What She Does Next Will Astound You

by Patrick Ness

The attack wasn’t long. It could, she told herself long afterwards, have been worse. They didn’t even hit her with weapons. Or fists. Some of them grabbed her sheet and pulled it tight. She couldn’t move. She struggled there, helpless, refusing to scream. They struck her with the flat of their hands, blow after blow on her face, her body. She looked up as long as she could, her eyes not seeing their faces, just the helmet cams staring at her.

  I’ll never know who you are, she thought. I’ll never know who did this.

  She ignored every urge to shout back at them, to beg, to cry with pain. She felt her heart, that strange part of her, leaping around in fury. Something deep inside her wanted to hunt down everyone in this room and kill them all. She hoped it was the alien part, and not her.

  The blows stopped. She sensed people stepping back. She felt a moment of relief.

  Then she was reeling from a terrible rank smell. It was so overwhelming she fought back for the first time, struggling against the hands holding her down.

  What have they done, she thought—they’ve let a Skandis into the room. They’re going to kill me with it. I’ve said I wouldn’t fight and now they’re going to make me fight.

  Something landed on her. Wet. Repulsive. As it touched her skin, she felt it flare up and burn slightly.

  Her eyes streamed and she gagged at the terrible, sticky, dirty smell.

  The hands holding her down released her. They stepped away. They walked out.

  The door opened. The door closed.

  The lights flickered on. She knew they would. She knew what she would see.

  The dripping, severed head of a Skandis was pressed against her mouth.

  Looking back later, from a long distance away, she realised that neither she, nor her attackers, had said a word.

  It was a long night. The lights in her room hadn’t gone off. Repulsed, she’d eventually squirmed her way out from under the head. The bedsheets were stained with a mixture of slime and blood, seeping over the sheets and into the mattress. Inside the tiny room, the smell was choking. Of course the door was locked.

  The head sat on the bed, watching her with boiled-egg eyes, the tentacles flopping and slipping over onto the floor. She moved to another corner of the room and curled up in it and tried to close her eyes. It didn’t work.

  She remembered the pillow and slowly, reluctantly, worked herself up to go back for it. She hoped that the Skandis’s blood hadn’t touched it. That would have been something. But no, of course the pillow was covered in tiny, foul-smelling spots of gore, burning into the cheap foam inside.

  So April just sat in a corner and tried to ignore the severed head and stayed utterly, chillingly calm. The smell became more and more overpowering and she could hardly breathe without retching, but she stuffed a fist into her mouth and screwed her eyes shut. She didn’t think about the pain she was in, she didn’t think about what had been done to her, she didn’t think about what she’d do next. She just waited and waited. Until eventually the door sprang open.

  She’d hoped the shower would have done something about the smell. The stench of that decaying creature was in her hair. She swallowed mouthfuls of the tepid water, trying to clear the taste from the back of her throat. She checked herself for bruises—there were none. They’d been careful. Nothing to make anyone feel any sympathy for her. She stayed in the shower until the water slid from tepid to lukewarm to cold and then she got out. She caught sight of herself in the mirror, and her mouth fell open. She made a noise. A half sob from somewhere deep inside that, if she’d let it continue, felt like it would never stop. She stifled it.

  She dried herself on the cheap towel and slipped into a fresh uniform.

  Walking towards the Big White Room was the hardest thing she’d ever had to do. At least, she told herself, there’ll be no surprises. I know they’re all waiting there. They know I’ve been humiliated, hurt. They’ll all know from the videos.

  But it’s a meal. It’s a day.

  She breathed in. Be brave, she told herself. You can face them. You can face them all and that’s how you win. Don’t even put your helmet on. Don’t hide behind it. Just look at them.

  She walked in.

  There was no one in the room. Nothing on the screens. Just empty benches.

  No food.

  She wandered around for a bit. Forced jollity. She swung her shoulders around. Then the exhaustion, and something else pricking at the edges of her eyes, wore into her and she picked a bench and sat down.

  Someone walked in. They were wearing their helmet, their face tilted down. Was this one of her attackers? The boy walked over and sat down a few seats away from her. His nose twitched.

  God, thought April, I must still reek of that thing. She fought down the urge to apologise to him. Almost automatic, but not.

  Another boy walked in.

  Then a girl.

  Then another girl.

  All of them silent, heads down, not noticing her. This was nothing unusual.

  Her strange heart fluttered and she wondered if this was them—the group of people who’d assaulted her. Kill them all, just in case. The alien thought passed through her head and was quickly discarded.

  A boy walked in. Taller and broader than the rest. He sat down opposite her.

  They all sat there. Nothing happened. No food turned up. Nothing.

  They were all around her. But no one was looking at her. They kept on doing it.

  Unable to bear it anymore, April sprang to her feet. She wanted to run off, to shout, to say something, but she couldn’t think of anything to say. She stood there, glancing from bowed head to bowed head.

  It’s like I don’t exist, she thought, and then sat down. She knew then that she was trembling. She pushed her hand out in front of her and watched it shake.

  This is really, really getting to me, she thought.

  More people filed in and sat down. None of them looked at her. I’m nothing to them, she told herself. And that’s okay. I can work with that. So long as I can get rid of that thing from my room I can go back there and I can wait this out. No fighting. Seeing no more of these people. Just living is enough.

  But what if they come back to my room? Maybe I’ll leave the head where it is, after all. That should keep them out. But when can I go? When can I leave?

  The hall filled up.

  Still no food. Just waiting.

  Come on, guys, thought April, the war’s not going to fight itself. And look at all these people—no porridge. How are they going to lift their guns?

  The giant screen flickered into action.

  ‘Morning, everyone!’ Seraphin was hanging upside down from a pull-up bar, waving. ‘It’s someone’s birthday today, so we’re going to celebrate their special day. Let’s hear it for April, the birthday girl!’

  Everyone in the room burst into applause. A strange, terrible, clapping in unison. April flinched from it.

  The clapping stopped.

  ‘Apparently you got her a surprise cake! Am I right? I’m right. Hope you saved me a slice!’

  The screen cut to the severed head sitting on her bed.

  And then back to Seraphin. ‘We’re lucky to have you, April. Let’s give her another hand!’

  And he stayed there, frozen on the screen.

  Little squares replaced him. Tiny shots from headcams as one by one everyone looked up to stare at her. All of them. Every one. A thousand Aprils filling the room.

  She stood up, stumbling, as she tried to push back the bench. But there were too many other people holding it down with their own weight. She backed away. And watched the action repeated from every angle.

  Seraphin’s voice called out, ‘Who’s got a magic memory of April they want to share?’

  And then, from every angle, she saw the assault on her from last night. Repeated over and over again. As Seraphin sang ‘Happy Birthday’. Her face twisting from side to side. The blows falling on it.

  ‘It’s not . . .’ began April, stammering. She tried aga
in but the singing continued. ‘It’s not my birthday!’ she screamed. Suddenly this point seemed really important to her.

  All that happened was the giant wall carried on showing her face crying.

  ‘It’s not my birthday,’ she repeated softly. ‘And I’m not going to fight. You’re not going to make me fight.’

  This turned out to be a lie.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  YOU’LL BE AMAZED AT HOW LONG IT TOOK HIM TO REALISE HIS MISTAKE

  ‘It’s about April,’ said Ram. ‘She’s missing.’

  THIRTY-NINE

  WAR VETERANS ARE COVERING THEIR HEADS IN GLITTER FOR REASONS THAT WILL STUN YOU

  ‘COMBAT CHAMBER EMPTY. BATTLE READY TO COMMENCE SMILING EYE’

  ‘I’m not giving in,’ April told herself. ‘I’m just showing them.’ Showing them what, she didn’t quite know.

  She picked up a gun, steadied it, and took a deep breath. The readout counted down. The dimensions stabilised. Then, with a tiny click, the door slid open.

  April stepped through into the Combat Chamber. For a few moments it held its warm, vanilla-scented emptiness, and then the landscape flickered into being across it.

  Everywhere she looked, projected onto the floor, were rolling marshlands and sulphurous pools. On the walls were distant hillocks and thundering clouds. Above her, more clouds drifted across the roof. The temperature fell and the air took on the tang of rubbish bins on a hot summer’s day.

  April shivered and walked on. Looking around, she realised this was the first time she’d seen the alien battlefront. The strange no-man’s-land that they fought in. She tried to taste the air—an artificial representation of an alien atmosphere. This may have been only a simulation, but it was a simulation of an alien planet. Every step she took here was somehow echoed on that planet. She was both here and standing somewhere far beyond in space. This was thrilling.

  Yes, but not thrilling enough for her to forget her sense of defeat. Just by being here she’d given in. She’d admitted that she was going to fight. Was this how the machine rewarded her? With a better simulation of her alien surroundings? A little treat. You gave in, have some virtual reality.

  April walked on, feeling the floor sink slightly under her—was this an illusion, or was it . . . She reached down and patted it—soft rubber? Clever. Squinting she could see it followed, just slightly, the contours of the land projected onto it. She moved on a little further. Judging from the feeling on the back of her calves, she was walking down a slight slope. She glanced back—the doorway had receded and she seemed to be at the bottom of a hill.

  Impressive. But also worrying. What level was she on now? The terrain wasn’t flat. There were rocks, weird, burnt rocks—anything could be hiding behind them. She moved forwards, and the marshland receded to a silvery shore, which edged its way up to an ochre cliff. This was it, she guessed. She turned back.

  Somewhere around here, something was going to come and try to kill her.

  April trudged on through the mire. Increasingly, she’d stopped thinking of it as some kind of illusion, and let her head tell her that she was on an alien planet. Flashes of wonder filled her mind. I’m on an alien world. What convinced her that it was real was that she was finding the whole thing increasingly tiring. Her legs ached, her bruises hurt, and there was sweat pricking and trickling its way down her back. Is this what it was like for astronauts, she wondered? Amazement at being where no one had gone before, followed by an annoying slight itch in their space boot?

  She skirted the edge of the swamp, her boots crunching along the silver pebbled shore. Her feet hurt, but this was also really pretty something. The thick, wrong-coloured clouds carried on drifting slowly over her (were they going the wrong way? Was there a wrong way for clouds?). She stumbled slightly against the rocks and, with nothing better to do, sank gently down onto her back.

  Here she was, looking up at space clouds in an alien sky. Glimpsed beyond them were whole new stars, shrugged into totally different formations.

  Her life had changed a lot over the last few weeks, but this really was it. Alien planet.

  It had been a bit of a rush. Of course aliens existed. She knew that, but had always thought of them as a vague possibility, in the same way that she knew that Russia existed. Then aliens started turning up at her school, armies of them, and the sum total of everything she knew got very hard to keep a hold on.

  April had tried making her own rules for life. They weren’t glamorous, or complicated, or even that ambitious. It was her way of saying to the world: ‘You took my dad away, you crippled my mum, and you broke everything I believed in, so, from here on in, world, it’s going to be baby steps’. Her rules had been based around looking after her mother, trying to ensure they didn’t talk about it too much, making sure they weren’t talked about, and trying to impose some small little bits of normality on life. Which aliens had, literally, driven a bus through.

  Her carefully settled world had been shaken up like a snow globe. New rules, new heart, and now here she was, some kind of teenage super-soldier, fighting aliens. It was all ridiculous. Exciting, but ridiculous. She thought she should probably stop before it got out of hand.

  She laughed at that. And then, lying on her back on a not-quite-real alien marsh beach, she started to hum a song to herself.

  A few minutes later, she dozed.

  The buzzing woke her. Her helmet was making little fzz fzz fzz incoming text message vibrations.

  She blinked and was startled by the clouds wandering over her.

  ‘ABNORMAL.’

  Right. Yes. Alien planet. Beach. Dozing.

  Fzz fzz fzz.

  Why was her helmet doing that?

  Maybe whoever monitored the helmet camera. If the shot didn’t change, that was a bad thing. Either she was dead or not putting on enough of a show. Maybe that was it.

  Fzz fzz fzz.

  She picked herself up, now feeling every bruise, and shook her head. Her helmet was still buzzing. She looked up the shore and then realised why her helmet had been trying to get her attention.

  There were three of them.

  Three Skandis, slithering across the beach towards her. April crouched, grabbed her gun, and started backing away.

  She’d come to fight them, but now she was here, she was wondering. She’d just wanted to take on and kill one, to make a point. To show the people outside that she was as good as them.

  But where would that get her? If she survived, she’d shown that she would kill. Wouldn’t they just make her fight again? Wasn’t she being manipulated?

  Of course, she’d thought she could probably kill one of them.

  But three?

  Three of them coming towards her very quickly. There was no way she could kill three of them. Coming here had been a terrible mistake.

  The three creatures swept along the beach, the stones skittering and popping as their tentacles and claws scraped over them. Whereas they’d initially moved in a group, they now were separating—one continued to glide towards her, another rolled into the marsh, and the third sprang up to the edge of the cliff where it climbed across the rocks at a terrifying rate.

  April realised what was happening—they were herding her. If she backed away she was losing the advantage.

  Losing the advantage? What am I like?

  No. She needed to hold the line. Hold the line?

  The three Skandis were really close, tentacles whirling up into the air.

  ‘This isn’t my fault,’ she said to them. ‘I don’t want to do this.’

  She raised her gun.

  ‘I mean it,’ she shouted, the cliff swallowing her voice.

  ‘I will kill you.’

  She felt her heart, her weird heart, pounding in her chest.

  The creatures pushed closer.

  Something moved up on the clifftop—more of them. Come to watch the slaughter.

  She could smell them, that terrible reek of death and vinegar.

  April stood
there, holding the gun. She raised it and aimed it.

  ‘I will use this,’ she said. Was she talking to herself or the creatures? She sighted one of them, and marked its drop points. Drop points?

  A tentacle whipped past, stinging her cheek, burning her. She cried out.

  ‘I will use this,’ she said.

  She squeezed the trigger, firm constant pressure. Nothing happened.

  She squeezed the trigger again. Nothing.

  What had she done wrong?

  April held the gun out to the creature, almost as if asking it where she’d messed up.

  The Skandis brushed it out of her hands and launched itself down onto her.

  FORTY

  THIS ICELANDIC PENGUIN VILLAGE IS PROBABLY THE CUTEST PLACE ON EARTH. BUT YOU ARE NOT THERE

  The three Skandis exploded in ribbons of burning flesh.

  One moment they were there, the next they were three meaty fireworks, shooting limbs, offal, and sparkles of gore across the beach.

  A dense cloud of foul smoke engulfed April. It stung her eyes and poured into her mouth. She gagged and choked, staggering back, rubbing her sleeve into her eyes.

  What had just happened? What the hell had just happened?

  With a wet patter, the last burning remnants of the creatures splashed onto the beach.

  April lurched away, blinking to clear her eyes.

  Then stopped.

  Amazed.

  ‘You?’

  Miss Quill was standing there with a gun.

  ‘I cannot tell you how good that feels,’ she announced, blowing across the muzzle of the gun. She stopped, frowning slightly, considering her options, and finally allowed herself a small, brief smile.

  ‘Killing things feels good. No, it feels really good.’ Miss Quill rocked back on her feet, surveying the red-green mist of body parts.

  April loved her keyboard. Without it she couldn’t work through her thoughts and turn them into music. But sometimes, when she was thinking too fast, she’d hit too many notes and the keyboard would just stop trying to keep up and emit a single thin sharp note. It was her keyboard’s way of saying ‘Enough, April. Stop!’