I sighed, drawn from my own thoughts. “All right. Does everyone want a story?” There was a chorus of assent. “Okay, then. This is a story about the Fells or as we now know it, the Fellest. Now, many decades ago, there was a farmer called Bill who kept sheep, and his parents before him kept sheep, and their parents before them kept sheep. He had a family and a black and white sheep dog called Rex. There were a lot of farmers like him on the Fells and on the day this story begins they all received a letter from the EuroGov.”
Some of my captive audience hissed and booed. I shot a quick look at the sealed off cab, but the inspectors went on chatting amongst themselves, so if there were microphones, they weren’t switched on.
“Bill’s letter said he had to accept a subsidy—that’s money—to have trees planted all over his land. Because the Fells were the place where the reForestation program—which was necessary to take all the carbon out of the air and save the planet—was to start.
“But no one in the world had any money, largely because they’d run out of oil. Not the USNA Bloc, the USSA Bloc, the African Free States, nobody. Certainly not the EuroBloc. Nor any jobs. Yet the EuroBloc offered Bill too little money to live on. So Bill can’t possibly accept this subsidy, can he? Not with a wife and four children.”
“Four! Four? Is he rich?”
“Yes, four, and no, he’s very poor, but people were allowed to have as many children as they wanted, in those days. Anyway, Bill says thanks, but I’ll keep my sheep. So does the EuroGov send another letter offering a fair price? No. They send a letter saying take the subsidy or else. In a much longer and more boring way, but that’s what the letter said. But can Bill take it?”
“NO!”
“No. The EuroGov is mad, he thinks, I’ll write to Parliament and get them to sort it out. So Bill and the other farmers write to Parliament.”
“What’s Parliament, Margo?”
“Parliament was a group of people who used to run the department back when it was an independent kingdom,” I explained. “All the adults would choose these people to run the country on behalf of the King.”
“Why didn’t he run it?”
“It was too much work for just him. Anyway, this was actually the moment when everyone discovered we weren’t a country any more, just a department of the EuroBloc.
“Parliament couldn’t do a thing, you see, and when they tried, the EuroGov dissolved them—that means they sacked them and sent them home—and locked up the King. And do you know what they did to Bill and the farmers then?”
“They killed them all!” cried Andrew Plateley.
“Not quite all, but unfortunately you’re getting close. Bill’s out tending his sheep one day when he sees this huge machine crawling relentlessly over the Fells, tearing up the ground and leaving rows and rows of saplings behind it.
“Bill’s horrified. The machine’s on his land, destroying his livelihood! How will he feed his family? He rushes back to his house to get his shotgun. He’ll put a few rounds into the machine’s treads, he thinks.
“But when he gets over to it, he finds there are soldiers with the machine and they’re shooting his sheep. Just shooting them dead, as they stand grazing with their lambs beside them…” Oops—Harriet’s eyes were swimming with tears.
“Bill loses it a bit. He heads for that machine—he’s going to stop it—he starts firing at it like a madman. But the soldiers just shoot poor Bill dead and his faithful Rex beside him. And when his oldest son—about our age—runs out to try and stop them, they shoot him, too. And the same happens to a lot of the other farmers, and the Fells are completely covered in young trees.”
Harriet was clinging to Sarah, crying. Rex and the sheep was more than she could bear.
“Then what happened?” asked one of the boys eagerly, though he knew perfectly well.
“Well, elsewhere, farmers had to take the pathetic offer to keep their lives. When the machines had gone, they did what Mrs. Bill did: they went out and cleared a few trees and settled down to eke a living from the soil.”
Sniffs still trickled from Harriet.
“Look, there, by the road.” I spotted some woolly shapes. “They didn’t manage to kill all the sheep, see, and today the forests are full of them, wild and free.”
“Sheep!” said Sarah happily, craning to look back down the road. Harriet brightened a little.
“Anyway, the story gets a bit happier,” I went on, when the others made impatient noises. “Eventually things improve a bit in the world and some people in the big cities have jobs again, and money to spend. Bill’s surviving son and his two daughters set up a mountain biking center, and their neighbors build a high adventure course in the trees and other neighbors make hiking trails.
“In fact, Salperton was luckier than many of the small rural towns that now stand abandoned, because Salperton could claim to be the Cradle of the ReForestation Project. Of course, they don’t mention anything about the massacre of the Fell farmers and their sheep in the visitor center. Or anywhere a tourist might set foot. But we know, because our great-grandparents’ generation saw it and thanks to the EGD, many are still alive to tell us all about it.”
My last words were heavy with irony and the bus erupted into boos and hisses of a completely different scale. I saw the inspectors look back and a voice came sharply over the speakers. “Quiet down, back there!”
Silence fell. Slowly.
It didn't last long, as everyone began to talk among themselves, discussing the reForestation and vilifying the EGD. It was better than the uneasy hush earlier.
I looked out at the passing forest for a time, though the stupid bars obscured the view. As though the Resistance would actually bother rescuing reAssignees! Sorting was pretty low on their list of grievances. Like most members of the Underground, I wasn’t too fond of the Resistance—didn’t agree with their methods, to put it mildly. But just then I wouldn’t have minded finding myself in an ambush, risk of being caught in the cross-fire or no. At least we’d have a chance.
But we drove on, unopposed. Jonathan sat beside me, lost in his own thoughts. I eyed him surreptitiously, not sure if he would somehow know.
I was looking at his hair, mostly—it really was like autumn leaves—rich, vibrant russet, but sun-streaked with a beautiful array of lighter browns and golds. His fair skin was lightly tanned by the same sun and his nose was smaller and better formed—less sharp—than Bane’s, his cheekbones and brows also less pronounced. He was probably more handsome in the classic sense of the word, but beauty really was in the eye of the beholder and I preferred Bane’s face.
“Little Hazleton’s a hotel, isn’t it?” I asked him, eventually. Well, I knew it was—Bane’s mother worked there.
He turned his head, clearly to point both ears at me, since his gray-blue eyes didn’t so much as flicker. “Yes. My parents are the on-site managers, so we get to live out there.”
“It’s supposed to be one of the prettiest hotels…” Oops, stupid remark!
Jonathan raised an eyebrow. “I wouldn’t know. I do know the streets are full of the scent of flowers and the sounds of wildlife; fascinating carved stones on many of the cottages, something to feel wherever you go. I can believe it’s pretty, whatever that means.”
“Have you…always been blind, then?” Could it be possible?
He nodded.
“However did you survive long enough to be born?” Those with the most serious defects were generally dispatched before they could even draw their first breath. Or just after.
His lips twisted. “I was lucky.” He tilted his head away slightly, as though listening to the other sounds inside the bus and I sought a safer question.
“Do you have a sibling?”
He gave a tiny, rather mysterious smile. “An older sister. Unfortunately she’s…officially dead.”
So much for a safer question—that meant there hadn’t been enough left for a firm ID—or to bury. “I’m sorry.”
He shrugged.
“Your older brother is…officially dead as well, isn’t he?”
“Oh. Yes. Officially dead.” I tried not to squirm in my seat. Always awkward to talk about Kyle, since I knew jolly well he wasn’t dead.
No, not true, unfortunately, I only knew he hadn’t died when everyone thought. He probably was dead by now. Most of those who faked their deaths and went to follow their vocation ended up dead for real. It was a long way to the Vatican Free State, across the entire EuroBloc. Still, we had it easy compared to some of the other streams of the Underground. The closest Islamic seminary was in the Arab-OilBloc and Hindus had to get all the way to the OceanicBloc’s Indian department!
I was still trying to think of a genuinely safe question when we turned off onto a smaller road running into the depths of the Fellest and then all too soon we were heading down into a cleared area. There sat the Facility, a grim, brooding blot on the forest-scape, its solar panels glinting ominously from the rooftops. Silence fell like a blanket over the bus.
Nam inimicus persequitur animam meam; collocavit me in tenebris sicut pridem defunctos—the words slipped unbidden into my mind—see how my enemies plot against my life and set me down in dark places, like the long-forgotten dead. Yes, it was a very bleak place.
“What’s everyone looking at?” Jonathan asked.
“Our new home.” My voice didn’t quite shake.
“Is it nice?”
“Oh, yes. If your taste runs to twelve meter concrete walls with razor wire and machine gun towers.”
“Oh. Sounds lovely.”
But as we drew nearer and the dreadful silence in the bus went on and on, he leaned closer to me. “As we go in, make sure you memorize any detail that can’t be seen from outside, hmm?”
Yes, Jonathan, I was planning to. Because I’m not giving up until they cut my heart out. But I just said, “And who would have any interest in something like that?”
“I think we both know someone who’d find it very interesting indeed.”
What’d Bane been saying to him today, since my unpleasant revelation?
There wasn’t actually a great deal to see, though. The gates were formidable metal things that looked like they’d need opening with explosives if you forgot the code and the concrete walls were also depressingly thick. And let’s not forget that razor wire, huge coils of it all around the top.
The compound was square, with a machine gun tower on each corner sporting bulletproof glass broken only by long gun slits. Desperate parents had occasionally done desperate things and the EGD didn’t take any chances nowadays. Plus the Resistance would go driving a truck of homemade explosives into a EuroGov target from time to time, just to show they could.
A sort of glassless window was set in the wall to the left of the gates, closed off by the thickest grille I’d ever seen in my life. A small hatch nestled below it, also apparently built to resist a direct hit from a bazooka—or perhaps a truck. As we passed inside the gates, I saw a little room sticking out from the wall behind the grille. Through the open door a guard watched us drive past. A guardroom. The hatch must be for the post. The gates didn’t look like they opened very often.
The minibus drew to a halt in front of the building occupying the center of the compound. The inspectors got out at once and stood around by the back doors, still chatting. I looked around without troubling to conceal it; everyone was staring.
The stairs to the guard towers seemed to be inside the towers themselves and simple walkways ran around the top of each wall, with extra staircases of their own. The area the bus had stopped in was paved: a parking area for those of the Facility staff senior enough to afford cars? Though with six month shifts there hardly seemed much point.
Gates on either side blocked from view whatever lay between that central building and the walls. A pair of cameras were trained on the main gate; another, mounted above that gate, took in the whole of the parking area. The building’s wind turbine rose from the highest point and everything was built of concrete and metal, everything.
The gates came together at last and the inspectors unlocked the back door, ordering us out. A man and a woman stood waiting. The man was blond and slender, probably in his late thirties; the slightly younger woman was plump with a round-cheeked face which should’ve looked friendly but didn’t. Perhaps it was the gray Facility uniform and the pistol at her belt.
The man was identically dressed and armed, and Bane’s enthusiasm for weaponry allowed me to identify the pistols as the latest nonLees—nonLethals. Bane had an airGun replica which was probably more dangerous than the real thing.
More guards waited behind them, also armed with nonLees. So that could be worse. The inspectors got us into a rough sort of line and looked expectantly to the officers.
“Welcome, reAssignees,” intoned the man, rather sardonically. His epaulettes were bigger and shinier, and he was perceptibly neater than the woman, his uniform pristine—though stuffed incongruously through his belt were a pair of leather gardening gloves. Actually…a second pistol holster nestled at his other hip and the butt protruding from that surely belonged to a Lethal.
“I am Major Lucas Everington, Facility Commandant and the boys’ warden; this is Captain Wallis, the girls’ warden. I have a few standard announcements. First, the internal guards—with the black trim on their uniform—are armed with nonLethals. If you are caught out of bounds and shot, that won’t hurt you, but I can’t promise your punishment won’t.” He glanced at the woman beside him, Captain Wallis, and his lips turned down unpleasantly.
“I am also required to inform you, just in case by some extraordinary means you manage to get outside the walls, the external guards—with the red trim—have real bullets and will use them. No challenges. Anyone in the cleared area will be shot dead without warning. You may wish to make sure your families are aware of this when you write to them.”
He smiled again. I didn’t like his smiles at all. What was so amusing about a grief-stricken parent being shot down like an animal?
“That’s all I have to say to you,” he concluded. “With luck, I won’t have to set eyes on any of you again for the duration of your stay. Carry on, Captain Wallis.”
The girls’ warden assumed a rather aggressive parade rest and barked, “Boys through the left hand door, girls through the other.”
Jonathan found my hand and gripped it for a moment. “Good luck!” he whispered, “I hope he saves you!”
Then he followed the four other boys or, presumably, the sound of the four other boys. My heart sank, but I’d no time to dwell on his departure. Harriet and Caroline were hastening towards the door and, frightened of the warden’s harsh voice, Sarah was clinging to my sleeve, so I led her after the others.
A guard swiped a pass card through a reader to open the door and inside we found ourselves in a stairwell that could’ve been stolen from a multi-story car park. A particularly grim and ugly one. We followed the guard up one level and through another card-locked door into a long corridor running the length of the building, though a barred gate closed it off halfway along. Big windows ran along one wall and looking through, I got my first idea of the layout of the place.
This building was one of two three-storied blocks facing one another across an open courtyard. The concrete stairwells at each end joined these to two smaller blocks, which filled in the short sides of a rectangular quadrangle. A beautiful little garden nestled in the courtyard—like that was going to have anything to do with us. The other three stared down in delight, though.
The guard directed us through the passage’s second door, also card-locked—the place was secure, no doubt about that—and we found ourselves in a cafeteria. Putting my bag down on a chair, I looked around. If you’d told me a cafeteria could be more utilitarian than that of Salperton Senior School I’d have called you a liar, but here was the evidence before my eyes. They hadn’t bothered to put anything on the inside of the cinder block walls, for either appearance or insulation. The windows were s
ingle-glazed, as well; this place was going to be cold in the winter.
Captain Wallis marched in, armed now with a clipboard and a handful of cards which she shoved at one of the guards with a curt, “Go allocate the bunks.”
The guard departed and Captain Wallis came and looked us over with an unfavorable stare. “Well. Get on and turn out your bags.”
Ah. The bag search. We took a table each and laid out our possessions. When we’d finished Captain Wallis prowled along, examining everything, while another guard went over us with a hand scanner—and just what was that supposed to find? Weapons?
“Not. Permitted,” growled the warden, confiscating Harriet’s hair straightener. Harriet looked dismayed, her lip trembling, but fortunately didn’t cry. Did they think we were going to use the hair straightener to burn down the building or something? With us in it?
The warden was already rifling through Sarah’s things, holding up treasured games and soft toys with derisive snorts. I caught Sarah’s hand to stop her objecting—she clearly didn’t like it at all. Who could blame her?
“Bah,” snorted Captain Wallis, consulting her clipboard. “So there’s two idiots, a brain box, and a vegetable, well, I know which one you are. Missed you in the womb, didn’t they?”
“What?” asked Sarah, but the warden ignored her and moved on to me, consulting her clipboard again.
“And what do we have here? Margaret Verrall, I assume.”
I didn’t say anything. Didn’t trust myself to speak.
“So! Hand it over at once.” She held out a pudgy hand.
“Hand what over?”
“Your omniPhone, brain box.”
I raised a scornful eyebrow. “I don’t have one. Anyway, they’re not allowed.”
“Don’t lie to me,” snapped the Captain. “You smart ones always try and sneak one in.”
“Well, then, I must be another vegetable.” I choked back a vehement denial of lying. Many an Underground member had come under suspicion after betraying so-called ‘excessive’ moral values.
Elfling (U.S. Edition) Page 36
