by Tom Becker
Adam’s brain was struggling to take it all in. So that was why Luca was hated – he had betrayed his friend to escape. No wonder Caiman was so bitter. But it still didn’t explain why the Codex in the library had been damaged – unless it wasn’t anything to do with Luca’s escape at all, but the mention of his brother. Had Adam stumbled across a trail Nino D’Annunzio had been laying? Was it Nino who had written the recipe for “Volcano Chilli”?
Adam was replacing the report in the cabinet when a noise from the corridor made him freeze.
Footsteps.
Adam dived behind the filing cabinet and pressed himself against the wall. The footsteps reached the door of the Records Office – not the brisk march of a guard’s boot, but a softer, more considered tread – then paused for a brief second before continuing onwards. Further down the corridor, a door creaked, and the footsteps died away.
Adam let out a long, quiet breath. Who could it be wandering the corridors? Everyone was supposed to be on the landing strip! Whoever it was, they had put Adam in a tricky situation. He couldn’t hide in the Records Office for ever – he was going to have to risk creeping downstairs. Adam cursed himself for his recklessness.
Adam opened the door as slowly and quietly as possible. He had one foot outside when the sound of violins came screeching out from a room further down the corridor. He jumped, his breath catching in his throat. The deafening noise offered the perfect cover for Adam to flee down the stairs. But instead he found himself irresistibly drawn in the opposite direction – towards the music. He tiptoed down the corridor and pressed his face against a crack in the half-open door. Then he looked inside.
The room beyond was large and airy. Through the large window in the facing wall, Adam could see all the way to the landing strip, where the Quisling was still moored to the ground, surrounded by a vast crowd of inmates. Echo was sitting with his back to Adam, at a desk with a series of large dials and a small upright microphone. A record was crackling loudly on the turntable at his shoulder – as it faded out, Echo leaned towards the microphone and exclaimed, in his grating nasal tones:
“Good afternoon, everyone! So glad you could all make it!”
Adam didn’t think he had ever hated a stranger like this before. He remembered the last time he had seen Echo – when the boy had been greedily filling his pockets with chocolate bars, seemingly oblivious to the inmates’ hunger. And now here he was, the guards’ lapdog, mocking the prisoners with whom he had once been friends.
Over on the landing strip, men had begun untying the guide ropes as the airship’s motors growled into life. The Quisling rose uncertainly into the air, its engines spluttering and choking before bursting into a full-throated roar. Despite himself, Adam couldn’t help but marvel at the sight of the huge zeppelin lifting off the ground.
“And there it goes!” crowed Echo. “Let’s hear it for the Quisling, and all the guards who’ve helped restore it to its former glory!”
If there was any response from the inmates on the ground, it didn’t carry up to the radio station. Echo flicked off the microphone and leaned back in his chair with satisfaction, as a loud whirr signified the siphoning of the Dial’s electricity to the Commandant’s Tower – and its warphole machine. There was a loud crackle from the tower to Adam’s left, and then a bolt of power shot out from a window on the top floor up into the sky, where it exploded like a firework. The Quisling banked in the air, setting a course towards the churning mass of the warphole.
By the time the airship had been swallowed up by the vortex, Adam was no longer watching. He had backed away along the corridor and was creeping down the stairs as quietly as he could. With the Quisling gone, it wouldn’t be long now before the prisoners would be back. Adam descended through the guards’ quarters to the cellar, before hurrying back into the tunnel. This time, however, there was a smile on his face – a smile of exhilaration, of a risk rewarded, of a mission accomplished.
The flight of the Quisling – and the extra helping of pudding doled out at dinner in celebration – seemed to have a galvanizing effect on the inmates. That evening, Mouthwash started a giant wrestling match in the dormitory, which ended with the roommates leaping off the top bunks like monkeys on to one another. Adam was too preoccupied with his day’s discoveries to join in. Doughnut didn’t seem in the mood either, so the two of them played chess in a quiet corner of the room, the fixer sucking on a boiled sweet as he calmly took piece after piece.
It was nearly ten by the time the Quisling returned, the Dial descending into darkness as the electricity was funnelled up to the Commandant’s Tower, where the mysterious warphole machinery opened the vortex. Adam left his depleted army on the board and went to the window to watch. About twenty minutes elapsed before the new inmates appeared outside the Docking Port, bug-eyed with bewilderment, their faces stained with tears. They shrank under the pressing of the guards, jumping at every shouted command. As he watched them stumble across the walkway, Adam thought back to his first night, when he had been numb with shock and every second had been a new nightmare. It had been nine months ago; it might as well have been a lifetime.
“Poor sods,” he murmured.
Doughnut didn’t bother to look up from his chessboard. “Save your sympathy. This won’t be the last time you see a new batch of prisoners. Let’s carry on with the game.” The fixer slid his queen along the board, taking Adam’s rook and checking his king. “Didn’t see you on the landing strip earlier. People were asking after you.”
“I was there,” Adam said casually, moving his king to safety. “Must have missed you in the crowd, that’s all.”
“Oh yeah? Then where did all the dust come from?”
Adam blinked. “What?”
“When you turned up for dinner your back was covered in dust. Most people wouldn’t notice it, but I did – I got caught that way once, when I was younger and stupid and didn’t know how to take care of myself. You weren’t on the landing strip, Adam. You were in a tunnel.”
“So what if I was? What’s it to you?” said Adam defensively.
“What’s it to me?” Leaning over the chessboard, Doughnut whispered sharply: “You were in the tunnel I showed you, weren’t you? If you get caught, that’d wreck everything!”
“But I didn’t get caught, did I?”
“Listen here – I’ve been holding your hand from the first second you got into this place. Never asked for anything back. But I told you to stop digging stuff up about Luca, and you didn’t listen to me. Bookworm told me about you creeping around the library, looking through the Codex Treacherous. And now you’re using my tunnels behind my back, and you won’t even tell me why. I’m this close to turning my back on you.”
“Don’t worry about me,” Adam retorted. “I can take care of myself.”
“Yeah, you know it all, mate,” Doughnut said sourly. He slid his queen in line with Adam’s king.
“Checkmate,” he said, and walked out of the room.
The frosty relations between Adam and Doughnut showed no signs of thawing: at mealtimes, the fixer pointedly sat at another table, and the two boys avoided eye contact every time they bumped into each other in the dormitory. Even though a part of Adam wanted to apologize, an indignant voice in his mind complained that it was all Doughnut’s fault, and insisted that he should be the one who tried to patch things up first.
Despite his bruised feelings, Adam couldn’t deny that his life was far less interesting for the fixer’s absence. Three days after the argument, he wandered down to the exercise yard in search of a Bucketball rumble, only to find the gravel playing area empty. The only inmate in sight was a small figure standing by an easel and canvas on the top tier of benches. It was Paintpot. The dark-haired girl had turned her back on the view over the perimeter fence and was squinting thoughtfully at the surrounding wings of the prison.
“What’s going on?” asked Adam, climbi
ng up to the bench and taking a seat next to her.
“Not much,” Paintpot replied, squeezing thick blobs of paint on to a wooden palette. “Thought I’d finally get around to painting the Dial.”
Adam laughed incredulously. “You’ve been here all this time, and you’ve never painted the prison?”
Paintpot shook her head. “I see enough cell doors without painting them too,” she murmured. And then added, with an awkward shrug: “But I finish my sentence next month, so I figured . . . why not?”
“You’re getting out?” Adam sat up. “That’s great news!”
“Yeah, I suppose,” she said uncertainly. “I shouldn’t really say anything. You don’t want to make someone who’s just starting their stretch feel worse about it.”
“Like me, you mean? Don’t worry about that. We can’t all stay here for ever.” Adam followed the artist’s gaze over towards the grim edifice of the Re-education Wing. “But aren’t you nervous about going in there? Letting them mess with your mind?”
“Nervous?” Paintpot laughed softly. “I can’t wait, Adam. I can’t wait until I’m back home and all of this is a bad dream. I can’t wait to get my life back.”
A thoughtful silence descended upon the yard. Adam sat back and watched as his friend sketched out the prison in pencil before daubing the image with oil paints, humming softly to herself as the buildings of the Dial slowly unfurled across the canvas. Paintpot carried on well into the evening, until the light began to fade and shadows crept across the yard like inky fingers. Adam helped her pack up and carry the easel and canvas back to Wing II, where they parted on the stairs outside the entrance to the boys’ quarters.
He noticed the silence straight away – the absence of noise louder in his ears than any alarm. The doors to the dormitories were all flung open, but there was no one inside the rooms. It was as though the boys had been called away to some ghostly roll call. Adam had a sudden, unsettling premonition of what it might be like to be alone on the Dial, stranded in no-time for eternity.
As he hurried along the corridor towards his dormitory, he heard the first faint murmur of voices. The noise grew louder and more animated until Adam rounded a corner and walked straight into the vast crowd of boys gathered outside his room, jostling one another and standing on tiptoes as they competed for a view inside.
Adam blinked with surprise. “What the hell—?”
He elbowed his way through the throng and into the dormitory, which was overflowing with boys: some sitting cross-legged on the floor; others perched on the window ledges; still more sandwiched next to each other on the bunk beds. The air was thick with sweat and anticipation. Conversations bubbled like excited kettles. A pair of paraffin lamps draped a gossamer veil of light over the dormitory, the gloom broken only by the occasional intrusion of a searchlight through the window as it continued its unceasing rounds of the prison.
A space had been cleared at the far end of the room, where Major X was waiting solemnly behind a desk, flanked by the upright figures of Corbett and Fletcher. Caiman was sitting in a chair next to the Tally-Hoers, his arms folded and his face drenched with disdain.
“Adam! Over here!”
Mouthwash was waving at him from his bunk, where the talkative inmate was crammed next to Doughnut and the rest of the boys from their dormitory. Adam threaded his way towards them and wormed into a seat by Mouthwash, who shouted down the groans of protest from the other prisoners on the bunk. Doughnut looked away, refusing even to acknowledge Adam’s appearance.
He had barely sat down when Major X produced a gavel from his pocket and rapped it sharply on the desk in front of him. Immediately the room subsided into an expectant hush.
“Right, listen up,” said the Major. “For the last few weeks the Tally-Ho have been convinced that there’s a rat amongst the inmates. We’ve been trying to hunt him down – and today, we think we’ve found him.” He turned to the surly boy seated beside him. “This is your court martial, Caiman. How do you plead?”
The accused snorted. “Go take a running jump.”
Fletcher leaned over and gave the boy a meaty clip around the back of the ear. “Show the judge some respect,” he growled.
“It’s all right, Fletcher,” Major X said briskly, ignoring the sniggers in the room. “We’ll put that down as ‘not guilty’.”
Adam was speechless. For weeks he had been the Tally Ho’s prime suspect, subject to the dark threats and accusations of the Major’s men. And all along it had been Caiman?
“Calling Corbett for the prosecution!”
As the hulking Tally-Hoer stepped forward, Adam’s eyes were drawn to the top bunk behind him, where the bandaged boy from the chapel was sitting alone in the shadows. Even though the room was heaving with inmates, no one had chosen to sit next to him. The boy leaned forward as he watched, clearly intrigued by proceedings.
“Tell the court martial what happened earlier today,” Major X instructed his henchman.
Corbett coughed. “Not much to tell,” he said. “I got this note saying that if I wanted to know who the rat was I should go talk to Caiman. I went to his bunk to find him but he wasn’t there. Then I saw this sticking out from under his pillow.”
Corbett dug a folded sheet of paper from his pocket and spread it open on the desk in front of the Major.
“It’s a page from one of our escape plans,” he said. “One of the pages that went missing.” Corbett jabbed a burly finger at Caiman. “That little scumbag must have nicked it!”
“Thank you, Corbett!” Major X called out, above the hubbub that greeted the accusation. “You can stand down now.”
He waited for Corbett to stomp back to his position before continuing: “So now you all know why we’re here. Usually we’d sort this out ourselves, but since the accused used to be a member of the Tally-Ho, he’s got the right to a proper court martial.” He glanced across at Caiman. “What have you got to say in your defence?”
“Nothing!” Caiman retorted. “I’ve got nothing to say to any of you. This is a joke! I’ve never seen that piece of paper before in my life. Someone must have put it there. Who sent you this note, anyway?”
Corbett shrugged. “Dunno. It didn’t say.”
“See what I mean? I’m being framed, and you idiots are believing every word of it!”
With a curl of his lip, Caiman sat back and refused to speak again, ignoring all of the Major’s questions. Angry mutters rippled through the audience; many of them had been on the receiving end of the accused’s sharp tongue over the years and were only too happy to believe the charges against him. Adam should have been watching the proceedings with glee. After all, from the first moment that they had met, Caiman had taken every opportunity to pick on him, to needle away at him, to shop him in to the guards. But something was nagging at Adam, like an itch just out of reach. The evidence against Caiman was flimsy, but it was more than that, something only he knew. . .
“I wouldn’t want to be in Caiman’s shoes,” Mouthwash whispered. “He’s in for a right old kicking.”
Adam barely heard him. His brow knotted as he desperately searched his memory. At the front of the room, Major X had lost patience.
“Right, Caiman, have it your way,” he declared. “The accused isn’t going to defend himself. Is there anyone here who’ll speak for him?”
Eyes glanced down at shoes; heads shook vigorously.
“In that case,” Major X continued, raising his gavel into the air, “on the basis of what we’ve heard today, and without any contradictory evidence, I can only declare Caiman g—”
“Wait!” Adam cried.
The gavel froze in mid-air. Major X frowned. “Who said that?”
“What are you playing at?” hissed Mouthwash, elbowing Adam in the ribs. “Keep out of it!”
“I can’t!” Adam whispered back. “Something’s not right here. And I
think I’ve worked out what it is.”
“Well?” Major X said impatiently, shielding his eyes as he looked out over the crowded dormitory. “Who interrupted me?”
Clearing his throat, Adam stood up and raised his hand, aware of every pair of eyes in the room swivelling in his direction. Further along the bunk, he heard Doughnut sigh. The Major gave him a hard stare.
“I’d have thought you of all people would have been best off keeping your mouth shut,” he said ominously.
Adam pushed his way to the desk, anger pulsing through his veins.
“Yeah, because you called me a rat too, didn’t you? Forgot to mention that in your little speech.”
“You were one of our suspects,” Major X said icily. “What’s your point?”
“My point is that you were wrong about me, and you’re wrong about him.” Turning to face the crowded room, Adam declared loudly: “Caiman’s not the rat, and I can prove it.”
The dormitory exploded into uproar. Major X hammered his gavel on the desk, but no one took any notice. Corbett and Fletcher had to stride around the room shaking boys into silence before any sort of order could be restored.
“That’s a big claim you’ve made there, Wilson,” Major X said, visibly seething. “Can you back it up?”
“About a week ago I was up on the roof and—”
“Up on the roof? Doing what?”
“Just clearing my head,” Adam said quickly, not looking at Doughnut. It didn’t matter that they had fallen out – he wasn’t going to drag anyone else into this. “Anyway, I was up there when that sandstorm hit. Before I went back inside, I saw a prisoner meeting Mr Pitt on the perimeter wall and giving him a load of papers. I’m guessing they were the rest of your escape plans.”