I look sick and I feel sick too – sick and sleepy. The sweet sticky tea, which Bear refused, swishes around my stomach.
There’s a hairbrush on the table. I’ve seen things like that in the Emporium too – the cream oval base, the soft bristles. I used to think they were pretty, until Barney told me they were made from ivory – elephant tusk – and the bristles came from horses.
This one’s carved with vines and the bristles are full of the woman’s hair.
I trusted her because she was wild and a woman with silver hair, like Annie Rose. I trusted her because I was scared and sad and starving. Because Bear was too and I haven’t done any kind of job of looking after him so far.
“Juniper!” Bear says and I turn to him. He’s dragged out the clothes from the bottom of the wardrobe and is holding up sheets of stapled-together paper. He’s staring at them, confused. “The address. It’s in our city, I think.”
I grab the papers from him. The date is in the top right-hand corner of the first sheet, like we were always taught at school. It’s just three years back. And then pages and pages – words in small black type. I don’t read it properly, there isn’t time, but the words I need reveal themselves to me – reconnaissance, integrity of the mission, loyalty to the city. There’s a name at the bottom of each sheet, like it’s a contract. A signature, in elaborate calligraphy. Portia Steel.
I remember Silvan, back in the Warren. “To be her eyes and her ears… Only a few ever report back … they’re properly crazy.”
One of the sheets has numbers on it and other odd words. Old words. Frequencies, bandwidth, wavelength.
“What does it mean, Ju?” Bear asks, his nose puckered.
I have to make myself think. Fast, even though my brain’s cloudy and slow.
“Can you see a radio? If she’s working for Steel, if she knew about us, she must have a way of making contact with the city.”
“A radio?” Bear asks, confused.
Why would he know that word? I only do because I spent so long pouring over that old dictionary back in our kitchen.
Radio. The use of electromagnetic waves for broadcasting two-way communications.
Two-way communications. That’s what Violet will be doing. She’ll be letting the city know that she has us. Has both of us. I walked myself right into her trap.
“It’ll be a kind of box. With an aerial. An antennae. Like the drones have.”
Bear frowns. “There was something like that before, on the table. She was playing with it last night – turning some dials. Talking to it, like it was a person, but it just crackled. It was broken I reckon. It’s gone now.”
“That must have been what was in that satchel,” I say in a heavy voice. “She took it with her. Maybe there’s somewhere she goes, for a better signal.” Maybe she didn’t dare leave Bear until she’d found me in case I broke in and rescued him. Like I should have done if I had any sense at all. Any of Bear’s instincts.
“Juniper!” Bear says helplessly.
My eyes fix on his. He’s waiting for me to do something. “We need to get out of here,” I say.
“She locked the door!”
“The windows then.”
A gunshot sounds outside the cottage and I pull Bear after me, back into the main room.
The moment the door opens, Bear and I throw ourselves outside. We don’t give the woman time to stop us. She’s got the gun in one hand and the black satchel she took with her is slung over her shoulder.
“Run, Bear! Run!” The trees. Get to the trees, we told each other. We’re faster than her, smaller. We can hide. My feet are heavy on the ground but the trees are getting closer. I’m almost there.
Bear’s scream stops me. He’s fallen and even as I turn back for him, she’s caught him. She’s pulling him up from the floor.
I run towards her. “No!”
She’s got a silver blade in her right hand and she’s moving it to Bear’s throat.
“No! No!” I cry, my voice shaking.
The woman’s face is taut and focused, just like her voice. “I’m protecting my interests. Get back inside. Now.”
“No,” I say, even though my heart is pummelling out of my ribcage.
“There’s a warrant for you both. It’s my civic duty. Portia Steel put out a call herself.”
“No!” I cry. “We’re not going back. Not ever.”
I keep my eyes on the blade. It’s dirty – encrusted with blood – but still somehow catching the light of the morning sun. “Let him go!”
“Inside!” the woman hollers.
“If you send us back, they’ll kill us. Both of us!”
The woman shakes her head.
“They want our blood. They’ll take yours too, if they come out here. You don’t know what the city’s like now.” I’m yelling at her. Screaming. But I’m pleading with her too. “Please! Please! Please!” There are beads of sweat, like dewdrops, painted on Bear’s face.
The woman’s moving her head from side to side, wildly. “I’ve been promised. By Steel herself. She’ll let me back in, in exchange for you two.”
“Why?” I splutter. “Why would you want to go back? The city’s a prison!”
“It’s my home!” the woman screeches. “I didn’t ask to be sent out here. You think I wanted my blood to show up positive?”
“It means you can survive. And you have. You’ve survived here!”
“I’m about the only one that did. You don’t know what it’s like. No soul to speak to except the voices in your own head. I’m not doing another winter out here. I can’t! In the cottage. Now.”
“And what if I don’t?”
Bear’s properly sobbing now. The blade’s pressing against the soft skin of his neck. There’s a madness in the woman’s eyes. Now she’s forgotten to smile I can see it. “I will do it,” she says, pressing the blade harder, and I don’t doubt for a moment that she will.
I turn back to the cottage and the woman turns too, to follow after me, but something comes from the woodshed – a leaping, hurling thing, throwing itself against her. Our lynx cat. Our Ghost. Violet staggers, letting go of Bear as she hits the ground.
“Run, Bear!” I call, even as I’m hauling him up off the floor.
The woman’s grabbing at my leg. Her thick calloused hand gripping tight round my ankle, like a claw. I kick out.
“Don’t you dare!” she cries, incensed. “I’ve been promised! You’re my ticket back in!”
“No!” I scream, lashing out. She’s scrabbling for the gun with her other hand, but the leather strap is tangled up with the satchel.
I manage to move my leg up to her neck and start kicking because she deserves it, because she would have used that knife on Bear, I know she would.
“Juniper!” Bear’s screaming out at me from the trees, calling my name, and it’s louder now and I’m terrified he’ll come back and I never ever want him near that knife again.
The woman lets go of my ankle to go for the rifle, but she’s still splayed out beneath me. I lift my foot up and bring it right down on to her, right into her knee, my full weight right on her, and there’s a sort of snap, like that air rifle made when she broke it back to insert the silver pellets.
Then I’m off and running too. To the trees. The air rifle banging against my back as I run, the leather strap across my back.
“I’ll get you! I’ll get you both!” the woman screams at me, and then the cottage door bangs in the wind. A moment later a shot sounds out after us. She must have gone back for another gun.
I lurch forwards to Bear and the sweet tea pools on the forest floor at his feet. Bear looks terrified but I pull him after me and we run on. Zigzagging through the trees because now the shots really are coming.
We can’t keep going. Or I can’t. My head’s spinning. Spinning fast and I need to be sick again.
The woman’s still coming. She won’t give up. I could see it in her eyes.
“We have to hide,” I gasp. “I can�
��t run any more.”
There are twigs breaking behind us and Bear’s looking up, and before I can stop him, he’s climbing – disappearing high into the canopy. And I follow – even with my fear of heights, even without the climbing centre’s soft, spongy floor, even though everything’s moving – I clamber after him. Foot on branches, testing them for strength and then trusting them and reaching up for the next branch with my hand.
We’re twice the height of Violet when we see her. She’s breathing loudly and wincing as she stumbles on. Her left leg’s dragging. I don’t think I imagined the snap of her knee.
City bones break easily.
Not enough calcium. Not enough light.
Her eyes are working though – rolling round the forest looking for us.
We’re right up against the trunk of the tree, Bear above me gripping on like a monkey. I look up at him. I can’t look down anyway or else I’ll fall, or vomit, or both.
It’s an oak and it’s lost a load of leaves already, there’s not enough cover, but we shrink ourselves into it.
It’s hide-and-seek, like in our Palm House. Except there’s no glass around us. We smashed our way out of it. We found a ladder to the sky.
Violet fires the gun into the trees. I wince. Bear’s head is bent down and our eyes stay fixed on each other. We’re still, silent.
The trunk’s got a strange softness and a strange kind of sound or rhythm from within, like I’m hearing its heartbeat as my whole body presses against it.
And eventually, or maybe after just a few minutes, Violet turns back to the cottage. She’s cursing us – shouting out about drones and radios – but she’s going back to the cottage.
“Where’s all our stuff, Ju?” Bear asks nervously, once we’re on solid ground and I’ve thrown up again into the undergrowth.
“Back at the tent.”
“You left it?”
I nod. I jettisoned everything except Etienne’s GPS, which hangs down inside my jumper.
“What about Ghost?”
“She ran off.”
“The gunshots!” Bear shrieks.
“She ran off,” I say decisively and I take out the GPS. My head’s still pounding but somehow I manage to scroll back through our route. The GPS has a memory and I can work out where we camped, where Bear went missing from.
The moment we reach the clearing, I start throwing everything back in our bags. All I can think about is getting further away from that cabin.
It’s Bear who sees Ghost. She’s lying at the edge of a thicket. Her head’s down and there’s a circle of blood on her left shoulder.
Bear’s creeping towards her, whispering her name. “Ghost cat, Ghost cat. We’re here now. We found you. We’ll look after you.” His eyes are shutting slowly. Three long blinks. He’s learned her language.
“Juniper!” he says quietly, urgently. “Help her!”
Ghost’s bleeding. Help her.
I scramble in my rucksack. There are absorbent pads in our medical kit and I press one against the wound. It’s a bleeding hole and maybe I should be delving down to look for the bullet, or maybe I should be cleaning it out, but the blood’s pretty fast so I just press down. The soft pad against the lesion. To stem the flow.
It’s only seconds before the pad colours bright red and I have to change it and let her bleed out again into a fresh one, and a third.
It’s the first time I’ve touched her, touched anything this alive, this wild, and her tremble passes into my fingertips. It passes into my whole body.
I can feel her fear. Her heart beating too fast and too frantic as the blood runs out of her.
My tears drip down to wet her soft fur. “We should put something over her. To keep her warm.” The tremble’s in my voice now.
Bear’s on it immediately. He finds our blanket – the old woollen one from home that Annie Rose stitched back together whenever we found new yarn in the Emporium. He arranges it over Ghost, talking fast. “It’s good it’s her shoulder, isn’t it, Ju? It’s not her heart. Or her head?”
I nod. What else can I do? “We can’t stay here,” I say, my voice dull.
“But Ghost!” Bear looks at me aghast.
“Maybe she’ll follow us.”
“She’s hurt, Juniper! She won’t be able to follow.”
“The woman’s got a gun, Bear. She’ll come after us. She’ll be coming now. Maybe she’s strapping up her knee or something, but she’ll come back. Or the drones will. She’s called Steel. You heard her!”
If my head was clear, if I hadn’t drunk that stupid tea, I could think what to do. I’d know what to do. How did Ghost even get mixed up in this? In her world bullets shouldn’t even exist. Humans shouldn’t even be out here.
“Ghost saved me. She saved you too, Juniper. We can’t abandon her!” Bear’s yelling at me, frantic, horrified that I’m even suggesting leaving her.
Ghost has dragged herself deeper into the thicket and she’s almost hidden, camouflaged against the fallen leaves. Black and brown, like the markings on her coat. That’s what gives me the answer.
I take a deep breath, to pull clean air back into my body and help the nausea pass. “We have to clear the campsite, OK? There can’t be any trace left, of the tent or the fire or anything. Then we hide too. We can wait for her to recover.”
“Violet will see us, if she comes.”
“She won’t,” I say. “Because that’s what we’ll do.” I point at Ghost. I don’t crawl in after her, I don’t want to freak her out, but there’s another thicket nearby, a tangle of bushes or shrubs, and I climb inside it on all fours. Bear passes the bags in after me.
Once our things are hidden, I scatter leaves over everything, and then I crawl back to where Bear is hidden. We’ve spread out one of the tarpaulins and we put the space blanket over us.
“We’re like Robin Hood and his Merry Men,” Bear whispers.
I smile weakly. “And Maid Marian.”
“Ju!” Bear says, worried. “Are you OK? Your eyes keep shutting!”
“It was the tea, I think.”
“Was it poison?”
“Nah. She wouldn’t have radioed in to tell them to come and get our dead bodies, would she? I think it was just to make us sleepy. So we wouldn’t escape.”
“We did though, didn’t we, Ju?” Bear says, proudly now.
“And I got us an air rifle.”
“Huh?”
I point at the wooden rifle, which I’d shoved to the back of the thicket.
Bear gasps. “Ju! You took it!”
“These too.” I dig into my pocket and bring out the silver fragments, spread across my palm. I grabbed them from the bowl on the kitchen table as we left.
“She’ll be furious!”
“Yeah, well. I figured she owed us.”
They come when we’re sleeping. They come in my dreams. The low hum of them. I’m back in my bedroom, in our soft sheets, and Bear’s warm against me, his breathing low and snuffly. I can hear Annie Rose snoring too, in the next room.
It’s the noise that wakes me. Tears mist up my eyes when I realize where we are.
There are two of them. I see the dark shapes through the branches, whirring, whirring, like metal birds lit by their little red lights. Looping round the sky, looking for us.
I don’t wake Bear. It’s better he doesn’t see.
When Bear wakes me, cold, without our old blanket, the drones have moved on.
It’s dark and we creep out of the thicket. The blanket is still draped over the floor but the thicket is empty. Ghost is gone.
“Where is she, Juniper?” Bear cries.
“She got up.”
“But where did she go?”
“To drink, maybe, or get food.”
“We can wait for her though?” he asks quickly.
I swallow. “Not this time. We have to go before it gets light.”
Bear shakes his head and picks up the blanket, holding it up to me, desperately. “There’s blood. Ghos
t’s still bleeding.”
I look at the blanket. “It’s not much and it’s dry. It’s good that she’s up. It’s a good sign. She’ll find us, Bear. She always does. She didn’t save us so we’d get caught again. She’d want us to be smarter than that.”
“It’s dark.”
“That doesn’t stop the owls does it? That doesn’t stop the foxes? We can be nocturnal like they are.”
Bear glares at me. “Not all owls, Juniper. Don’t you remember anything?”
“I don’t want a snack bar, Juniper,” Bear says, staring at the empty trap. He’s shivering. His hair hangs wet down his back. It’s been raining all morning.
I sigh. “You have to eat. We both do.”
Bear takes the bar. Of course he was going to eat it. His stomach is crying out for food, any food, just like mine is.
“I’m trying, Bear,” I say weakly, sitting down next to him.
“I’m not angry with you. I’m angry with that man.”
“Abbott?” I ask, confused.
“That man you went to. Silver, you said. The pirate man.” I can’t help but laugh at the indignation in Bear’s voice. “He gave us a broken trap!”
“It might not be broken. It might be the bait.”
Bear grunts.
“I’ve been thinking,” I say, trying to sound confident. “We have to use the air rifle.” I haven’t tried it yet. I haven’t dared, not after Ghost got shot. She’s following us again on and off, but limping. She’s nervous of us now. Frightened of fast movements. Frightened when we talk too loud. I’m terrified of scaring her away all over again.
I can’t bear to think of losing Ghost now. It feels like she’s the only thing keeping us safe.
But I can’t stall any longer because Bear’s right. That trap’s not going to catch us anything. I don’t know why I’m even still carrying it.
I’ve been playing with the air rifle. I think I’ve figured out how it works. I’ve bent it back, like that woman did, and inserted a silver pellet into the barrel before snapping it straight again.
“We’ll find our own lunch, Bear,” I say, holding it up.
Where the World Turns Wild Page 14