Everywhere Everything Everyone

by Warner, Katy;

  ‘You wanna go the long way?’ Z said.

  ‘We got time?’

  ‘Always.’

  The long way meant the weird detour Z had taken me on all those months ago. It was a thing we did. We’d talk about that first day together and remember (or misremember) how everything went down and we’d notice the way the city was changing.

  The Unit had started setting up security checks all over the city. It made things really slow but because it also made things ‘extra safe’ people didn’t mind. They said things like, If you’re a Good Citizen you’ve got nothing to worry about. And they lined up, patiently and quietly, as their bags were scanned and their movements questioned by Unit Officers.

  A line had already formed at the security check they’d set up at the far end of the park, by the gates that led into the city. Sometimes the check could be really quick – you’d show them your ID and everything would be fine and through you’d all go. Other times, not so much. It all depended on the officers’ moods. And today they were all in really shitty moods.

  We pushed our bags through the scanner, showed our IDs. I had my permanent ID now, plastic and official and keeping me safe. But I still hadn’t told Z the bit about his dad being my guardian. It felt too weird. The officers made us empty our bags and, as they went through every single item, asked what we were up to. The interrogation went like this:

  Where are you going?

  School.

  What are you doing there?

  Learning.

  What’s this?

  That’s a calculator.

  Why do you have a calculator?

  For school. Maths class.

  Show me.

  And I showed him it was just a calculator and nothing to worry about and he turned it over and over for ages before shoving it back at me.

  When we finally got through the security check and there was enough distance between them and us, Z put on his stupid (and kinda funny) officer voice and said, ‘Tell me everything you have eaten for dinner for the last month.’

  ‘And how many times you went to the toilet,’ I said in my attempt at the officer voice thing.

  ‘Do you prefer dogs or cats?’

  ‘Sweet or savoury?’

  ‘Magnus Varick or Magnus Varick?’

  When we were stupid like that it was almost like things were normal. Like I could almost imagine Astrid walking with us, telling us, Stop being idiots, and, Hurry up or we’ll be late.

  Suddenly Z grabbed my shoulder and did this weird motion with his head.

  ‘Stop it, weirdo.’ I laughed and went to move away, but he pulled me close and whispered, Look up.

  I did and there, up high on an old building with a restaurant downstairs and teeny offices upstairs, were the words: DOWN WITH THE REGIME. Red block letters. Spray-painted and messy, but readable. And right in the middle of the city. Not hiding down some alleyway. The words were out in the open for everyone to see. If only they’d look up.

  I took Z’s hand, squeezed it tight and didn’t let go until we reached school.

  CHAPTER 30

  Peter was in my classroom.

  I kept staring at him to make sure. Part of me wondered if I was losing it. But the more I stared at him, the more I knew it was him, and then he was introduced and it was definitely him and I wanted to stand up and shout, Hey, Peter, it’s me! But I didn’t. Of course. I just stared and tried to send him a message with my mind: Look at me, look. I’m right here. But he avoided my eyes completely.

  He stood in front of the class with another officer. Mrs Emery wrote the name of the class across the whiteboard in sprawling black letters – Futures: Your Life with the Unit. The week before we’d had Futures: Your Life in Agriculture and listened to a dairy farmer and someone who worked at the abattoir try to convince us that our lives would be so much better working out of the city. You’re making a realcontribution to society, the farmer had said, and we’d all nodded.

  ‘It’s great to make a real contribution to society,’ the officer said. And we all nodded. Again. I wondered if anyone else realised we were being read the exact same script.

  The officer, who was all pimples and eagerness, told us his name was Baxter. He didn’t look like an officer, he looked like a kid playing dress-ups. He could have easily passed for one us. Baxter, I thought, I could outrun you and outfight you any day. If Z and I were ever caught doing graffiti, I hoped it would be Baxter who found us. We’d be fine.

  ‘You can’t take Safety and Security for granted,’ Baxter said. ‘It’s up to us to protect it. Our Safety ensures our Freedom.’ He went on like that for ages. I couldn’t follow his argument but he was really into it and lots of the guys in class were nodding along with him.

  Peter shuffled from one foot to the other. He’d always been kinda shy. Astrid and I would always force him into our stupid make-believe games. Let’s pretend to be pirates, we’d say, and he’d get all self-conscious about putting on the voice or acting out the fantasy world we’d created. It felt like a lifetime ago. It probably was.

  We locked eyes. I smiled. He didn’t. He looked right through me and I wondered if he’d forgotten me. I squished my face at him, squinted, stuck out my tongue, and finally, there it was. A very quick sideways smile. A slight nod. Then he looked at Baxter as if he were really interested in what he was saying.

  Peter. I couldn’t stop looking at him, trying to read his mind, his expression, his body language. Anything. Last time I’d seen him he’d pulled me from the crowd at the Checkpoint. Pushed me. Yelled at me. Saved me. There was so much I needed to ask him but it wasn’t like I could just blurt out, Hey, Peter? Can we talk?

  Everyone started clapping and I realised the presentation was over. Baxter looked very pleased with himself.

  ‘The officers have agreed to answer your questions. Ask something smart. Don’t embarrass me,’ Mrs Emery said.

  Everyone sat quietly, eyes forward, hands on desks. We never asked questions. We weren’t used to doing that anymore. Mrs Emery pointed to some poor kid at the back of the class and demanded they ask a question. They stood and stumbled over their words until Mrs Emery had had enough and put them out of their misery.

  ‘You,’ she said, and pointed. At me.

  I pushed the chair back and stood. My knees were like jelly. I couldn’t ask my questions out loud. Not in front of all these people. I needed to get Peter alone, but I had no idea how to do that.

  ‘Do Unit Officers work on the other side of the Safety Border?’ I finally said.

  ‘We work across both Regions. You get placements and are deployed to areas that need you most,’ Peter said. He looked right at me. I searched his eyes for something more, a hint or a secret code or anything about my family. Anything. ‘And, just so everyone knows, the people on the other side of the Safety Border are doing OK. They’re all OK.’

  My heart jumped. He held eye contact for a little longer than he probably should have. I was scared Mrs Emery might intercept his message. They’re all OK. My mind raced as I tried to come up with another question. Something that could get me some more details. But the guy in front ruined everything.

  ‘Who cares how they are?’ he said loudly. ‘They’re all Threats over there!’

  ‘My mum reckons they should be cut off completely,’ another said, and people murmured in agreement. ‘We’re propping them up with our resources and taxes and what do they do? Riot and attack us cos they always want more. Nah. Let them fend for themselves. We’re better off without them.’

  Mrs Emery nodded like all this shouting was suddenly allowed, and the rest of the class took that as a chance to start talking over each other in angry voices about how bad the other side was. It was like they wanted to outdo each other with who had the loudest, most stupid opinion. Peter and Baxter gave them more ammunition with their well-rehearsed lines about Threats and Security and how the Unit makes a Difference and why the Safety Border works.

  I sat quietly and let Peter’s wor
ds sink in: They’re all OK. My eyes grew hot with tears and I blinked and blinked to stop them breaking through. Mum and Astrid were safe. They were OK. What else could he have meant?

  CHAPTER 31

  I needed to do something. I had that butterflies-in-your-stomach feeling, like you get when you’re a kid before your birthday party. Maybe it was the news about my family. Or the fresh graffiti we’d seen. Or maybe I was just fooling myself into thinking things could, possibly, be OK.

  I lay in bed and stared into the dark and wished Diggs wasn’t home so I could go into Z’s room. I had weird, half-asleep and half-awake dreams where I felt like I was falling and just as I was about to hit the ground I’d feel a jolt and find myself in bed.

  When Dad was taken from us, we all slept in the big bed with Mum for a while. Me on one side, Astrid on the other and Mum in the middle. She would twitch in her sleep, cry out sometimes, and we would help her fall back to sleep again. Tell her we were there and that it would be all right. She said we shouldn’t have to do that, that she was the mother and she should protect us and not the other way around. And then she would cry. She cried a lot back then. We told her we loved her and climbed into her bed every night for months. I wondered if she slept in my bed now, to be closer to Astrid. I wondered if she was having the same dream where she was falling. Maybe we were falling together and jolting to consciousness at the exact same time.

  As soon as the first signs of morning appeared, I snuck into Z’s bedroom. He was already awake, a pile of pens and markers on his bed. He said he’d been collecting them whenever he could.

  ‘What do you mean, “collecting”?’ I whispered.

  ‘Better if you don’t know,’ he said, and smiled. He was lucky he had that smile. It really got him out of so much trouble. Or into it.

  ‘Let’s go for a run,’ I said.

  ‘Now?’ He yawned.

  ‘I think we should put our mark somewhere people will actually see it. I mean, Z, come on – we started this whole thing –’

  ‘No, we didn’t. You did. I was just coming along for the exercise.’

  ‘You’re part of it! They copied your words. I just think people should see it, our stuff. The original.’

  I wanted to be braver than whoever had copied us. I wanted to watch people reading our words. I needed to know we were doing more than inspiring copycat graffiti.

  ‘I dunno, Santee,’ he said.

  ‘We need to make stickers.’

  ‘Stickers?’ he said. ‘Really?’

  ‘Really,’ I said, and showed him. I’d taken some of those sticky label things that Diggs had in his study. I’d been snooping for new markers when I found them. ‘We just need to decorate them.’

  I thought it was best to keep the message simple. Just DOWN WITH THE REGIME, written in the quick style we’d gotten pretty good at by now. We sat on the bed and wrote it out on label after label.

  ‘Do you think Diggs will notice we’ve taken all his labels?’

  ‘No,’ Z said. ‘Anyway, I think these would have been Mum’s.’

  ‘Shit, sorry, I didn’t – I didn’t think.’

  ‘She would love it, Santee. She’d probably be out there with us if she was still here.’

  We walked out into the early morning darkness. It felt as if it were just the two of us against the world. But, somehow, Z’s mum and my dad were with us, too. Urging us on. I liked that feeling.

  My idea sounded better in my head than when I tried to explain it to Z. The basic idea was this: stick our message on all the trees in the park. OK, maybe not all the trees, but the big ones that lined the paths. The ones people would walk past or sit under. The ones they couldn’t miss.

  ‘They’re trees, Santee,’ Z whispered as we slowly jogged through the park. ‘We can’t do that to trees.’ He looked at me like I was some kind of psychopath. ‘Don’t you care about the trees?’ he said. And he looked so sad.

  I felt awful and tried to take it back.

  He cracked up laughing. ‘I’m kidding.’

  I whacked him on the arm.

  ‘It’s a great plan,’ he said. ‘You’re a genius.’

  Problem was, I wasn’t a genius. Not even close.

  There were security cameras in the park but Z was pretty confident he knew where they were and how we could avoid them. We would jog along the winding paths and one of us would stop to catch our breath or stretch or tie a shoelace and the other would slap the stickers onto the tree. Simple. We would hit as many trees as we could across the entire park. I had this idea that if we spread them out, the Unit might miss a couple and then our message would remain and maybe someone would actually see it.

  It worked. The stickers stuck to the trees and Z even added some to the park’s signs and plaques and statues. It was quicker and easier than writing and we covered way more ground than we’d been able to before.

  I was pretending to stretch at a tree and was about to plaster a sticker to its smooth bark when I heard Z whistle. A loud, piercing sound that made my heart stop. The whistle was our sign. Something wasn’t right.

  Someone was coming. Or already there. I froze. I was supposed to act casual. That’s what Z had told me to do when we made our getaway plans. Act casual. Walk away. Like you hadn’t even been there.

  ‘Run, run, run,’ Z said and ran past me, grabbing my arm and pulling me along with him.

  It felt like I was watching myself in a movie cos there was no way this could be true. Z was running faster than he’d ever run in his life. I knew there were officers chasing us down but I couldn’t tell how many or what they looked like or anything. All I knew was the sound of their boots hitting the path behind us. Their voices shouting, Stop or we’ll shoot. Shoot? Shoot what? Us? I kept my eyes forward. Maybe if I didn’t look at them we’d be safe.

  Z suddenly swerved off the path and onto the grass and I stumbled as I followed him and my ankle twisted and a sharp sting shot up my leg but somehow I managed to stay up and kinda ran kinda limped and ignored the whir of a distant helicopter getting closer and the sounds of the officers shouting, Go-go-go. Z led me into a garden thick with trees and bushes and onto a hidden dirt path that wound through it and we pushed through the bushes until Z stopped and pulled me to the ground with him.

  My whole body was thumping, thumping, thumping as we crouched in the dead leaves and dirt, hidden by the bushes. What the hell was he doing? They were close, they must have been close. I tried to shove him, keep him moving, but he wouldn’t move. I waited. I tried to hold my breath. To stop my heart thumping. My blood flowing. My mind racing. Everything inside me was too loud. I was sure I was going to give us away just by existing. Z found my hand and squeezed it. I looked into his eyes. We’re safe, he seemed to be saying, and I tried desperately to believe him.

  We huddled together and waited.

  Bang.

  We both jumped. A gunshot. Then another and another. Shit. They were going to kill us. I started shaking and couldn’t stop, even when Z put his arms around me and held me tight. This is it, I thought, this is the end. And I didn’t want it to be. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t right. I was trying to breathe but I’d forgotten how to and suddenly, without thinking, I pushed Z away and stood up and … there were no officers. No guns. The helicopter was hovering above another section of the park, not right overhead like I’d thought.

  We took off our hoodies and hid them in the dirt, just in case someone had noticed two terrified idiots running from the Unit – even though the Unit wasn’t chasing them. Of course they weren’t. We were nothing. We weren’t doing anything that needed guns and helicopters to make it stop. They could stop our messages just by covering them up.

  CHAPTER 32

  As we finally made our way to school, exhausted and sore and feeling more empty and useless than ever, it wasn’t a surprise to see all our stickers had been ripped down. Little bits had remained, tiny streaks of white paper stuck to tree trunks and things, but there were no words left on any of th
em.

  Except for one.

  A lonely sticker had stubbornly remained, stuck to the trunk of a big old tree on the main path. My writing stood out clear and strong. DOWN WITH THE REGIME. It might have been small, but it was there.

  And it lit something inside me. Made me less tired. More determined. It felt like we were invincible. Like we could do anything.

  ‘How’s your brother doing?’

  It was lunchtime and I was sitting at the bird-crap table, on my own, sketching some ideas for our next graffiti attack. I wanted to source some better-quality stickers – some that were really, really sticky and hard to remove. And I was already dreaming about covering the whole city: sticking them to cars and buses and letterboxes and shop windows and Unit patrol cars. I was lost in all of this when Tash approached me.

  ‘How’s your brother doing?’ she asked again.

  I shut my sketchpad and looked at her. I knew exactly what she was trying to do. Make me feel stupid and embarrassed. I wasn’t going to let her. I just stared at her. Waited.

  ‘Z,’ she said. ‘I mean, you’re like their foster kid or something, aren’t you? So that makes him your brother.’

  ‘What do you want, Tash?’ I said, and started packing my bag like I had somewhere to be. I didn’t. Z was off with Riley and his friends playing basketball. He said I should come but I wasn’t going to sit on the sidelines like some dumb girlfriend cheerleader. No way.

  ‘Look,’ she said. ‘The girls sent me over cos Chloe is into him and wanted to find out what his deal was. You know.’

  The Tash I had been friends with would never have said that kind of thing. We would have laughed at girls like that. We had.