The sea was calm and the swell minimal. When Pan caught up to the rest of the group the undersides of the clouds were tinged with gold. Day was dawning. She turned in the water and was relieved to see Sanjit ten metres behind her. His face was screwed up in pain. He laboured up to them and trod water. Pan was aware of the depth of the ocean beneath her and a dim fear surfaced in her mind. The thought of movement in the darkness underneath. Her legs dangling and scissoring beneath the waves. She fought down panic.
No one said anything. They bobbed in the gentle swell, some looking out to sea for Gwynne’s arrival, others looking towards shore. Where was Nate? They were only a few minutes short of the rendezvous time and he should have been there by now. Unless something had happened. Only six will leave this place, Pan thought. Only six. The sky lightened moment by moment.
‘He’s here,’ said Jen. They had been silent so long that the sound of her voice was a shock. Pan looked along the beach line. Nothing. She turned in the water and heard the sound of the boat’s engine. Even though the water was calm, the swell meant she could see little beyond a hundred metres. Gwynne’s arrival – she assumed it was Gwynne – would be invisible for some time yet. The sound rose in intensity and Jen started waving her arms above her head. Pan turned her gaze and fixed it on the beach. The shore remained stubbornly empty.
When the boat arrived it did so dramatically, looming above them. The engine throttled down and the boat turned in the water and idled. Gwynne peered over the side, held out a hand without speaking. Jen swam to Sanjit and looped her arms around him. He was exhausted, his head lolling, eyes almost closed. Gwynne leaned further and took his arm, hefted him onto the side of the boat and then inside. Sanjit flopped like a landed fish. The others followed, needing various degrees of help. Jen stayed in the water until everyone else was in the boat. Then she put both arms onto the side and hauled herself out of the water. There was a pile of thermal blankets in the bottom of the boat, the metallic sheen glinting in the pale sun. One by one they took a blanket and wrapped themselves up. Sam and Karl lay Sanjit down and covered him. His eyes were fully closed by now and his breathing was laboured.
‘Where’s Nate?’ said Gwynne.
‘He’s still out there,’ said Jen. ‘We wait.’
Gwynne examined his watch. ‘Nine minutes,’ he said. ‘If he’s not here by then, we go.’
No one replied. They all watched the shoreline and shivered. The seconds ticked by and became minutes. Gwynne looked at his watch again and opened his mouth to speak. Then he closed it. Out of the forest a figure appeared. It was running towards the beach. Running fast. Pan recognised the easy lope, the angle of the body as it moved across the land.
Nate.
Jen stood up in the boat, but she didn’t say anything. A group of figures burst out of the forest about thirty metres behind the lone runner. They were moving fast, but Nate was putting distance between himself and his pursuers. One of the chasers stopped. A distinctive pop sounded. A gun. But Nate didn’t stop running. He was racing along the water’s edge towards them. Another shot rang out. Another miss. Now they could see him clearly from the boat. Nate had spotted them as well and was judging when would be the best time to strike the water. He was a strong swimmer. They wouldn’t catch him once he was in the ocean, but they would get closer while they were still running along the shore. He was trying to maximise his chances before he became a slower-moving target in the sea. Jen muttered under her breath. The group watched and felt powerless.
Nate thrashed through the shallows and plunged into the sea. Immediately he was swimming towards them, his arms scything through the water in powerful strokes. The men kept running. When they reached the point where Nate had entered the water they stopped and one man stepped forward. He raised the gun to his shoulder and took careful aim. The seconds stretched. The only movement was the rhythmic dip of Nate’s head as he took a breath and the thrust of one arm after another through the waves.
He was about a third of the way to the boat when the shot rang out. For a moment, the group thought he had missed again. Nate’s arm rose, bent at the elbow, ready to strike the water one more time. But then his body stiffened and the arm fell. His body shuddered in the water and stilled.
‘No!’ yelled Jen. She turned to Gwynne. ‘Take the boat in. Now. There’s still time.’
Gwynne wiped his nose with the back of his hand. He gazed out across the water. The men were already wading out towards Nate’s body.
‘Too dangerous. The deadline has passed,’ he said. ‘We leave.’
‘No,’ repeated Jen. ‘We won’t leave him behind. We will not.’ But Gwynne took no notice. He moved to the stern and the engine roared. He swung the boat around in a tight arc and headed away from the beach. Jen moved to jump into the water, but Karl and Sam grabbed her arms. Even so, she writhed furiously to break their hold. By the time she freed herself, Nate’s body was almost lost to view. She appeared to collapse in upon herself. She slumped, resigned, at Gwynne’s side and watched as the land fell away.
No one spoke.
Chapter 23
Pan sat up the front of the boat as far away from the group as she could and watched the sea as it flashed with dazzling shards of sunlight. She was dimly aware of the sounds behind her, the drone of the boat’s engine and faint, intermittent sobbing. It might have been Sam.
Pan’s focus turned inwards.
Something had happened when that shot rang out and Nate’s body slumped in the water. The rest of the pieces had slotted together. All those fragments had circled in her mind, assumed new shapes and come together. There were gaps. Some of the pieces were still missing, but the general pattern had formed in an instant, like an epiphany.
It took her breath away.
Pan wondered how much Cara had already worked out. There was so much more to her than anyone could have thought, and Pan was convinced that her own gift of intuition was even more developed in Cara. She had simply hidden it better and her shyness meant that no one pressed her to disclose more than she was prepared to reveal. She’d locked herself up in her own mind. Even her journal did not provide a key to her inner thoughts. Had The School suspected? Had The School killed her on the basis of those suspicions? That was one missing piece, but it was a mystery Pan was determined to solve.
A quotation sprang to her mind. When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. She thought it was Sherlock Holmes who’d said that, but it didn’t really matter.
Her dreams and her memories. They were the key. Why did she doubt her own memories? Why did she trust her dreams more than her memories? It took a monumental effort of will to break her mind’s certainty that what she remembered must be true and that what she dreamed must be fantasy. Three memories, shared by three people independently. Sanjit remembered a child in a white dress, playing with a doll. So did Pan. So, according to her journal, did Cara. What were the odds of three people remembering the same thing? Not impossible, but staggeringly improbable. Cara had said during that conversation outside the shower block that she didn’t trust her memories. She’d said that some of her dreams made more sense. The dream she recorded in her journal of being chased? The same dream that haunted Pan most nights, the men in suits running after her, the policeman with the gold tooth, the injection in the back seat of the police car. What if that was true and the memories of the relief teacher in Melbourne, the streets littered with bodies, the policeman who killed himself in front of her eyes . . . what if they were the dreams?
Other things, small things. How could Dr Morgan get a shuffling machine when vital supplies were almost non-existent? Where did Gwynne’s protective equipment for stick-fighting come from? The guarded wall, the mysterious village and the story they’d been fed about why it was impossible for students to visit it. Evil lives beyond the wall, Dr Macredie had said. How did they know immediately that the wall had been breached when she and Nate had been caught? Cara again. The watches
are wrong. The watches issued to each student. What if they were tracking devices, intended to monitor everyone’s movement? Would that explain why Cara had left hers behind the night she disappeared? Nate had said they were on an island. How did he know? What if he knew their destination before they set out? Nate had flirted with her. What if that was his job, his own individual mission? What if he hadn’t died back there, but his death was faked because his mission was over?
Pan stared at the water and turned all the ideas over in her head. The conclusion was absurd, but that didn’t make it wrong. The students were not survivors. They had been abducted, the memories of abduction suppressed, replaced with false memories of a virus that had wiped out billions. A virus that didn’t exist. And, if that was so, the world was going on out there as it always had. Her mother and Danny were alive. The students believed what they remembered and the wall kept them all as prisoners.
Their memories were an elaborate fabrication. Pan knew it.
Everything was built on a monumental lie.
And The School was the biggest lie of all.
About the Author
Barry Jonsberg’s young adult novels, The Whole Business with Kiffo and the Pitbull and It’s Not All About YOU, Calma! were shortlisted for the CBCA Book of the Year, Older Readers, awards. It’s Not All About YOU, Calma! also won the Adelaide Festival Award for Children’s Literature, Dreamrider was shortlisted in the NSW Premier’s Awards for the Ethel Turner Prize and Cassie (Girlfriend Fiction) was shortlisted for the Children’s Peace Literature Award. Being Here won the 2011 QLD Premier’s Young Adult Book Award and was shortlisted for the 2012 Prime Minister’s Award. My Life as an Alphabet won the 2013 Gold Inky, the 2013 Children’s Peace Literature Award, Older Readers and the 2014 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards.
Barry lives in Darwin with his wife, children and two dogs. His books have been published in the USA, the UK, France, Poland, Germany, Hungary, Brazil, Turkey and China.
Pandora Jones: Admission Page 25