The Boy I Am

by K. L. Kettle

  Keep moving. One foot. Then the other.

  No one’s following yet. No torchlight blistering the drowning, star-freckled dark. Still, no matter how far I crane my neck, High House is still in view. If I can see it, we’re not far enough away. Did you make it this far when you ran? The Lice didn’t wait for the light to hunt you down.

  “Jude, don’t worry,” Ro says. “We’ve got a head start! It’s the fog. We have to—” She starts to cough before grabbing my hand, pulling me into a run. We wind through narrow passages, between buildings a few storeys high. The sand climbs up over old windows and I wonder how deep the floors inside go. Are there basement levels like ours that scrape the earth? We pass a stone arm reaching up, out of the sand, as if it needs saving.

  In the moon shadow cast by the buildings, the air seems to prickle and hum. So that’s the fog? Pulling at the hairs on my arms?

  “Yes!” Ro claps as she reaches a large building, smacking a rusting metal door with a symbol painted on the wall.

  “It’s safe?” I ask as she tries to wrench it open.

  She nods towards the symbol. “That painting, those brackets. Fog-proofed.” Taking a deep breath, Ro shoves open the door. Heavy metal scratches at the floor beyond and there’s the smell of animals and sour air.

  “How do you know?”

  “Mum used to teach me all the tricks she’d picked up from the House of Exploration. We can shelter here while the fog comes in. Look.” She shines the torch closer to my arm and rolls up my jacket sleeve. “The electricity in the air makes the hairs on your arm stand up.”

  All I can hear is the blood pounding in my ears.

  With the door sealed behind us, Ro shines her torch down the corridor. An uncomfortable quiet settles. Breathing is easier but the stink hasn’t gone; it’s seeped into the bricks.

  “Look.” Ro takes a slow breath. “I know you probably don’t want to talk about it but you should know that Olive’s been telling people you and her did … stuff, in your appointments.”

  She’s bringing it up again now?

  My stomach churns. “No, I, we…”

  “I just wanted to say, if she comes after us, I’m going to fogging kill her,” Ro says, leading me further into the building. “For targeting you.” Maybe she’s afraid to use the word assault. “You know you can tell me anything, Jude.”

  “Yeah,” I lie again.

  I move past her, pulling my suit jacket round me to keep warm, feeling my way along the old walls. “Be careful!” Ro says. “These places are dangerous.”

  “I’m not afraid of the dark,” I call back.

  Ro still won’t let the subject drop. “I tried to tell people not to believe what she was saying. That you’re not that kind of boy.”

  “You’re right. I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “But it happens in appointments all the time. That’s what the girls say.”

  “Ro, you wouldn’t—” I want to say ‘understand’ but she interrupts.

  “So … she never touched you?”

  “That’s not what I said.”

  It’s not the answer she wanted.

  She looks away, disappointed, I guess. “Look, I get it, OK? It’s none of my business. It’s just…” She sighs. “Saints, I went on enough in our appointments about my problems. I could help with yours too.”

  How do I tell her?

  I want to explain but can’t find the words. Whether she believes any stories I tell her isn’t the point; the truth is, if I told her, she’d never get it.

  “It’s OK. Forget I brought it up,” says Ro with sudden bite before climbing up a stone staircase to the next floor, disappearing into the unfamiliar dark.

  I follow the torch glow to find her waiting in a room with faded walls. Once I’m inside, Ro shuts another heavy metal door rigged with a light above flickering a dull green. She locks it firmly, doesn’t look at me. When the light turns red, she explains, it means there’s fog outside and I’m not to try to open the door.

  “I’m not an idiot,” I say, which she ignores. She pushes a handful of candles from the bag towards me and clears a corner of the room to sleep.

  There’s an upturned couch, dusty, picked half hollow. I can have it, she says, trying to be ladylike I guess, but I prefer the floor.

  After spending my whole life sleeping in rooms with more boys than I can count, the idea of being too far from another person – even a girl – makes my insides curl. I lie down not too far from her. Close enough to hear her breathe. If I reached out, I could touch her hand but I won’t, even if I want to.

  She’s really quiet when she sleeps, so different from my brothers snoring in the dark.

  I bet that in the dorms no one’s asleep yet. Half the boys are probably shouting at Stink for going on about the ball. I’ll be one of his stories and he’ll be telling the new boys that the story is true. They’ll stare open-mouthed at the madness, the stupidity, the horror, until Father Jai cuts them off, because for all his blubber and bookkeeping he makes sure everyone is in bed by lights out.

  In the morning, they’ll go for breakfast and fight over the milk, while Father Mack from M-dorm takes the register and someone tells Stink the story of the boy that cried in the night so loudly he woke up half of T-dorm. They’ll carry on like every year. Except this time I’m the one who didn’t come home. And all my brothers have blind, clouded eyes. They don’t see the Gardener, blood-drenched, dragging me down, down into a burning, airless hole in the stomach of the world.

  When I wake up, I’m shaking. Wishing the nightmare away. It takes a second to pinch myself, test the room, remember I’m Outside.

  I’m not the only one awake. Even in the dark, I can tell Ro’s watching me. She’s holding her breath.

  “My appointments,” I ask the darkness. “Why did you come?”

  There’s silence for a while. I roll on to my back, stare at the dark ceiling.

  “Aunt Lorri,” Ro says. “She was friends with Walker. Last year, after Reserves, he was upset, told her everything. And Aunt Lorri told me.”

  She sniffs, her breath shaking in the dark. I think she’s crying.

  “Next day she asked if I could check on you. Said that Walker was worried about you because you’d lost your friend.”

  “You came to see me because of Vik?”

  “Kind of, yeah.” She holds her breath for a second. “Never knew Walker was grooming you, not then.”

  “You kept coming, though?”

  “I liked you,” she sighs. No shaking in her voice, no tears now. “Like you.”

  There’s movement in the dark. The tips of her fingers reach out; they curl against mine.

  “I’m sorry,” she says.

  “What for?”

  For Vik? Walker? The assault, the grabbing hands? For growing up without the sky, or dancing, or a family? For the auction? For Madam Vor? The infirmary, the needles, the vanished Roids? For the Chancellor?

  “For everything.”

  In the dull glow from the light above the door, I can almost see the curve of her shoulder, the end of her nose.

  “So we’re still friends, right?” I ask.

  Her hand pulls away. “Yeah,” she says. “Friends.”

  Morning heat hits like someone’s opened a huge oven door. Daylight sears through the glued-up window; it casts shadows into the dark corridor ahead. Before we move on, Ro checks to make sure there aren’t any Lice.

  We hardly talk as we move from building to building, always staying inside, following painted ‘safe’ symbols through the fiery morning heat that fills each dark and ancient corridor we find. I ask her to tell me stories from the House of Exploration to fill the silence. They were always her favourite. The art of listening, say the House Fathers, is encouraging others to talk.

  With each story, it’s like she’s trying to convince me life is better out in the desert. The last expedition is her preferred subject, recounting the ‘ten-year trek’ beyond the desert edge, to what t
he Saints called a sea. The history books she’s read say they found nothing except dust and the Saints’ leftovers: fog, rot and chaos. “But, but!” Ro’s eyes gleam. “Mum would swear there was more to it. When she left, she said she’d not come home until she’d proved there were survivors.”

  Ro’s voice gets higher, faster when she talks about her mum, like she’s talking over all the silence in the desert. I keep asking her to slow down.

  “There are green lands out there, like the garden.”

  Women know best, right? She thinks it’s my fault she didn’t get to kill the Chancellor. I know it deep down, but I don’t care. If I hadn’t asked her to dance, if I’d just let her plan play out, then what? She’d be dead, that’s what. And me too probably.

  We move up high, passing through one of the old covered bridges leading to another building. I’ve never felt such heat. She points through the glass dulled by wind and dust.

  “I swear! We can’t be the last, the only,” she laughs. All I can see on the other side of the glass is the thick fog knocking to get in. I can even smell it up here. Feel it scratching inside. Not sure we’re as safe as she says we are. Does it drive you mad like the stories say it does?

  “Otherwise Mum would have come home,” Ro insists.

  There was a hope that you survived, a hope the Chancellor gave me. It was a hope I was afraid to say out loud. We’re not that different, Ro and I.

  “Come on, it’s too hot up here. There are old underpasses below.” Ro throws me a flask of water from the bag before loosening the zip on her dress to let her skin cool. There’s a waterfall of freckles all down her back, as full as the night sky.

  We climb down through the next building, through rooms that hold nothing but heat and echoes. Sometimes there’s an apartment that looks as if the Saints have just gone out for the day. Shadows make the ancient paint flake and curl. I bet there are ghost stories out here that would keep my brothers entertained for years.

  A pinprick of pain spasms up through my heel; the soft soles of my feet aren’t used to leather shoes or walking so far. I drink in lungfuls of air, right into the bottom of me. Each gulp gritty and sweet on my tongue as we get closer to the unlit corridors stretching below the desert, gaping like the throats of a waiting nest of snakes.

  “Can we stop?” I ask.

  “If we keep going, we can make it to the old hospital by tomorrow,” Ro explains. “We can get a buggy, maybe supplies for the trek.”

  That was the dream once. You and me. We would scale mountains and fight monsters. The adventures we’d have. Gone now. Not dead. Gone. Is it the same dream if it’s just me and Ro?

  In the underpass, the Saints’ lights turn on with our movement, dark ahead of us, darkness behind. I look back. The knots in my stomach reach up to my lungs, tightening each breath. The further we walk, the worse it feels to leave you behind.

  We climb over rubbish abandoned in the tunnels. There are old pictures along the walls, almost completely in shreds, but in some you can see what’s left of the Saints – faded buy-this smiles. All teeth.

  My tongue squeaks over my newly bleached teeth. Maybe if I tell Ro what happened in the infirmary, about what I saw, or think I saw the doctors do to Aye-Aye, she’d want to help. Go back – get the others. Then maybe we could all go and find her mum together?

  “I know about the Chancellor’s vote, you know. I worked it out.”

  Ro stops.

  “Walker was going to tell me but he didn’t get the chance.”

  “Jude—”

  “What? She’s going to pinhead every single man and boy in the Tower, isn’t she?”

  She doesn’t answer.

  “I’m waiting for you to tell me I’m crazy.”

  “You’re not. Walker should have told you. Maybe he didn’t want to scare you. She’s been spreading stories about some men helping the Hysterics. Then there are fears of uprisings, alliances, fights, wards attacking their guardians.”

  “Stories? Lies, you mean.”

  “It’s not all lies. But … that doesn’t mean it’s right, what she’s doing. She has the whole Tower too afraid to think for themselves. But, if they trust her, she’ll make it all better.”

  Stale air sucks past as Ro takes a breath. In the glow of the old humming lights above, I can’t help but think she’s looking at me with pity.

  I need her anger. “You’re making excuses for her?”

  “No, but you have to understand how clever she is. She’s engineering conflict to stay in power, to keep them too afraid to leave, to make them feel safe, in control, as long as no one leaves. The fog isn’t as bad as it was – there are longer breaks, more regular.”

  There hasn’t been a break in the swamp Outside since last night. How often does it ‘break’? Every month? Week? Day?

  “And people in the Tower can see that,” Ro goes on. “The Tower’s at capacity. Everyone’s hungry, stressed. The building is creaking at the seams. They blame the Hysterics because that’s who they’re told to blame, but what they don’t realize is it’s mostly the Chancellor diverting funds from places they need to be.” Ro shrugs, scratches at her head. “It’s all about control with her. Manipulation and politics only go so far.”

  “So, what? We stop it.”

  “We can’t go back,” she says and moves ahead.

  I chase after. “The Roids were in the infirmary because of you,” I tell her. “I saw them; I saw what she did to them. That could’ve been me too.”

  “They were in the infirmary because they tried to kill you.”

  “And what about Vik? He tried to kill the Chancellor – do you think it’s OK to leave him? And what about the others?”

  And she pulls that face again, sort of angry, sort of sad, sort of like there’s something she isn’t telling me.

  “We need to do something!”

  “Saints, why are boys so stubborn?” she sighs.

  “Walker thought we could stop her,” I push.

  Ro’s green eyes burn. “You think you can stop it? On your own?”

  “No, but—”

  “Go back then! You think you won’t end up the same as your bullies?”

  Ro stomps up out of the underpass, scaling furniture, piles of dusty books, broken paintings of ancient places and people.

  Maybe she’s right. One boy – any boy – is not enough.

  The dozen or so Hysterics who attacked the ball were hardly organized but if there were more they could get more people out. Maybe Walker, maybe my brothers – Stink and Rodders and Woody. “What about the Hysterics? Would they help?”

  She stops as we get back to the surface, into another building. There’s less of a stink here. I wonder how far we are from the Tower now. I swallow, my throat desert dry. Underneath the serums and injections the doctors gave me I can still feel the bruises from the Roids’ noose.

  “The Chancellor doesn’t care what the Roids did to me,” I go on. “She had the Roids pinheaded because she could, not because she needed to. Like you said, it’s all about power.”

  Ro keeps moving, even though she’s gone pale.

  “I get it. You’re afraid of the Chancellor.” My eyebrows lift with surprise at the thought – never thought I’d see a girl afraid of anything.

  “And you’re not?”

  Leaving you behind, leaving Walker and my brothers, that’s what scares me.

  “The Chancellor wanted your aunt’s support on a vote. Aspiner mentioned a vote too. The Chancellor’s going to get every woman in that place to vote on whether to pinhead boys like me and she’ll get her way – no one with enough merits will vote against her. They’ll go along with it!”

  Never seen Ro so quiet.

  “The Chancellor was afraid you’d stop her. Not by killing her … it’s all those merits your family has. You could have stopped the vote! She’s won. She wanted you gone and now she can do whatever she wants.”

  The underpass has led us into a building with a large ground floor, t
he sand-dulled glass windows glowing with light even as a storm splits the heat Outside. No fog here. For now. Is this one of those breaks Ro mentioned? How long does it last? Will I get to see the sun without anything but air between us?

  “Maybe the rest of the women won’t vote her way.” Ro doesn’t sound convinced. The rain has died down. Everything’s too quiet now.

  “How long have you known?”

  “It’s … there’s just nothing left to do. Not without risking… Don’t you get it? I can’t lose anyone else. I’m not strong enough. She’ll kill you, or worse.”

  That’s what she’s afraid of?

  “I’m not afraid.” I am.

  My name is Jude Grant and I am alive, you say, almost like a curse.

  A wall of light, as bright as the auction house spotlight, cuts through a large, broken window. Dust flecks dance and spin. Who knows how long the fog break will last? I have to take a look.

  Through a crack in the glass, shimmering in the distance like it’s not quite real, stretches an endless spire of rust and dust. It seems to pierce the sun, windows glinting like the Chancellor’s grey eyes.

  “You really want to go back there?” Ro asks. We’ve come to the edge of the city, I think.

  “I want to find the Hysterics, ask them to help my brothers.”

  “OK,” she says.

  “OK?”

  “And then you’ll come with me? We’ll go and we’ll find the green lands, and my mum.”

  Who wouldn’t want to see the world?

  By the time the storm passes and we head out, my stomach has started eating itself and my brain is thudding with thirst. But that’s the least of my worries. Every second I’m checking the flesh on my arms for that telltale prickle of bumps. How long before the fog swamps us again? At the edge of the city, what Ro called the Melts, the sandy sides of the old buildings have dissolved in the heat. We’re moving as fast as we can for there’s less cover on the outskirts of the city. Ro has no clue where the Hysterics are. They move around a lot to avoid detection.