Where the World Turns Wild

by Nicola Penfold

  “Let me do it for you,” Etienne says now. “Give me the matches and I’ll set the fire. You concentrate on getting out.”

  I shake my head decisively. It’s one thing helping us come up with the plan. It’s another thing to take part in it. “I already told you. I can do it, Etienne. I don’t need you.”

  “Let me, Juniper. In this whole adventure, it’s the only thing I can do.” His voice is insistent. He’s not like Sam or Silvan, Etienne actually wants to be part of our escape.

  “No. I don’t want to be out there worrying about you. I don’t want there to be anyone left here for them to blame.”

  “Juniper. You’ve barely any time left in this place. Barely any time left with Annie Rose. Are you telling me you want to spend it starting fires?”

  “I couldn’t forgive myself if—”

  “Juniper,” he says again. “It’ll be campfires every night now for you and Bear. This is my one chance. Are you seriously going to deny me it?”

  I laugh softly, even though I really want to cry. “You’ve done so much already. Especially with that GPS. Do you know how worried I’ve been about my map-reading?”

  Etienne grins. “I should’ve given it to you before. You should have had it the day I found it. It was never for me. I don’t have a place to type in. I’m like Colin in The Secret Garden. I wasn’t meant for the outside.”

  “No. No! Don’t say that. Because it’s not true. Colin got out, didn’t he? He went outside and you will too. I know it.”

  “You know it?” Etienne laughs.

  “Yes, deep down inside. I know it.” And somehow as I say it, it feels real. I can see him out there. I can see all of us – Etienne, Bear and I – running together across grass with flowers just like the ones on Bear’s wall. “Etienne,” I say suddenly, “that place at the North Edge behind the yellow tape, where I thought Sam was breeding the Sticks?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Well, he isn’t. Not Sticks. Ticks! Ticks, Etienne! They’re doing a trial for disease resistance. They’re looking for participants.”

  Etienne nods blankly, but I see him flinch.

  “You get me?” I say.

  “Sam didn’t tell me,” he says and I hear the hurt in his voice.

  “I’m telling you! You can’t go back there. No one from our school can. It’s too dangerous.”

  He nods again, but he’s not quite looking at me.

  “I mean it. They wouldn’t care, Etienne, if you lived or died. Sam wouldn’t care. You’ve got to stay away!”

  “Sam would care,” he says loyally.

  “No, Etienne!”

  “He would, Juniper. You don’t know him like I do. After the Jack incident, Sam was the only person who understood and the North Edge was the one good thing, you know? The one thing that kept me going.” His voice is breaking.

  “You can’t trust Sam. He’s gone to their side. Maybe he didn’t want to, but he did anyway. Etienne!” I take hold of his hand and shake it. He can’t ever go back there. Even if Sam was trying to help him in the beginning, Etienne can’t be involved in this.

  Etienne looks at his fingers in mine and his face softens. “OK, Ju, seeing as you’re so insistent. I won’t go back.”

  “You swear?” I say. “Cross your heart?”

  “Yes.”

  “Say it!”

  Etienne laughs gently. “I swear, Juniper.”

  This gush of panic and sadness wells up inside me. “You won’t need to anyway, because you’re a Plant Keeper here now. You’ll watch out for Annie Rose, won’t you, Etienne?”

  Etienne smiles. “Of course I will. I promise. I’ll come down every day. You know how jealous I always was of you having the Palm House? Your very own garden. Just like Mary Lennox. Now you’ll see the moors too and the hills. You’re going home, Juniper Green.”

  “I’m not ready.”

  Etienne squeezes my hand. “You were always ready, Juniper, you and Bear. That’s why you have to go.”

  I go back to the kitchen and make Bear help me put all our old books under the floor, where the journey things were. They’ll be seen as incriminating evidence if Portia Steel’s officers come looking.

  “It feels like we buried a person,” Bear says as we drag the chest back over the top.

  “They did their job,” Annie Rose says. “And maybe they will again one day, for another person.”

  “I don’t want anyone else having Birds of the World,” Bear says fiercely. “That’s just mine.”

  Annie Rose smiles. We had a fight on our hands getting Bear to leave that one. “OK, Bear. I’ll keep it safe for you. Your bird book isn’t going anywhere.”

  I look round at the meagre amount of food left on the shelves. Anything she could get to fit, Annie Rose has stuffed in our bags for the journey – energy bars and fruit sticks and protein balls.

  I start moving the remaining jars down from the top.

  “Leave it,” Annie Rose says. “I can do it, when—”

  “No,” I say sharply. “You can’t reach them up there. You could fall.” And I need something to do. My head’s spinning, thinking about Etienne getting caught by Street Patrol. Getting caught and dragged away, just like Ms Endo was.

  “Ju!” Bear stops me. “We missed one of the books.”

  I glance over. It’s the book I looked up Silvan in. Bear’s flicking through it curiously. “Baby Names! Am I in it?”

  Annie Rose scoffs. “Baby Names! Do we still have that old thing? No, Bear, you won’t be in there. Your name wasn’t from any book.”

  Bear puffs up proudly. “What about Juniper?”

  “Not Juniper either. Your names are both from real things. Real wild things. That’s the book I used to pick your mum’s name.”

  Bear finds the page for Marian. It’s easy – the corner is folded over at the top and there are flowers drawn around the name.

  “Marian. Wished-for child,” I say, not even needing to look. I know the entry by heart.

  It means rebellious too. That was the sting in the tail. Annie Rose loved her so much, but she was too wild to keep.

  When the fire alarm sounds, it’s piercing and overwhelming and my stomach, which has been tied in a knot since Friday, comes loose. I run to the bathroom and throw up into the toilet.

  Etienne said we should wait five minutes to give the Border Patrol guards time to leave their posts and when I come back into the kitchen, Bear’s counting out the seconds. Annie Rose is nodding, prompting as he stumbles over the hundred boundary. One hundred and one. One hundred and two.

  At two hundred she takes our hands in hers, and Bear and I join hands too so we’re one perfect circle. Annie Rose doesn’t cry. She doesn’t get overly emotional. She’s not like that. She knows it would distract us, weaken us. Now more than ever is a time to be strong.

  Three hundred and it’s time to go. Annie Rose lifts Bear’s rucksack on to his back. The pans are strapped to the bottom and they jangle against each other.

  “My little tin man,” Annie Rose says and she kisses him softly on the head. “I hope your school shoes are up for the challenge!”

  Bear looks small, stunned, unsure whether this is actually going to happen. “Can’t you come too, Annie Rose?”

  Annie Rose doesn’t falter. She keeps her voice light, says that one day soon someone will develop a vaccine and she’ll come then. Someone could come and get her, bring her to us. To Ennerdale.

  She doesn’t believe it. It’s just a story she’s telling him, to ease the goodbye, and my heart’s breaking – cleaving right in two – because I know this might actually be it. The last time she pulls me close, kisses me. The last time I can hug her, my arms so tight against her thin frame, to let her know just how much she means to us.

  She runs her fingers along my cheeks. “Are you ready, Juniper berry?”

  “Yes.”

  “Your bag’s not too heavy?”

  “No.”

  “Come, then.” Annie Rose pulls Bear
back a safe distance and I swing Grandpa Edward’s axe against the pane. I watch the glass shatter.

  We’re walking across the Buffer, Bear’s hand small and hot in mine. “Shall we run, Ju?”

  “No, let’s just walk fast. We don’t want to trip.”

  I hadn’t thought through the terrain – the rocks and blocks of concrete that Border Patrol have strewn over everything. It’s hard to get a footing. You could stumble. Turn your ankle. No doubt that’s what they want, if they ever imagined anyone would be crazy enough to try and cross.

  “Are we crazy, Bear?” I ask, looking down at him for some confirmation of sanity from my six-year-old brother, dutifully trotting by my side.

  “I think we should run, Ju,” he says, gazing back over his shoulder.

  You can see the smoke funnelling up into the sky and the glow of the flames leaping up, capricious. I never saw anything like it before. I think I can feel the heat too, on the back of my neck, and flecks of ash fall down upon us like some terrible black rain. Going up like a tinderbox, that’s what they used to say. It’s going to take all the water the city’s got to put it out.

  “Will it burn down our block? Will it burn the Palm House?” Bear asks.

  “No. It’s just the warehouse. No one will be hurt.” The smoke reaches up into my nose and my mouth, acrid. We’re both coughing.

  I focus on the way ahead. Each step needs picking out and we have to keep our torches right down so we’re not seen. Sometimes we need to change course to detour round the higher piles of debris. The concrete blocks are more dangerous than they look, for embedded within them are nails and shards of glass. And there are coils of barbed wire, which wrap around our feet. We keep having to stop to untangle ourselves.

  It’s no man’s land. It’s one big trap.

  We try and keep to the places where you can see the actual ground. Where the scattering of obstacles has become uneven and the scorched chemical earth shows.

  At some point I realize there’s an actual softness underfoot. That I’m sinking into something. I shouldn’t stop, I shouldn’t look down, but I do and my torch floods the floor with light.

  Dead feathered bodies. Soft bloodied corpses. We’re walking over rotting birds.

  Bear screams and I clasp my fingers over his mouth to silence him. Not that anyone could hear with the sirens wailing. Maybe it’s me that doesn’t want to hear. It’s like some awful omen. Our first sight of wild things and they’re dead already.

  “What’s happened to them, Juniper?” Bear’s voice wavers.

  “They’ve been shot, Bear.” That’s what we hear at night. They’re not empty warning shots. Etienne was right.

  “But why were the birds here? Why didn’t they stay away?” His little body is shaking. It’s too much – too close, too many. I gather him up beside me to move us on, but my legs are shaking too.

  You don’t see dead things in the city. Occasionally, the odd insect gets through. Once we saw a dead cockroach on the way to school, sometimes there’s the odd fly or spider, but creatures don’t last in the city. They don’t last long enough to die. If there’s a breach, if one gets through, Glyphosate Patrol gets them straight away.

  Here are mounds and mounds of flesh. Broken wings and small round heads with dull eyes, staring up at us.

  “Don’t look, Bear. Let’s get to the forest. It’ll be better there.” I look to the horizon for the trees, but it’s too dark to make out anything. I’ve no idea what’s really ahead. No idea where I’m really leading him.

  “Seagull. Pigeon,” Bear says, ignoring me and shining his torch right into the carcasses. “Crow.”

  A murder of crows. It was in our dictionary in this strange list right at the back of the book. Collective nouns. A sloth of bears, a misbelief of painters and a murder of crows. Like the dictionary was warning me.

  “Don’t, Bear. Don’t look.”

  “Starling. Magpie.”

  “Bear, please. Stop it!” For once he’s called out their names, we can’t ever unknow. And we can’t ever unsee.

  “Why did they come here?” Bear asks, still trying to make sense of it all.

  “They’re town birds, or they were once. They don’t know they’re not allowed.” My eyes are wet and hazy as I look again to the horizon, willing my eyes to make out the treeline. “Come on! Please! Let’s carry on. We have to. We have to, Bear.”

  The moon’s overhead – a full circle of white, hanging right above us, but still not providing enough light to see. We’ve got too used to artificial city light.

  “Bear!” I scream and I pull him on, yanking at his arm to force his legs to move. “Let’s get into the forest.”

  There’s a shadow on the horizon. An uneven edge on the skyline. It’s really close now.

  I wish we were seeing the trees first in the daylight. It’s impossible not to imagine danger when everything’s so dark.

  Behind us, we can hear shouts, or screams maybe, carried on the breeze. But there’s no gunfire, no border alarm, just the fire siren, quieter now, but still wailing out incessantly.

  We practically fall into the forest, out of breath. For a moment we pause on the threshold. Partly it’s disbelief that we made it this far and partly it’s fear. This is the start of the Wild, and despite everything – despite how we’ve longed for it, dreamed of it, sickened for it – we’ve been taught our entire lives in the city to be scared of it.

  “We have to keep going, Bear,” I say, though I’m still rooted to the spot.

  “Why are you whispering?”

  “Maybe there are Border Patrols this side too.” But that’s not really it. It’s the trees looming up above us and the quiet that’s suddenly around us. Like the power outages in the city, when everything turned off and for a while there was silence and you could hear your own heartbeat.

  “We need to head west first. Get clear of the city,” I say. Etienne’s GPS is strung round my neck. The light on the screen is dim when I turn it on, but we have to save the battery and we can’t be seen. The drones can search out light. Same with the torches. We’ll have to ration their use.

  I stare at the GPS, at the turning hourglass. It’s the trees, I think, blocking the signal from the satellites. Did we seriously expect it to work? But the device is cleverer than that. Within a few seconds, a green spot lights up on the screen and around it the map comes into view. There, on the south edge of our city, our starting point.

  “This way,” I say, relieved that I don’t have to get out the paper map. It’s safe in our bags with the compass, but I’m really not sure of my ability to use it. I’ve never used a map before. Only ones in stories. Made-up kingdoms. None of that’s going to help.

  I turn back one last time. I can still see it in the distance, or maybe I’m imagining things. Maybe it’s my head, painting it in – that dome of old Victorian glass. Our very own Emerald City.

  The forest isn’t silent. As we walk into it, it comes alive. Everything moving, ever so slightly. There’s a whisper above us and rustlings in the undergrowth, and a sudden twit twoo which is so textbook-owl that Bear squeezes my hand and even in the dark I can see his eyes glow.

  “Tawnies,” he whispers and bounds forward to look for them. There’s a sharp crackle. “Ju!” he cries, panicked. “What’s that?”

  “It’s just leaves.”

  “Will the guards hear?”

  “No.”

  “What about the wolves, Ju?”

  “No, but stop speaking anyway.”

  It doesn’t take long for the glow from the city to sink away. The dark’s like a liquid we could drown in.

  Bear’s breathing is laboured. He was amazing across the Buffer. All that way across, all the stumbles and the horror of the birds, he didn’t once complain or cry. The adrenaline of the escape kept us both going, but adrenaline doesn’t last forever, not in a six-year-old boy out way past his bedtime with a heavy load on his back. He doesn’t say anything, but his pace has slowed, he’s laggin
g behind. His legs are smaller than mine, his stride little.

  I tug at him gently. “Come on, Bear. Keep up.”

  “When can we make our tent, Ju?”

  “We have to get further away. From the Buffer. Here, let me carry that.” I unhook his bag from his shoulders and place it on my front, even though my back’s already aching with my own bigger bag and the tarpaulins in a roll beneath it, and the rat trap beneath that.

  “Can we make a fire tonight?” Bear asks.

  “We’ll try.”

  “Shall I start collecting sticks?”

  “Not now, Bear,” I say, quietly desperate. “You have to walk faster than this.”

  I can’t help thinking that by now some alarm has been raised. Maybe Border Patrol are already coming after us. If not, then at 9am tomorrow, when school starts on Monday morning, our desks will be empty. Our teachers will mark us absent, Abbott will call Annie Rose. She’s going to pick up the phone and say we’re sick. To buy us time before they come looking. I’m not sure any of us believe that will work though.

  Sometimes I think I see them. Lumbering white figures lit by the moon. Border Patrol in their Hazmat suits. But it’s all in my head. There’s no one for miles.

  When we can’t go any further, we make our tent. A tree holds a branch out for us at just the right height and I drape over one of the tarpaulins and lay the other on the floor.

  Bear doesn’t ask about collecting sticks or making a fire. He simply gets inside his sleeping bag and falls asleep. His body can’t do any more. I’m so exhausted I crawl into mine, right next to him, and shut my eyes.

  Some bird is calling above us. This high-pitched trill, little snatches of song that stop only to start up again a moment or so later.

  Bear’s out of his sleeping bag already and I clamber up next to him. I want to say something but I can’t find the words and anyway it doesn’t matter because I know Bear’s feeling it too. Anyone would. The scale of it – the trees, right up into the sky, all green and yellow and gold, and the sunlight filtering through them, dancing down on our upturned faces.