‘Have you not listened to a word of this?!’ Kate says.
‘Yes! Of course I have!’
The coffin-maker taught me to use my hands – and to speak up.
‘The thing is, River,’ says Mumma – holding out a piece of cake to me; which I (reflex) take, with a Courtesy thank-you nod – ‘he can’t go back.’
The slice of cake, in front of my nose, smells impossibly good: I’m so tired and so hungry. I take a bite – and it IS good: apple cake with precious cinnamon and a crunchy beet-sugar crust. My whole body is instantly greedy for it, and I stuff more into my mouth as I wait for Mumma to explain why he can’t go back right now.
‘He can’t ever go back to a Sanctuary because he’s contaminated – with our bacteria . . . and with the virus,’ says Mumma.
That can’t be right. Even though I’ve never really listened closely in Community Studies – least of all in Men’s Week (why would you?) – and I’ve only half listened to the Granmummas, there is one thing we all know: XYs cannot survive in our world. The virus still exists. The virus kills them. Five days alive would seem to be some kind of record, but even the boy knew how this goes: they run, they die.
‘But he’s going to die, isn’t he?’
‘Nope!’ says Kate, taking another slug of apple brandy. The twinkle, that exasperating twinkle, is in her eyes again, accompanied by its friend: a smirk of triumph.
‘It seems not,’ says Mumma.
‘What . . . Are you saying that he’s immune?’
‘It’s weirder than that, kid.’ Kate smirks.
‘Akesa got the first results back,’ says Mumma. ‘He has the virus, same as us. His body has not reacted. The virus does not affect him.’
‘Same as us,’ breathes Kate – and chinks Mumma’s glass in toast, even though Mumma has not lifted it.
I can’t get enough spit to swallow; I grab my mint tea – cold now – and swig.
‘He is NOT the same as us,’ I manage to say.
My mind is reeling. The Granmummas always speak as though the XYs will come back, as though – after all these years – some kind of solution will be found. The Mummas never speak like that. Though I never listen closely, ‘until a solution is found’ is a phrase I know well. I understand it, but I never attached much meaning to it. It is the Mummas’ polite way of acknowledging the Granmummas’ heartfelt desire for the XYs to return – spoken, always, before whatever proposal relating to XYs is Agreed. That they should be supplied with new tech; that they should have their own air-transport service, for the purpose of moving XYs between Sanctuaries. These are things I’ve heard. These are things I’ve heard and not paid attention to, because they were prefaced by the phrase ‘until a solution is found’. Until a solution is found means that whatever follows does not apply to me.
I feel – not an eruption, but a huge landslide happening in my head.
‘If the boy is able to survive . . . does that mean all the XYs are coming back?’
I try to imagine a world full of Masons. I cannot. I will not. It’s horrible. It cannot be. Why would the Granmummas even want this?!
‘We don’t know yet,’ my Mumma says – at the same time as Kate says, ‘Yes!’
‘We don’t know,’ Mumma says. ‘So, River –’
‘We gotta keep a lid on this,’ says Kate.
We don’t ‘keep a lid’ on anything that I know of. A secret – one like this – is the same as a lie.
‘But . . . why?!’
‘Kate’s view is that –’
‘They’re not getting their hands on him. If we’d followed the bloody protocol he’d be dead already. Until we find out what’s been going on and where this boy has even come from, he’s going nowhere.’
‘Mumma?’ I cannot believe she is Agreeing to this, that my Mumma, a newly elected Representative, would even dip a toe into all this lying – and, in any case, since when did Kate and the rest of the Granmummas have the final say over something that is so clearly of national – international! – importance? This cannot be right!
‘I have listened to the Granmummas’ concerns,’ Mumma says, ‘and I have listened to Akesa. She seems confident that the boy is indeed recovering – rapidly. I am prepared to allow him to remain here until such time as we can speak to him. After that, any decision regarding his future and our position regarding the Sanctuaries will be a matter for the National Council.’
‘Over my dead body,’ says Kate.
My Mumma does not respond to this. ‘So, for now, we’re keeping it,’ she sighs.
‘Him,’ corrects Kate.
‘Excuse me?!’ I manage to get out. It’s a phrase I learned from Kate. You say it when you have heard – perfectly well – what the other person has just said, but you do not want to believe it. The mental landslide piles down on me and I –
‘What do you mean, we’re “keeping” it?!’
‘He’s not some kind of pet!’ says Kate.
‘That’s right,’ says Mumma, who knows hardly anything about pets (apparently people used to have tons of them) and even less about XYs. ‘It’s not some kind of pet.’
‘He – he’s not some kind of pet,’ corrects Kate, cutting free a new slice of cake. ‘He! He! He!’
‘Oh – yes – he. It’s just so hard to remember!’
‘Try.’
‘I am!’
HELLO?! I’m thinking. Another Kate-learned phrase. It hardly matters what it’s called, he or she or . . . What matters is that it’s in our house – and, specifically, IN MY ROOM.
‘Where am I supposed to sleep?’
‘Don’t start getting antsy,’ chides Kate.
‘You could come in with me,’ says Mumma.
‘Or there’s always the utility room,’ says Kate.
The once-was utility room: tiny and cold and packed with junk. Or sharing Mumma’s big, warm bed. ‘Fine, I’ll sleep in the utility room,’ I say coldly – colder than I know that room will be.
‘Oh, River . . .’ Mumma says.
I look up, wanting to catch Mumma’s loving warmth, and see Kate shaking her head at Mumma. If there are already a thousand things I do not like about this situation, this – Kate and Mumma siding together, working together – is number One Thousand and One.
‘You can always change your mind later,’ Mumma says.
‘Later? How long are we keeping . . . him . . . for?’
‘We don’t know yet.’
I rest my elbows on the table and squeeze my fists against my head, squishing the landslide inside it. One thought is forced to the surface:
‘What if it’s dangerous?’
‘Oh, stop now,’ says Kate.
‘It said women rape and kill – but that’s what men did, isn’t it?’
Mumma darts a look at Kate.
‘Get a grip! Both of you! Where did you even hear that kind of thing?’
‘School,’ I say, shrugging.
‘Oh, for crying out loud! That’s what they’re teaching you?!’
‘It was mentioned during a discussion last Men’s History Week.’
Kate rolls her eyes.
‘But there’s truth in it though, isn’t there?’ says Mumma. ‘Didn’t there used to be prisons full of men?’
‘Violence! Wars!’ I nod encouragingly at Mumma.
‘Stop!’ Kate stares us both down. ‘He’s a boy,’ she says. ‘He’s just a boy. He’s no more dangerous than . . . River.’
I, non-dangerous River, scrape my chair back. It makes a long, slow groan.
‘Just remember: you can’t tell anyone about this,’ Mumma says.
I shake my head in disbelief and confusion.
Kate scrapes back her chair in a fast shriek, leans across the table to eyeball me.
‘Have you told anyone about what the boy said?’
‘No. Only that I found him. And that he was sick. No.’
‘You tell no one,’ she says, voice pointed hard as her shaking finger – right in my face.
This is what happens when you see Mars: a single tiny scrap of light that might have taken millions of years to reach Earth hits the back of your eyeball and your brain grabs it and whispers: planet.
Is that not amazing?
It is only you who sees that. You are the only person on Earth to receive it. You are the only person in the entire known universe to see that scrap of light at that second, which will never be repeated again. Only you.
CHAPTER 8
GEOGRAPHY
It is worse than I thought it would be.
It is supposed to be the first day back at school after the ha-ha-harvest break – which should have been yesterday, but yesterday got cancelled.
I wish today was cancelled too – what’s left of it.
It is very hard to sleep when your world has been turned upside down (along with half the village). It is also quite hard to eat breakfast – even though you’re starving because you’ve slept so late it’s lunchtime already – when there’s Mumma’s huge map lying on the table and you’re immediately asked to point out where you managed to be unlucky enough to stumble across a boy creature.
‘About here,’ I mumble, jabbing at the map.
‘You need to do this properly,’ says Kate.
‘I am.’ I really am; on the map in my head – which is more accurate than this one with all its once-was features – I know exactly the place. ‘Here.’ I press my finger down on the spot – amazed at how filthy not just my nail but my whole hand is. It leaves a grubby mark on the map.
‘Thank you,’ says Akesa. ‘Well, the fact that he was on the road complicates things a bit – what did he say again, River, about how fast he could run?’
‘He didn’t.’
‘He did,’ says Kate. ‘He said he could do a mile in . . .’
‘Six-point-eight.’ It horrifies me that I can remember every word of that weird, nightmarish conversation. It horrifies me even more that I feel as though I’d be remembering it even if I hadn’t had to write it all down; it feels like it’s going to be burned into my brain forever, taking up precious space where information that is more useful – to me – could go. I calculate, miles to kilometres. ‘He couldn’t run at that speed.’
Mumma shrugs – she wouldn’t know. Sport used to be a big thing, apparently, and there’s talk about it happening again in some sort of large-scale, organised way, but it’s the same as all kinds of once-was entertainments, such as ‘television’; there isn’t really enough time or resources for it – or enough interest.
‘Plenty of people could run that fast,’ says Kate. ‘And those shoes he was wearing, they’re runner’s shoes. It is possible . . .’
‘But how long could he keep that up for?’ Mumma asks Akesa. ‘If he was sick too – how long?’
‘I really don’t know,’ Akesa says.
‘People used to run marathons,’ Kate is saying, explaining how a person could run twenty-six miles in not even a whole day, with breaks, but in one go, in just hours (!!!), as I scrape leftover porridge out of the pan, pile leftover eggs on top, pour myself the last of the sage tea – so strong it makes my mouth crinkle – and scoop a seriously enormous spoonful of honey into it.
‘Go easy on that honey, honey – and get a move on,’ says Kate. ‘Have you seen the time?’
I am stunned. She can’t mean it. ‘I’ve got to go to school?!’
‘Yup.’
‘No one could run that far, every day, for five days,’ Akesa is saying.
‘And not if it was sick!’ Mumma says.
‘But perhaps if he was desperate enough . . .’ says Kate, looking hard at Mumma.
Akesa ties a piece of string around a pencil, measures the string against a ruler.
‘Mumma?’ Even before the question that follows leaves my lips, I know what Mumma will say: school. School, school, school, school, school. Kate isn’t strict about it at all – ordinarily – but Mumma . . . ‘Have I really got to go to school?’
‘Yes, of course,’ Mumma says, without even looking up.
‘What did I tell you?’ says Kate.
I do not like this. I do not like this at all. Mumma and Kate Agreeing . . . like last night. Like this whole ‘keep the boy’ idea.
A thing has been happening to me sometimes lately. A thing Kate calls ‘hormones’ – and when she does, it is guaranteed to make the THING worse. This – seriously – bothers me in every way. When Kate ‘loses it’, that’s just Kate being Kate. Now, when I ‘lose it’, it’s ‘hormones’. Not ‘River’. ‘Hormones’.
The thing that bothers me most is . . . I sometimes think it might be true – and I don’t like it. I liked it when I was just me, and not ‘Hormones’. Although sometimes – like right now – I feel like changing my name.
Hormones scoops out another spoonful of honey and –
‘I said that’s enough,’ says Kate. She hasn’t even looked up; she has a sixth sense when it comes to Hormones. I could be a terror when I was your age, she says – forgetting that she’s still a terror.
Akesa has drawn a circle on the map; finger where mine was, string pulled tight.
‘Maximum distance,’ she says.
Mumma gasps.
‘As the boy flies,’ murmurs Kate.
I can’t help myself. I have to look. The circle covers a huge, huge swathe of land; it’s got to be several hundred kilometres in area. It stretches down as far as the north of Cornwall. It stretches into the sea – and across the sea. It stretches as far as the south of Wales.
‘How in the hell did he get here?’ says Kate. ‘I mean, think about it: where is the nearest Sanctuary?’
‘That’s not supposed to be public knowledge. You know that, and you know why.’
I know it and know why too. The location of the Sanctuaries was kept secret to begin with because, globally, there were sky-high levels of fear and mistrust. It’s not really a secret any more – at least not in most former countries. It couldn’t be: Sanctuaries must be serviced with food and supplies, the women who travel to them to give up boy babies in caesarean sections see where they are going – if they choose to look . . . but the precise location of the Sanctuaries is still not shown on maps. They have no official addresses.
‘I mean . . . Wales? Or Cornwall? They’d be the closest,’ Kate persists, ignoring Mumma. ‘Because you’re not trying to tell me he ran all the way from – where else is there? Northumbria, Galloway, John o’Groats. Orkney! But wait – maybe he came from Iceland? We’ve got boys there too, haven’t we? Maybe he floated here on an iceberg.’
No one is going to figure out where this boy came from, or how he got here. Unless he tells. That’s what’s apparent to me – very, very clearly. That circle is huge . . . but there is nowhere within it that he could have come from. Nowhere.
‘Did he say anything else to you?’ Kate asks me, shaking her head over that circle. ‘Anything you forgot to write down.’
‘No.’
‘Anything at all?’
‘No!’ I glance at the kitchen clock. Unlike my notebook, it’s not always right. It’s got a wind-up mechanism. Nevertheless, I am, approximately, five and three-quarter hours late for the start of school – and, despite the prospect of facing yet more questions about the boy, I’d almost rather be there, right now. Almost, but not quite . . . because at school I know I will be asked more questions. I won’t just have to speak in public, I will have to lie.
Kate looks at the clock too. ‘Better get a wiggle on,’ she says.
‘There’s only forty-five minutes left!’
‘You need to go,’ Mumma says.
Yes – that’s what she would say. That’s how it goes, isn’t it? A
student has got to be screaming for the death pack before she has any excuse to miss even forty-five minutes of school. We ARE the future. We know that. But . . . seriously?
I try one last pleading look at Kate –
‘You just need to show your face,’ she says. ‘And don’t worry, I’ve squared it with the Brain Boxes: no one’s going to be pestering you.’
Kate has never quite squared it in her own head that it’s not just Yaz and Yukiko who are ‘brain boxes’; this whole Community is dedicated to fast-track study. We’re a tech village. Kate calls it Swot City. She says there’s no one dumber than a smart person.
I shove my bowl of cold, disgusting breakfast away from me. Hormones would like to shove it harder – perhaps so hard it skitters clean off the table and shatters on the floor – but I am River. I don’t do that kind of thing.
‘And get a shower!’ Kate speaks to my back.
My back . . . turns round so my face can handle the situation.
‘You’re gonna make me go to school for thirty minutes?’
‘Yup.’
‘I need clean clothes.’
‘Obvs,’ says Kate, back to studying the map. It’s Teen slang from her day. It means ‘obviously’.
‘Well, it’s in my room.’
‘She’s unconscious,’ says Akesa, tracing her finger over once-was towns.
‘Him,’ corrects Kate. ‘He’s unconscious. How many times do I have to tell you people?! Now, what about Plymouth?’ she says, jabbing at the map. ‘I’ve always had my suspicions about Plymouth. What if there was a secret Sanctuary . . .’
‘There are no secret Sanctuaries,’ my Mumma says. ‘There are no secrets!’
‘Sure about that, are you, Bigshot?’
‘This isn’t the past. This is now,’ Mumma states, flustered and tired; she was up all night in her study. Researching, was what she told Kate. As long as it wasn’t snitching, Kate growled back.
‘It had better be,’ says Kate. ‘And it had better not be yesterday in a skirt.’
I don’t know what Kate means, but I don’t like the way she says it. I shut the door on them, in disgust. Hormones would like to slam it.
I shower, gloomily watching a surprising amount of filth come off my body. So much filth, in fact, I decide I will wash my hair after all. More filth. And the odd twig.
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