Chapter 21
Consciousness came back to me slowly. I became aware of my body first: muscles aching from the fight in my parents’ apartment. My neck was stiff from lying at an odd angle…the surface beneath my head was firm…the floor maybe? And my tongue was fluffy and tasted of acid when I swallowed.
I wanted to open my eyes to sit up and look around, but even lying down I could tell I was still too dizzy from the drugs to be able to do that. So, I listened instead.
Everything was quiet really. I could make out no sounds beyond the soft whir of an airflow unit and my own breathing. After a while of listening to nothing, the dizziness and nausea began to pass and I was able to open my eyes. When I sat up, the room swam and even with my head between my knees, it took a good thirty seconds to stop. Blinking seemed to be a major task: when my eyelids drooped they didn’t want to open again.
What was in that syringe?
More time passed and I found myself looking around the small grey, windowless room I was in and wondering. I wondered where I was. I wondered about Cassie: what was she doing, where was she, was she safe…? After a while I took to wondering about what was going to happen to me, but I didn’t have any positive answers to offer and so I stopped thinking about that.
Instead I counted my bruises – there were quite a lot – and analysed the fight in the apartment. There were so many things I’d noticed that weren’t right, but hadn’t had time to process when I was in the middle of everything: now I had some time on my hands. I began with the obvious things.
Each of the men had been stronger than I expected. Not just a little stronger: they had been unnaturally strong, in relation to their stature and build.
What would cause that?
Drugs, perhaps, but the difference seemed too big from what I could remember. When they’d managed to hit me, it was like running into something solid, not a flesh-and-blood person. The same when I hit them: even their weak spots felt more substantial than I would have believed possible…perhaps they wore some kind of flexible armour… But, why would they need armour? What had they said about not having to fight…I dragged the words up from my memory.
“What you can do – it’s unusual – we haven’t seen real fighting for quite a while now.”
I was unusual – I’d always kind of known that – but perhaps I was not as different from other humans on the SS Hope as I’d always thought. If those men had experienced fighting on the Station, surely that meant that life had not always been as peaceful as we were led to believe…and how old did they look? The same as every other adult I’d ever seen in the Family Quarter: thirty, maybe forty years old. Did that mean within the last generation there had been violence on the station? Perhaps there was truth in their system after all: we were separated for our own safety…
That would be quite a nice and neat explanation, if it weren’t for the fact that the men appeared to experience no pain from any of the blows I landed on them, with the exception of when I caught that one guy across the throat. When I hit them, my main successes had been related to momentum, using their movements and weight to dislodge them or unbalance them…but for all of that, none of their reactions demonstrated that they felt any sort of pain.
How could you stand on a broken leg, or move normally with a dislocated shoulder?
Their reactions had been all wrong. You could not experience that level of pain and not show it. I pictured Cassie after her fall: the limited movements, intense pain around her shoulder, nearly blacking out…
When Cassie had been injured, the effects were immediate and debilitating; just as they had been with the children I saw at The Clinic, when we dealt with them after accidents. I didn’t believe for one moment that Cassie was weak and these men were not. Their reaction to their injuries was just the same as their extra-strong bodies: unnatural.
Children.
The word bubbled through my mind, as if it were significant. For a few moments I could not think why, but then I realised what my subconscious was telling me. We only ever treated children at The Clinic – some were about our age, but I had never seen an adult being taken for treatment.
Why had I never realised this? I could have kicked myself for not seeing something so obvious before now.
What connected all these things? I began laying out my observations one by one.
The adults I fought with didn’t feel pain; the adults in the Family Quarter didn’t appear to get sick or have accidents that need treatment. Their bodies felt different to ours: the normal points of weakness did not exist, and they were much stronger than they should be.
Then there was the mind communication. Again, only the adults seemed to communicate with one another using just their minds – with the exception of Cassie, it didn’t appear to happen in the children and young people. And, they worked hard at hiding this ability from us.
Did they hide it to keep us safe?
In many ways that would make sense: so much of what we did or didn’t do was connected to protecting us, from what I had seen.
Until now…
That was true: the situation had changed. What happened in the apartment confirmed everything Cassie had said – everything she had seen in her dreams. What I couldn’t understand was why the adults would work so hard at keeping us safe, but at the same time, have no issue with removing us violently from the Family Quarter. The sedative they had given me had not diminished my memories… Did that mean they didn’t care what I remembered…?
My list of observations made nothing clear. I found myself asking the same two things over and over: how could any of this be possible? And what did it mean. Unfortunately, right now I didn’t have an answer for either question.
The Rainbow Maker's Tale Page 41