by S. C. Ransom
I turn away from the window and start to walk again. I wish I knew what to do. By now, everyone at home will think that I’m dead. Does Dane think that too? Or did Neville really see me the other day and tell everyone? With so many people here what were the chances of that happening? Frustrated, I stuff my hands in my pockets and walk on, looking at the pavement. A horn blares – I have arrived at a busier road, so concentrate on getting to the other side safely.
I have to decide – try to make contact, or do I move on?
Then I glance down a side road and see his face. Instinctively I dodge into a doorway, and I realise that what I do next will change my life again. Shall I stay hidden or betray Lily and all she’s done by stepping out into the sunshine?
I couldn’t resist the temptation to peep into the coffee bar as I came out of the station later, and he was there, lounging on the sofa reading the paper. He glanced up and saw me looking, but before I could turn away he smiled and waved for me to come in.
I pushed open the heavy door and stepped in, enjoying the cool air and smell of freshly roasted coffee. He looked even more gorgeous than earlier, but maybe slightly younger in the daylight than he had seemed on the Tube. He had to be older than me though. What on earth did he want with me? The girl sitting at the next table looked at us with undisguised surprise.
“Hello,” he said, making room on the sofa for me to join him. “I was hoping that I’d see you this afternoon. There was something I wanted to ask you. Nightmare this morning, wasn’t it?”
I nodded mutely, not really knowing what to say as I hovered next to the sofa. I shouldn’t really be talking to him anyway. He was practically a stranger.
“Oh, come on, I’m not going to bite. Sit down for a minute, will you? What harm can it do?”
The coffee shop wasn’t busy, but there were enough people in there for it to be safe. I perched on the edge of the sofa and couldn’t help smiling back a little when he gave me a broad grin.
“Did the delay make you really late for college?” he asked.
“Umm, no, it wasn’t too bad in the end,” I mumbled, not wanting to admit that I went to school and not college.
“Good.” He smiled again, then picked up his cup and peered into it. “Can I get you a coffee? I could do with a refill.”
There didn’t seem to be any point in refusing. “Coffee, please. Cappuccino if that’s OK.”
“Two minutes then. Don’t go away!”
He jumped up out of the deep sofa easily, reaching in his back pocket for his money as he walked away from me towards the counter. He was incredibly fit, and I couldn’t quite believe that I was sitting there with him. The girl at the next table couldn’t either, and, having admired him as he walked off, looked me up and down again before shaking her head. Sitting back, I tried to look as if I had coffee with gorgeous boys every day.
He reappeared with the drinks and folded his long frame back down on to the sofa. Taking a small sip of his coffee he nodded as if it were good and then set it back down. Finally he sat back and turned towards me, one arm resting casually along the back of the seat.
“So, Lily, what are you planning to do with Aria?”
I had just lifted my cup and almost dropped it back on to the saucer in surprise. The coffee sloshed over the edge.
“How … how do you know my name? And how do you know about Aria? Are you from Social Services or something?”
I pushed myself to the edge of the seat again, ready to jump up and run for it.
“Calm down. You’re not in any trouble. Sit back – we need to talk.”
He took hold of my arm and firmly pulled me back. As I eased back into the sofa I could still feel the press of his fingers on my skin. He was very strong, and I doubted that I would get far if I decided to run.
“Who are you?” I demanded, folding my arms and sticking out my chin as he sat back in a relaxed pose.
“My name is Dane and I’m a friend, that’s all you need to know. I’m not from Social Services, that’s for sure.”
He smiled again, but I refused to smile back. He leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. Aria had mentioned a Dane, so this had to be him, but was he a friend or not?
“The thing is, Lily, I have a bit of a problem and I need your help.”
“Hang on a sec, I need some answers. What makes you think that I know anyone called Aria?”
“Don’t be difficult. You were spotted with her at the weekend.”
“I’m not being difficult! And how do you know me? Have you been stalking me?” My voice was getting higher, and I could see some of the other customers turning to see what was going on.
“Keep your voice down,” he said, hands out as if to calm me. “It’s nothing like that, I promise. Aria ran away, and one of my friends saw her at the weekend just around the corner from here. So I was watching out for her myself yesterday when I saw her with you.” He smiled a little, looking away briefly. “I couldn’t believe that of all the people in London she could befriend, she found you. What are the chances of that? I knew that I would see you on the train this morning, so I waited.”
“Why the subterfuge? Why didn’t you just come and say something – you’re a friend of hers, aren’t you?” I asked, hoping that I was remembering correctly.
“I didn’t want to frighten her off. She knows that she’s broken all the rules, and if she had seen me she might have run again. I didn’t want to risk it.”
“Presumably she’ll take off because she doesn’t want to talk with you. Why would I – should I – help? She’s my friend.”
“Exactly – you’re her friend, so she’ll listen to you. You must have noticed that she’s a bit – how shall I put it – different. What has she told you about her home?”
“Some,” I said, shrugging, not wanting to give away what I knew. “She’s not said a huge amount, to be fair. She doesn’t seem to want to talk about it. Just that it’s a closed community with pretty strict rules. I’m assuming it’s something to do with your religion.”
The guy nodded. “It’s a good guess, and about right. Our community is very sheltered and Aria knows very little about the outside world. Our leaders are worried – I’m worried – about her ability to cope.”
“She seems to be doing OK.”
“I’m sure you’re looking after her really well but it must be hard. She’s a little backward in her understanding of the world and she has been known to rather exaggerate things. Has she been telling you some outrageous tales?”
He smiled at me and picked up his coffee. What should I say? Was Aria telling me the truth, or was the whole thing an elaborate hoax? If I agreed with him and told him what she’d said I could put her in more danger. I didn’t know what to do, and the longer I hesitated, the more he was going to suspect me. I leaned forward and lifted my coffee cup too, buying a few precious seconds of thinking time. I stirred the froth slowly before taking a sip, and the answer was suddenly clear. Aria couldn’t have been lying to me. Somehow she’d known how to get through that wall, and something had been on that disused platform. So if she was telling the truth, what was he up to?
“No, not really,” I said. “She’s doing OK. She doesn’t seem to read particularly well, but that’s all.”
The guy’s shoulders relaxed – was that what he wanted to hear?
“Cool, cool,” he said, nodding. “So, is she staying with you then?”
“Umm, actually no, she’s staying at a friend’s house. There’s no room in our flat.”
He nodded again, apparently satisfied with my answer. I sat back with my coffee, taking another sip and trying to look relaxed.
“So,” I asked. “You didn’t answer my question – how do you know my name? Secret Service if not Social Service?”
“Ha! Good one. Nothing so dramatic. I just read your name on the files sticking out of your bag this morning.”
“Oh.” That really was possible. I had taken in all my homework so not all of it fitted
properly in my rucksack. “OK then, why have you come to look for her? Why not send someone she would trust immediately?”
He looked at his hands for a moment before answering.
“I volunteered. I’m really, really keen to talk with her.”
He finally looked up at me through his long dark lashes, his gaze steady.
“Why?” I asked again.
There was a moment’s hesitation while he seemed to be weighing me up.
“Because I love her,” he said.
I sat back in surprise, lost for words for a moment.
“You didn’t expect that, did you?” he asked, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees. “She doesn’t know, does she?”
“No,” I said. “I really don’t think she does.”
He looked at me for a moment longer, then dropped his head into his hands.
“I thought she knew, I really did. I wish I’d been clearer – if I had, then none of this mess would have happened.”
“I think it’s time to be straight with me, Dane. What’s going on, and why do you need my help?”
He was hunched over, all his previous poise gone. For a moment I even wondered if he was about to cry, but he washed his hands across his face and sat back up, exhaling loudly.
“The truth is, Aria came here as a favour to me, to help me do something, but it’s all gone wrong. She shouldn’t be out here as it makes it really hard for her to go back. I need to talk with her. Can you bring her to me? I think she trusts you.”
“But why would she be nervous about seeing you? It doesn’t make sense.”
“She may think that I’m going to be angry about the mistake she made, but I’m not. I just want for both of us to be safe.”
“I thought it was just Aria who was in trouble?”
“It is, but I won’t be happy until I know that she’s OK. I need to see her, to find out what she wants to do. We have to talk about the future.” His dark eyes seemed full of pain. “Our future – hers and mine.”
He didn’t seem to be lying any more. He wanted to help her too.
“What do you need me to do?”
My head was whirling as I made my way back towards home. My simple, dull life had evaporated so fast that I could barely remember it. Smiling, I walked down the old iron staircase to the basement flats and turned the handle on the door of Marjorie’s flat. I was relieved to find that it was locked, as I had suggested, so I knocked gently.
Nothing happened, so I knocked slightly more loudly. There was still no response. I leaned round to look through the window to the front room, but found the view blocked by the net curtains. Cupping my hand over my eyes I tried again, and could just see the basic outline of the furniture. There was no sign of Aria.
“Where on earth have you gone?” I said out loud to myself as I leaned on the door.
Where could I start looking? She had no mobile so I couldn’t call her; she couldn’t read a note if I left one for her; and she couldn’t use a phone to call me. Maybe she had gone to see Nan. It was the only other thing I could think of, and I was just about to go up to the flat when I heard footsteps on the metal stairs behind me. It was Aria, looking relaxed and happy.
“Hi, how are you? I was wondering where you’d got to.”
“I had to get out. I hope you don’t mind.”
“No, not at all. So where did you end up?”
“I just walked around the streets a bit,” she said, unlocking the door as if she had been using keys her entire life.
The inside of the flat was cool and welcoming, and I instinctively moved towards the kitchen and the fridge. I dropped my heavy school bag down and picked out a can of Coke.
“Do you want one?” I asked, but Aria just shook her head.
“I saw lots of shops with white dresses in the window. What are they for?”
“Umm, white dresses, that will be … oh – wedding dresses, of course! There’s a whole street of little shops that seem to sell nothing but wedding stuff. Did you end up there?”
Aria nodded. “Ah yes, weddings – you were showing me the wedding stories in one of the magazines. I should have guessed.”
“The dresses are beautiful, aren’t they? Expensive though.”
“Very beautiful, but not very practical!” She smiled at me.
“You’re not wrong,” I laughed.
I took a glass from the cupboard and flicked open the can before sitting down at the table.
“Do you guys have any sort of partnership ceremony like getting married? You said something about being matched up by the Elders,” I asked.
“We are, so we never pair up out of choice. They put us into breeding pairs and there’s no ceremony for that.”
I couldn’t help shaking my head, relieved that my world was different to hers. I took a quick swig of the Coke then poured the rest into a glass.
“What if you actually do love someone? That must happen sometimes.”
“It’s not encouraged, because the breeding pairs get regularly rearranged.”
“So they set you up with one bloke and then move you on to another?”
“Yes, it would be pointless having fifteen children with the same partner. It’s our duty to breed stronger members of the Community.”
“And you get no choice at all in the men?”
She gave a bitter laugh.
“None. Usually we get paired up with the Elders as they are the first in line to have descendents. Later we might get one of the younger ones, but that’s quite rare. We accept what we’re given. Well, the others do anyway.”
“But not you.”
Aria looked down at the table, tracing a knot in the wood with her finger.
“Everything there is wrong,” she said quietly, not lifting her head. “Especially the way they treat us women. I knew rebelling against the Farmer was right, but the fight is so much bigger than that. It’s only since I’ve come up here and seen how you live that it has become so clear.”
“Don’t any of the women protest?”
This time the laugh was more of a snort.
“No! Never. Everyone knows their place. I would never even have thought about trying to change anything until Dane talked me into it.”
Dane. Should I tell her that I saw him, even though he had begged me not to?
“So what was his plan?” I asked.
Aria looked up at me, then her eyes slid back down to the table. She looked as if she was about to start talking then stopped. Finally she took a deep breath. “I was supposed to find someone – someone special – down on the Tube platform. The idea was to take them back to the Community. Dane had a plan, but I didn’t really know the rest of it. I knew he had a map of the old Crop tunnels, and we used them to find a secret way up. I waited until I knew that the Crop was busy and I took the risk, but then of course I got lost, and you found me.”
Was now the time to tell her? If I mentioned Dane wouldn’t that make things easier for her? I was about to say something when Aria continued, almost talking to herself.
“I’m beginning to wonder if Dane didn’t have a rather different plan in mind. Maybe I was supposed to fail. He lies so well – how can I be sure that he wasn’t lying to me?”
I shut my mouth. Had he lied to me too? I couldn’t know. I reached over and took one of her hands.
“Don’t get upset. You can’t change that now. What’s important is that you got away, and you found me too, which was a bonus. We’ve been doing OK, haven’t we?”
She nodded and looked up, and I could see that her eyes were moist.
“Come on then,” I said. “Tell me a bit more about today, not about things that are going to worry you. What else did you get up to?”
“I walked around a bit, trying to make sense of the area in my head. It’s how we learn the tunnels when we’re little.”
Lily laughs. “How did you get on with that then?”
“Not bad, I think.”
“You’re better than me then.
I’m rubbish at knowing which way I’m going.”
“We have to be good at it,” I tell her. “There’s a test when we reach six. We need to be able to find our way from one end of the Community to the other.”
“Sounds tough for a six-year-old.” Lily laughs again, clearly trying to cheer me up. “I hope you didn’t fail.”
“No one fails. The Breeders make sure of it. If they raised kids with no sense of direction it’s not good news.”
Lily raises her eyebrows but asks no more questions.
“Your school – was that good today?” I ask.
“You know, for a change it was OK. I managed to get the better of Jenny in an argument, which was awesome.”
I remember Lily mentioning a Jenny, but not why.
“Is she one of your friends?”
“Ha, no! She’s the one who’s constantly making things miserable for me, sending me the mean text messages. I got one just after we met, remember?”
“Oh yes, I remember the one. She’s horrible to you.”
“But not today!” Lily beams, holding up her mobile. “Not a peep out of her.”
“And that is good,” I say, smiling back.
“So come on,” Lily continues, finishing the last of her sickly-smelling brown drink. “Is that all you did today? What else happened?”
I remember the best bit of my day, and smile.
“I met Will. We went for a coffee.”
I nearly spat Coke across the kitchen table.
“I’m sorry, did I hear that right? You met Will?”
“Yes, he was lovely. He took me for a coffee. Well, obviously I didn’t actually have one of those, just a glass of water, but he said that’s what he was having.”
I couldn’t believe it. I’d left her for just a few hours and she’d already had more of a date with Will than I’d ever managed – or ever would manage by the sound of it. Aria was sitting in the kitchen I’d sorted out for her, eating food I’d provided and was sleeping in a bed I’d made. The very least she could do was keep her hands off the guy I fancied.
“How was he?” I asked through gritted teeth, but she was oblivious to my discomfort.