room. It must have been a boring job, monitoring the screens, reporting anything unusual. Most sabotage was more subtle than tapping directly into the reserves. You know how it works – people redirect flow or set up illegal harvest. His job was the menial one – to be on the lookout for poor people like himself who dared to steal a little from the Parent. And if he failed to report what he saw, even when it was neighbours …’ I shrug. ‘He would be wiped.
‘Just before I went to Halston, he caught someone we knew. Someone my brother knew. The son of a family that lived near us. Their father had been wiped. Their allowance was barely enough to survive. I think he was stealing to sell illegally. I don’t know. I was young and it’s difficult to remember, but I do know that my father reported this boy. It devastated him. Lewis called him a coward and my father slapped him. It was the only time I saw him lose his temper. “And what would have happened if I’d done nothing? If they’d found out I’d failed in my duty? If you were left to support yourselves on a docked allowance?” he’d yelled. I remember my brother telling him that people like us had to stand together. We couldn’t turn on each other. We had to unite. My mother tried to hush him, scared someone would hear, but he wouldn’t be quiet.
‘Lewis must have joined the subversives when he was very young.’ I smile now at how naïve I was – there doing my special lessons, waiting to be whisked away to my beautiful school. ‘I just thought he was jealous.’
I look at Chimo, surprised at the memories that are returning.
‘My mother was a cleaner in one of the executive kitchens. Her skin always felt so dry. It must have been all the detergents and chemicals she used. And she smelt of that synthetic sweetness.’
I remember recoiling from her kiss the one time I returned home from Halston. She’d been so pleased to see me she’d left work early, despite the loss of data this incurred, and she came to meet me at the entrance to the compound. I’d stepped out of that autocarrier and straight into her arms, pulling back immediately. ‘It’s so hot,’ I’d complained, even though I was shielded by my suit. ‘It smells terrible.’ She’d been ashamed for me, taking me by the hand and getting me home as quick as she could.
I look down at my feet, wrapped around Chimo’s leg. ‘They were quiet, good, ordinary people, I suppose. I never knew them well. What little time I had at home before I left for Halston was all about preparing me for my next life – the real one that was awaiting me.’
I look to the images floating overhead.
All around us, people are quiet now, most with their streamers focused on their evening’s viewing. Chimo and his friends are unusual for ignoring the mediastreams.
‘I don’t want to want what they want me to want,’ he’d told me once.
I’d nodded as though I agreed, and I did in one sense. I thought I was superior. I’d made messages. I knew how they worked. But the truth is, I not only enjoyed making them, I loved watching them.
‘You have to in order to excel at it,’ Miss Caroline had told me at Halston.
‘Look.’ I point up to the sky. A kaleidoscope of colour merges and floats, separating to form a dreamy landscape of lakes and forests and silver horses. If I had a streamer I would focus in, deep into the darkness of those woods, where evil no doubt lurked, and I would run and be chased and seize escapes that opened up to me when I least expected, the thrill of it keeping me awake for hours.
Chimo glances up and then back at me. ‘I prefer to look at you,’ he whispers. ‘My laydee.’
He holds my hand up to the light, my skin pale in his, and he kisses the base of each finger, his lips soft.
‘I’m here to help you,’ he says, turning his attention back to my hand. ‘Why stare at the sky when beauty is right next to you?’
I kick him gently. ‘At Halston they taught us not to overdo it. Make your message distinctive but subtle.’
He narrows his eyes and considers me for a little longer. ‘All those cells that make you who you are. The wonder of that.’
‘Not bad,’ I say, pretending his words have just skimmed across the surface, but the truth is I am diving inside, lurching with the thrill of him, and it’s like a roller-coaster ride deep into the heart of the sieves.
As soon as Miss Margaret reported what had happened, there was more action in the community than I had seen since I’d arrived. Gone was the languid eating of meals, time spent playing with the few children in the courtyard, leisurely chats in the common areas. Each morning an alarm woke us all at six, with breakfast to be finished by six-thirty.
We each had tasks. My m
ornings were spent helping Marcus and the others who worked with him. We had to select the seedlings we could take with us, pick the fruit and vegetables for preservation and help with the transport of whatever water we could carry.
‘We don’t know how long we have,’ Marcus said. ‘The scan was only brief, and in the past we may not have been so alarmed, but it’s different this time. Poor Margaret,’ he added. ‘She blames herself.’
I was quick to defend her. ‘They were there already.’
‘I know, and so does everyone else. They are more vigilant than ever …’
I wondered whether he was referring to Lark’s and my disappearance from Halston and our presence in the community. Was it our fault? No, I told myself. It wasn’t like we chose to come here.
‘Where will we go?’ I asked.
He told me there were other outposts we could join while we worked on setting up a new home. We would split up and head to a few of these.
Each day autocarriers left with supplies and residents. Everyone worked efficiently and quietly. Only once did I see their distress. An older woman was loaded into one of the transport units. She was clearly unwell. ‘But I don’t want to go,’ she kept saying. ‘This is home. Please don’t send me back – not to that place.’
I asked Marcus who decided who could join a community.
‘There’s no one person and no single factor,’ he told me. ‘Sometimes people who are desperate are rescued. Sometimes people who have been working on the outside and need refuge come here, and sometimes people want to rejoin families. There are many different reasons why people first arrive – some choose to stay, others don’t.’
‘But how are decisions made?’
‘Together,’ he said.
‘Everyone?’ The concept seemed impossible to me.
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