Chloe shook her head. Must be a trick of the acoustics; she was a good fifteen metres from them. She strode on.
‘I don’t get that one,’ said the first voice. ‘Her dad’s in the watch, but she’s friends with them.’
Chloe allowed herself a smile and continued towards her locker. People like that couldn’t possibly understand. They were the sort that would riot given half the chance, follow the crowd and not think for themselves.
‘I still don’t get that she likes Kepple.’ That was Ashley.
‘She wants to get into the Purity.’ She heard Kavi say. ‘Anyway, you used to like Kepple.’
‘Well, she used to like me, until … you know.’
‘Yeah.’
‘But if she wants to get into the Purity, why is Chloe friends with us?’
‘Maybe because she’s a good person.’
They went quiet as Chloe approached.
‘Hey,’ said Chloe.
The others nodded.
‘Anything wrong?’
‘Apart from the usual?’ said Ashley. ‘Everything’s rainbows and teddy bears. Just waiting for the day they find out my teddy bear has three legs and scales instead of fur.’
The school intercom played a jolly tune. They all looked up even though there was no point. The sound of the school secretary’s voice pierced the overwhelming quiet that seemed to pervade the place.
‘Ashley Crook report to classroom 3B. Chloe Dark to classroom 15A. Kavi Moorthy report to the School Office. Immediately.’
Chloe realised she had blocked out the thumping sound but now she heard two sets of racing heartbeats. Her hands snaked out to grab both Kavi and Ashley by their wrists. Neither of them spoke but there was panic just beneath the surface.
‘No,’ breathed Kavi. ‘I can’t, not again.’ She pulled ineffectively at Chloe’s grip.
Chloe could hear the voices of the students behind her. She knew they were looking and making judgements.
‘It can’t be anything to do with your families,’ said Chloe. ‘It would be one or the other of you, and not me.’
Kavi wasn’t listening but Ashley got the point. ‘Kepple must have talked. Must be about the fight this morning.’
‘She wouldn’t,’ said Chloe but she was suddenly unsure. ‘Look we have to go. I’ll take Kavi to the office, it’s on my way—’
‘Sort of,’ said Ashley.
‘—yeah, well, I’ll be late.’
* * *
She was about five minutes late but she had sneaked a peak into the school office, and seen Kavi’s mum. Whatever it was, it was not about S.I.D infections. And when she arrived at 15A she was not surprised to see her parents sitting by the wall.
There was a man standing at the main window across the room, looking out. She recognised him immediately as DI Mitchell; he was famous, which meant the other man was DS Yates. She was very confused: What could she have to do with the best freak killers on the Manchester force?
‘Mum?’
‘It’s all right, dear—’
‘Please, Mrs Dark,’ said Yates. ‘We require your presence to interview your daughter, but she is old enough to answer for herself.’
Her mother sat back, her eyes filled with worry. Chloe gave her a smile.
‘Miss Dark,’ said Yates. ‘Please take a seat.’
He indicated a chair in the middle of the room. The rest of the classroom had been cleared with furniture stacked along the walls. If anything looked right for an inquisition, this was it. The room itself was used for the Purity lessons and there were S.I.D information posters on the walls, like the ones in the infirmary.
Chloe sat. The chair was for younger students and a little small.
‘We just want to ask you a few questions, Miss Dark—can I call you Chloe?’
She nodded and he smiled. It was the smile of a TV presenter.
‘So, Chloe, you know Melinda Vogler?’
‘Yes, I know her.’
‘And when was the last time you saw her?’
Chloe frowned at the curious question. He must know exactly when she had last seen Melinda. The truth hit her like a brick and she gasped. ‘She’s disappeared, hasn’t she? Like the others.’
There was a movement from the man by the window but he didn’t turn. ‘What makes you say that?’
‘You’re DI Mitchell.’
He turned. Chloe could see he was in his fifties at least. He had been a policeman before the plague. Yates stood up. ‘No photographs, and no autographs.’
Chloe did not miss the look that flashed from Mitchell to Yates, but she got the strong impression Yates did not care.
‘What makes you think she’s disappeared, Miss Dark?’ repeated Mitchell.
‘Because you know the last time I saw Melinda. It’s in the riffy records.’
‘RFID archive,’ said Yates.
‘But if you’re asking then you don’t know where she is right now and the only way that can be true is if she’s no longer broadcasting.’ Chloe’s breath caught in her throat. ‘She’s not dead is she?’
Her mother gasped and, in the corner of her eye, she saw her father put his arm round her.
Yates glanced at Mitchell, who paused for a moment as if deciding which version of the truth would be right in the circumstances. ‘Not as far as we know.’
Chloe breathed out and looked Mitchell in the eye. ‘You want to know if she was acting strange or different?’
‘I take it she was.’
Chloe hesitated, gathering her thoughts. ‘She was sort of withdrawn, I suppose. She said she was going to the doctor. I knew there was something. I should’ve talked to her.’
‘When you say ‘withdrawn’ can you be a little more precise?’
‘She wasn’t talking so much. Didn’t take part at all, really. Like when you’ve done something really bad and you’re scared you’re going to get found out.’
‘And what do you think she might have done?’
Chloe sighed and when she replied she was almost talking to herself. ‘I don’t know. I should have asked her. I should have talked to her. I might have stopped it.’ She looked up and stared at Mitchell again. ‘You have to find her.’
He shrugged. ‘It’s not my case.’
‘But you’re the best.’
Mitchell’s stern face cracked into a smile. ‘Tell that to my superior.’ He turned back to look out the window at the school car park and a distant line of trees.
Yates got up from his chair. ‘That’s all for now, Mr and Mrs Dark, Chloe.’
He ushered them out into the corridor then turned to Chloe. ‘Ever thought of joining the police force, Miss Dark?’
‘No, I’m joining the Purity,’ she said.
Yates’s face fell. ‘Seriously?’
Chloe frowned. ‘Yes, DS Yates, seriously. Someone has to protect the world.’
8
Ellen
Ellen Lomax pushed her trolley around the shop with the wire shopping basket balanced precariously on the top of it. A single fragment of red plastic was the only memory of the handle it had once had. She wandered down the aisles under the flickering of the fluorescent tubes that remained. Most of the shelves were empty and had been for so long that the labels, for what they should have carried, had been removed.
She remembered when supermarkets had been stacked to overflowing with goods, the small ones cramming it all in to their limited shelf space. But not anymore.
It was true that nowadays the variety of items available was increasing slowly. But most of them were forbidden to her because, as a woman on her own with no job, she did not qualify. Rationing was still in force and only those with spare money got to have the limited range of luxuries.
The rations were supposed to be enough for one person but she was still starving most of the time.
She reached the checkout. It was the boy today, born at the same time as her son, she supposed, but luckier because here he sat doing a job that required minimal effort. She stood in the rou
ghly painted checkout circle and waited while the boy finished reading something on the screen. Mrs Lomax remembered smartphones. No one had those, but there were terminals enough for those who rated them.
The boy—his name tag said he was Carl—ensured she and the basket were inside the circle and pressed a button. Something beeped.
‘You got too much,’ he squinted at the screen, then looked up. ‘Two tins of meat. Should be one.’
Mrs Lomax hesitated. ‘I have some cash.’
‘I can’t take cash.’
She waited and watched the thoughts running through his head.
‘I’ll get Mr James.’
Mr James took two minutes to arrive, saw who was at the checkout, and sent the boy into the back. He removed the tin of meat from Mrs Lomax’s basket and rescanned. There was a gentle and reassuring beep from the machine.
Mrs Lomax fished around in her bag and pulled out an old embroidered purse. She simply handed it to Mr James without a word. He opened it, removed most of the contents, and handed the purse back along with the tin of meat.
Not a word passed between them. Mrs Lomax transferred her purchases to her trolley bag and left, trailing it behind her.
* * *
It was dark by the time she reached her street. It was not well-populated, less than one in ten of the houses had people living in them. This was both good and bad. She appreciated having some people around; it made the place a little safer, but there were more eyes to pry. Including the twitching curtain across the street as she made her way up the weed-covered path to her door. She unlocked it and pushed her way into the darkness beyond.
She did not turn the lights on. There was a basic entitlement to power but she preferred to store it up until she really needed it in winter. Her eyes adjusted slowly. She lit the candle on the table. It provided enough light to unpack the shopping and put it away. There was more cupboard space than she would ever need again.
The two tins of meat would have to last the week but, as long as she was careful, it would be enough.
She glanced up. A dark form stood in the doorway. She had not heard him arrive, but then she never did. The threadbare hoodie he owned, that she had repaired countless times, was pulled up over his head, and not even the flickering light from the candle penetrated the shadows beneath it.
‘Hello, Jason, had a quiet day?’
She did not expect an answer and did not get one. She got the can-opener from a drawer and attacked the first tin. It opened easily enough. Jason stood and watched.
Using a knife she retrieved from a drawer, she dug out the slab of cooked meat and let it drop onto a plate. Two tins for the two of them for the week. Well, those in power claimed that one tin was sufficient for one person, so two ought to be enough.
She measured off the days on its surface and sliced off two pieces of roughly equal size. They had some carrots left over from the previous week and she put those out on side plates. She could have used dinner plates but it made the meal look even smaller than it was.
Finally she fetched a couple of forks—there was no need for a knife—and placed one plate and fork in front of her chair and the other at the other setting. There had been four chairs for the kitchen table but one was in Jason’s room while another had been burnt as firewood last year during the worst of the freeze.
She sat down, looked up at Jason, still standing in the doorway, and waited.
‘Jason?’ she said after long moments passed. He moved with sudden swiftness, the chair scraped on the stone tiles, and he was sitting there. His face was still in shadow and she realised he had moved the candle. He could be so quick when he wanted.
She picked up her fork and cut off a chunk of meat with the side of it.
‘I went to see your dad,’ she said. ‘I gave him your love.’
She put the meat in her mouth and glanced nervously at him. She caught a glimpse of something moving in the shadow of the hood. She forced her gaze back to her plate. Of course she knew what he looked like; she had given birth to him. She should be used to his strangeness but he had hidden his face even from her for so many years now she could only imagine what he looked like.
‘You should eat,’ she said. ‘It’s good.’ But he didn’t; he just sat there.
‘You must eat, Jason. I know it’s not much but it’s enough.’
And if he ate perhaps he would stop going outside. She did not think he understood the terrors she went through whenever he left, and he had been doing it increasingly in recent months.
She broke the soft, tinned carrot in half and put it in her mouth. In the blink of an eye he was standing again, the food untouched on his plate. His hand moved in a blur and there was a metallic clatter as coins dropped on to the table.
Then he was gone. She heard the tell-tale creaks of the flooring as he went up the stairs and into his room. He did not shut his bedroom door quietly.
Jason
He paused for a moment in the middle of his bedroom. He could not bear to see his mother wasting away. Better she had the food. He knew she would pretend to leave it for him for a while. Then she would convince herself that she had better eat it. Once she had, she would feel guilty about it. But that guilt would not stop her from doing it again.
It wasn’t that he wasn’t hungry. He was always hungry. It had been years since he had eaten all the bugs in the house. Occasionally a spider would come in from the outside, but it never lasted long.
Likewise all the empty houses nearby. He had eaten bugs when he was a baby—once he had been able to get about on his own—but when he realised how much it upset his mother he had stopped doing it with her around. That had lasted until he was about thirteen but then the hunger had really kicked in. He had to find another source.
Rats were easy to catch—for him—but he was human enough to dislike eating them on principle, and certainly not raw. And, to tell the truth, he hated killing animals. While eating bugs and earthworms came naturally to him, anything bigger was just not on his radar. The local cats and dogs were safe from his depredations. And it wasn’t that he didn’t like proper food.
So he resorted to stealing food wherever he could find it. He knew what the Purity would do to him if they found him, let alone ordinary people. So he was as careful as he could be, and for Jason Lomax being careful was an easy skill to acquire.
‘Don’t go, Jason, please!’
He had heard her coming up the stairs, of course, but he had locked the door.
‘It’s not safe!’
She tried the door handle. They went through this ritual almost every day now.
Jason put one foot on the chair and then the other, tightening the laces on his battered trainers. He would have to see about getting something new soon. If he went to another part of the town he would be able to steal clothes without leading anyone back here.
‘Please don’t. Your father wouldn’t want you to go. If you can’t do it for me, do it for him...’
She pulled that argument out once each month, after she had been to the Chapel of Remembrance. Jason had been less than a month old when his father had died. He had never been to the chapel. All he had seen was that one old photograph his mother still had. It didn’t mean anything to him.
‘I saw a girl being kidnapped today: the one in the news.’
He stopped then shrugged. He picked up the kitchen knife he had honed into a dagger and slipped it into the makeshift plastic sheath that had once held a toy sword.
‘They know I was there,’ she said. ‘They’ll interview me. They might search.’
All the more reason not to be here. His mother had a riffy but he did not because, as far as the rest of the world was concerned, he had died with his father. He glanced around. If they did a DNA check they would know someone lived here but beyond that the room looked much the same as it always had. He had not been part of the real world, and had not decorated his room with anything modern.
He unlocked the door and opened it. There was
no light but he could see her perfectly well; it was bright lights he did not like. He did not bother slowing himself down this time; he only did it for his mother’s sake normally. He was at the window in a moment, unlatched it and glanced out. It took him moments to satisfy himself no one was there to see him as he climbed out and leapt down to the ground.
He heard his mother closing it behind him.
9
Dog
In some ways Dog liked the night. Everyone else in world saw things in colour, he only saw shades of grey, but at night it was the same for everyone—and he had good night vision.
On the other hand he really was a creature of daylight and preferred to spend the nights asleep. As long as he could find somewhere safe; if not it was impossible for him to even close his eyes. Something inside him forced him to stay alert.
That was one reason he stayed with Mendelssohn, although he was seldom allowed to stay the night. The other was the sense of belonging, because being a part of something filled a need. Then there was Delia, another reason he liked to stay, and the reason he wasn’t allowed to.
Dog bounded over a fence and into a back garden. This one was well-kept. Into the next—abandoned. His ears pricked as he heard a dog bark but it wasn’t nearby. Mr Mendelssohn’s rendezvous location coincided with some journey or other that his employer needed to make. Riffy implants didn’t work inside metal boxes—and that’s what a car was—but when someone got in a car the monitoring system tied them together and the car was tracked instead.
Mr Mendelssohn might run illicit activities but he had a riffy and was on the grid. His route had to have a reason; stopping had to have a reason. No one expected that every person’s activities were monitored, but the records could be checked.
Dog leapt up to the top of a high fence and jumped down the other side into a back alley. He had already smelled the cat. ‘Boo!’ he said as he landed beside it. It scrammed down the passageway as if the hounds of hell were on its tail. Dog laughed quietly. He didn’t like cats.
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