Tom ran over.
‘Amazing, isn’t she?’
Pan nodded. ‘Beautiful,’ she said.
‘I could save one for you – you know, when I get the breeding program up and running. And then I could show you how to train it. Once you’ve trained a falcon, you get to love it.’
‘And does it get to love you?’
‘Nah. These birds don’t love. It’s not in their nature. But a bond? Yeah. You build up a bond. It’s pretty special.’
Pan looked at the falcon. Most of the mouse had disappeared. Like the rest of us, she thought. Eat to survive. Just get it down your throat.
‘That would be great, Tom,’ said Pan. ‘I’d very much like to learn from you. And if I ever discover any meat in my food I’ll be sure to keep some for Kes.’
Tom beamed as he took the bird back onto his gauntlet. Just before he slipped the hood on, he looked into the falcon’s eyes. Pan recognised love when she saw it.
~~~
By the time she returned to the dormitory it was eight-forty-five and Pan decided to brave the shower block. She hoped the rush would have subsided by now and she might be afforded some privacy. She opened the door. Four girls were in there, one of them Wei-Lin, standing under four shower heads that trickled dispiritedly. For a moment, Pan was embarrassed at their nakedness, but the girls didn’t seem to care.
‘Hey.’ There was a chorus of yells. ‘Close the door. Keep the warmth in.’
Pan shut the door. She shivered. She doubted that shutting the door would have any effect on the temperature inside the toilet block which appeared to be a couple of degrees below that outside. She shivered, reluctant to take her own clothes off. Toughen up, she thought.
There was a small bench and Pan sat there to wait for a shower to become free. It didn’t take long. Wei-Lin stepped out from beneath the shower head and walked over to the rinsing head. She held a small plastic cup and collected as much of the fresh water as possible. When the trickle dried up she poured the water she had collected over her head and splashed it all over her body with both hands. Then she grabbed a towel from a nail on the wall and started towelling her hair dry. She stood in front of Pan, entirely unembarrassed at her nakedness, and smiled. Mind you, Pan thought, if I had a body like that, I probably wouldn’t care either. Pan doubted her bony frame would ever have the athleticism of Wei-Lin’s.
‘Hey,’ said Wei-Lin. ‘You’re cutting it fine. Most students get here a bit earlier to make sure they can see what they’re doing. The lights go out at nine.’
If that was the only way to guarantee privacy, she’d consider having her showers after lights out every evening. But Wei-Lin had already seen her naked at the Infirmary. And it would have been even more embarrassing to leave.
She stripped off quickly. The other girls’ bodies were hard and honed. Pan felt ashamed, not just of her nakedness, but of how her body seemed to signal that she was weaker, inferior. She stepped under the shower head vacated by Wei-Lin, picked up a cake of coarse soap from a dish on the wall and punched the button. An icy stream of water hit her head and she gasped. The rest of the girls laughed.
‘Gets you good the first time, doesn’t it?’ said one.
‘Don’t worry. You get used to it,’ said another.
‘No, you don’t,’ said Wei-Lin. They all laughed.
~~~
After what passed as a shower, Pan lay on her bunk. She was watching Cara write in her book when the room was plunged abruptly into complete darkness. The lights have gone out all over the world, she thought. This is the way it is for ninety-nine percent of humanity. The way it will be for the foreseeable future.
The day had taken its toll. Her body was still recovering, and even though she had done no strenuous exercise, she felt weary to the bone. Almost immediately, she fell asleep and into a series of vivid dreams.
Pan walked down a curiously deserted street. Off to one side there was a park and a woman was sitting on a bench, watching a boy on a swing. There was something familiar about the woman, but Pan couldn’t pin it down. She was distracted by another woman coming out of a shop on the other side of the street. She had a bundle of clothes over her arms, and she staggered slightly as if drunk. A void. Then a car hitting the woman. A crunch of bone on bitumen and a pool of blood.
A man grabbing her arm. He wore a police uniform and he was talking, but Pan couldn’t understand what he was saying. Sunlight glinted off one gold tooth. There was something odd about that, the presence of the golden tooth, but she could make no sense of it. Even when he put a gun into his mouth and blew the back of his head off, she was bothered more by the tooth than the confetti of blood and bone.
There was a man, hanging from a bedroom window. He had knotted sheets around his neck and he swung slightly as if in a breeze. His face was livid and a swollen tongue poked from bruised lips. She started to run. She needed to get away from these images, but wherever she went she was surrounded by horrors. She ran faster.
Pan didn’t see the car. She ran through a tunnel of her own vision, eyes fixed ahead and stinging from sweat. There was a screech of brakes to her left and an explosion of pain in her hip. The world flipped, sky and clouds a flickered image, replaced by the textured grey of asphalt. She got to her feet instantly, her conscious mind by-passed, her body moving to its own rhythm. Pan’s right forearm, raw from friction, sweated beads of blood, but she ignored it.
The car. She had collided at the driver’s-side wheel arch, spun across the bonnet, slid five metres on the other side. Pandora didn’t register pain. She looked for pursuers, but there was no one in sight. Not yet. But she sensed she only had seconds.
The driver’s door opened and a man’s body eased out. She locked eyes with him for a moment. Over his right shoulder, she saw two men appear. They wore sunglasses, their suit jackets flying, flapping as they ran. Pan glanced back at the driver and saw something dark in his eyes. She backed away a few paces, grateful the car was between them. The man reached into his jacket pocket, but Pan was already turning away. She had lost time. For one brief, glorious moment, hitting the car had offered a chance of rescue. Now, she knew it had simply cut her lead. How did she know that? Rescued from what? Nothing came to mind. She broke into a run again. There was something wrong with her hip. A sharp splinter of pain jagged up the side of her body with each impact of foot on ground. She focused on pushing the awareness of pain back, concentrated on breathing in and out, finding the rhythm once more, the pumping of arms and legs.
Pandora Jones ran for her life. Even in her dream, she was acutely aware of that danger. Footsteps closed on her. And then the sound of ragged breathing, rising in volume. The skin on her neck itched with the anticipation of a hand closing, grasping, pulling her down. She lowered her head and reached for another store of energy. It was there, but ebbing fast. She tapped into what was left and picked up pace. Her heart raced and she tried to cry out.
~~~
Pan sat bolt upright in bed, the scream still fresh in her throat. For a moment she didn’t know where she was, and then the sounds of the dormitory brought her back. The School. She clutched the blanket and tried to still the hammering in her chest. Her face was slick with sweat. A minute passed. Her cry had woken no one, but only because everyone was still wrapped in their own nightmares and had no time for hers. The groans and cries of restless sleep were all around. And sobbing. It was pitiful and filled with hopelessness.
Pan felt through the darkness and found the drawer in her bedside table. She groped blindly until she located the earplugs and put them in. The noise subdued, but she could still hear muffled moans and the thin tinnitus of despair. Pan lay down again, closed her eyes and feigned sleep. Dreams had claws. Instead, she reluctantly tried to recall the terrifying fragments of her nightmare, in the hope that examining them would dispel their terrors. But the more she thought, the more she became convinced that there was something odd about her dreams. They were absurd. After all, dreams have only a dislocated l
ogic, but she felt there were clues in those dreams, if only she could decipher them. Her unconscious was telling her something, but the more she focused on what it might be, the more elusive it became. A gold tooth. There was something sinister in the gold tooth. More sinister than a woman hit by a car or a body hanging from a bedroom window. More disturbing, even, than a woman in a park and a child swinging and coughing, swinging and coughing. How could that be?
It was no use. Like a memory that slips and slides the more she tried to recall it, this feeling defied examination. Finally, Pan sighed and glanced at the luminous dial of her watch. A little after four in the morning. She slipped out of bed and dressed quickly, trying to control the shivering of her limbs. Goosebumps prickled her skin. What she needed was exercise, something to warm her body and distract her mind.
Pan padded down the centre of the dormitory and felt for the door handle. For about thirty seconds, she couldn’t find it, and almost panicked. She had never been susceptible to claustrophobia, but the groans and moans at her back fed her imagination. She felt trapped in some kind of hell with no way out.
But then she found the handle, turned it and stumbled out into the clear, cold night air.
Chapter 7
A few stars shimmered in the frosty air. Pan hugged herself, but it made little difference. She sat on a rock outside the toilet block and tried to make herself small against the wind. The sky was smeared with the first blush of dawn. Far in the distance, towards the sea, she became aware of a series of flickering lights, and she fixed her eyes on them. They were too high to be part of The School. Then she realised. The wall. A series of lights spread evenly along the top of the wall. The watchtowers. Why would there be lights in the watchtowers? Who was up there and why were they watching?
Pan stood. The cold was numbing and she decided she needed to run. Her hip was still a little sore and her legs felt weak. All the walking of the previous day had made them ache. There was only one way to strengthen them and that was to push herself physically. Besides, it would warm her up. And the jumbled memories, the tormented dream fragments were pressing on her. She needed movement. Simple movement to flush her mind.
Her eyes adjusted to the dark, and the rough pathways threading through the grounds were faintly visible. Pan took off towards the wall. It dominated The School’s landscape and she wanted a better view of those flickering watchtower lights. The first few hundred metres were hard going. Her muscles, wasted by months of inactivity, rebelled, and her lungs strained to draw in air. But soon she settled into a rhythm and the aches and pains in her joints soothed. Warmth seeped into her body and her breathing eased.
Pan kept her eyes fixed on her destination – the lights that danced above the barely visible grey expanse of stone stretching from distant mountain to distant mountain. Yet the wall didn’t seem to be getting any closer. She tried to ignore the sensation that she was running along a conveyor belt. Moving, moving, but not making any progress. The dawn bled along the horizon. She kept running, even though her body ached all over.
It took twenty minutes before the wall loomed up, casting deep shadows, filling her vision. She stopped about five metres from its base, bent over, hands on knees, sucking in air. Only when she was able to draw in measured breaths did she look up at the towering expanse of stone.
The wall was about fifteen metres high and composed of massive blocks of stone, each taller than she was. It was still night in the shadow of the wall and she looked back at the landscape of The School behind her. Most was shrouded in dark, yet she could make out the high structure of the Infirmary and the sheer sides of the cliff that led up to The Garden on Top of the World. Above the building, the mountain was brushed with light. She took a step or two back from the wall and tried to take in its size and extent, but her mind had difficulty absorbing scale.
‘Overkill, ya reckon?’
The voice made her jump. She spun around.
Nate was smiling at her.
‘Yo, Pan. Sorry, kiddo. Didn’t mean to scare you.’
‘Yes, you did,’ said Pan. ‘What are you doing here, sneaking up on me like that? And how come I didn’t hear you?’
Nate’s smile broadened.
‘I was running beside the wall. It’s too dark to see me in the shadows,’ he said. ‘But you should have heard me. Tut, tut, Pandora. You need to hone your survival skills. I could have been a predator.’
Pan wiped the sweat from her face.
‘Problems sleeping?’ asked Nate.
‘Not so much sleeping. It’s my dreams.’
Nate nodded. ‘Is your dormitory like mine? You wake up in the middle of the night and you can’t hear yourself think for the weeping, wailing and groaning?’
‘It’s bad,’ said Pan. She didn’t admit that she made her own significant contribution to the night terrors.
‘Running helps. And it’s good for you, Pan.’
‘What did you mean?’ asked Pan. ‘When you said “overkill”.’
Nate’s forehead scrunched, then he glanced up at the blank face of the wall and smiled. His face was dry and he breathed normally, Pan noticed.
‘It’s too big,’ he said. ‘This thing is meant to keep people out, right? Yet a fence would have done the same job. Bit of razor wire along the top. And the watchtowers. I mean, this is beyond top-level security.’
‘But isn’t it ex-military?’ said Pan. ‘Maybe they kept nuclear missiles here. That would explain why a fence and razor wire wouldn’t cut it.’
Nate shook his head.
‘I’ve seen missile sites,’ he said. ‘My dad was a big brass in the military. And this place isn’t big enough. You need bunkers and the ground here is rock solid. Which begs the question: What went on here that needed this kind of security?’
‘Does it matter?’ asked Pan, but even as she asked she knew the answer. It did matter. It mattered enormously, though she couldn’t understand why.
‘Maybe not,’ said Nate. ‘But I don’t like questions I can’t find answers to, that’s all. With the sea and the mountains this site is secure in terms of natural geography. Think about it. If you were going to attack this place, what would your chances be like? Coming in from the sea, you’d be spotted a mile off and the bay is easy to defend. Good luck with sending troops over those mountains. And – BV – any air attack would be detected by radar if this was a secure military base. So what’s with the wall?’
Pan said nothing. The wall was blank and featureless. Sheer. Impenetrable. A fortress.
‘And those watchtowers,’ Nate continued. He was on a roll. ‘The lights are on all night. Why?’
‘There are people up there,’ said Pan. She didn’t know how she knew, but she knew. Pan could sense eyes watching. They were too close to the wall to be visible. But she knew that eyes roamed the landscape.
Nate examined her face. ‘What makes you say that?’
Pan shrugged. ‘No idea. Just a feeling.’
‘That psychic thing?’ This time Nate didn’t smile. Pan shrugged again.
‘Okay.’ Nate spoke quietly. ‘If that’s so, it raises even more questions. Why put guards up there and keep the place illuminated?’
Pan shared his sense of wrongness, but she couldn’t explain it.
‘Maybe,’ said Nate, his voice quiet and reflective, ‘the wall is not designed to keep people out. Maybe it’s designed to keep people in. Us, for example.’
‘Why?’
‘Well, that’s the important question, isn’t it?’
‘Wei-Lin said we were segregated from the village to protect against disease.’
‘Wei-Lin told us what Wei-Lin had been told. And anyway, the wall was here before the virus. So what was its original purpose?’
Not enough information, thought Pan.
Maybe Nate came to the same conclusion because he suddenly laughed.
‘Time to run, Pandora,’ he said. ‘My body is telling me the mind has had too much stimulation. I’m not so good at thinking,
but running? That’s a different matter.’
Pan knew that Nate’s mind was as fit and flexible as his body, but she didn’t respond. Was he fishing for compliments? Let him fish. She wasn’t taking the bait.
‘So why did you come to the wall tonight?’ she asked.
Nate smiled. ‘Not stalking you, if that’s what you think,’ he said. ‘Honest. Cross my heart and hope to die. I just needed to run and the wall seemed like a good destination.’
‘Don’t you ever stop running?’
‘No. I run in my sleep. I’m serious.’
He indicated the sky, which was lightening. ‘It’s an early start in this place and I need a shower before first lesson. I’m a morning shower kind of guy. Prefer to stink at night when everyone’s sleeping and doesn’t notice anyway. Run with me?’
‘You intend to find out what’s on the other side of the wall, don’t you?’ said Pan. As soon as the idea popped into her head, she knew it was true.
Nate rubbed a hand through his hair. ‘What makes you say that? It’s a village. A port. Boats. Our supply route. Potentially diseased. Why would I risk my life when I’ve only just been saved?’
‘Because the wall is stopping you,’ Pan said. ‘And you don’t believe that stuff about diseases.’
He gazed at her for a moment or two and then burst out laughing.
‘Psychic, huh? Boy, I’d better be careful with you, Pandora Jones. You have the distinct potential to totally freak me out.’
Pan said nothing, but she didn’t take her eyes away from his.
‘Run with me,’ Nate repeated, and this time he didn’t wait for an answer. He took off up the path and Pan had to sprint to catch up with him. They jogged for five minutes before he spoke.
‘Let’s just say I don’t like being in prison.’
Pandora Jones: Admission Page 8