by Natasha Ngan
Eyes still closed, Seven lay in his bed, content. Warm sunlight fell across his blankets. For a while, his mind wandered with bland, everyday thoughts. And then he remembered –
The girl.
Last night.
What he’d promised her for this night.
‘Oh, effing hell!’ Seven groaned, swinging upright.
Last night’s events came back to him in a flash of images: the White girl’s fingers curling into fists as she turned; the way her pretty green eyes widened as she saw him; her silk and lace nightdress (and what was – barely – underneath).
How she’d stepped closer to him, the sweet, floral smell of her skin unfurling in the air, and said fiercely, Then take me back with you. Take me surfing on your memory-machine.
What could he have said? No effing way? Seven wasn’t really in a position to argue, what with the girl’s father being, oh, you know, just Alastair White.
Anyway, one skid-surf seemed a small price to pay for getting away with the job. It was too much of an important one to mess up. Carpenter never had to know it hadn’t gone quite as smoothly as they’d planned. He’d have his memory. That was all that mattered.
But still. It was insane.
The trip to Hyde Park Estate felt like one long, crazy dream. Surely, Seven was about to wake up again any second. He couldn’t have made a promise to take that stuck-up North princess back to his flat for her to try out Butler.
He couldn’t have.
‘Well, you did, you complete idiot,’ he groaned, dropping back onto the mattress and covering his head in his hands.
12
ALBA
School finished early on Saturdays, which was both good and bad for Alba. Good, as it meant, well, less school, obviously. But bad, because it also meant more time in the house, and more opportunities to incite her mother. After yesterday’s events, Alba actually found herself wishing her last lesson would never end.
This time, she didn’t run to meet Dolly outside the school gates when classes finished.
‘Hi,’ she said sullenly, slipping her uninjured hand through her handmaid’s arm.
Dolly smiled. ‘How were your lessons today?’ Her face turned serious as she noticed Alba’s mood. ‘And how is your wrist feeling?’ She lifted her arm and inspected her wrist, which she’d bandaged afresh this morning before school. ‘Still painful?’
‘Not even a bit,’ Alba replied, forcing a smile.
She felt a guilty twinge as she lied, and not just about the pain. About the fact that she had said she’d slept well when Dolly asked her this morning, instead of telling her the truth about the boy and the memorium. She hated lying to Dolly, the one person she felt she could truly trust and confide in. But this might be just a bit too much. Alba couldn’t think of a way to explain what had happened without sounding like a total lunatic.
Oh, well, last night while you were sleeping I made a complete stranger – from South, no less – promise he’d take me back to his home tonight to surf memories he’s illegally obtained. I do hope that’s all right.
None of it felt real. Alba wished she’d thought to ask the boy his name, something to anchor him to her reality so he didn’t feel so much like a half-remembered dream, or a ghost slipping away in the night.
Dolly touched her arm, the corners of her lips tucking up into a proud smile. ‘That’s my little fighter.’
Little liar, more like, Alba thought grimly.
But no matter how bad she felt about keeping all of this from Dolly, she couldn’t ignore the excitement that had been racing through her all day. It was truly terrifying, the thought of leaving her house in the middle of the night with a boy she hardly knew the slightest thing about, especially as the things she did know – that he was from South, that he was a memory-thief – weren’t exactly reassuring. And she didn’t even want to imagine what would happen if her parents caught her. Yet alongside the fear was a giddy, rebellious thrill.
Alba had finally found a way to defy her parents. For the first time in her life she was clasping her hands round the metal bars they’d built around her, years and years of towering walls, and was pushing them apart.
13
SEVEN
He headed along the riverside path towards the pub where he was meeting Carpenter to give him the White memory. It was another sunny, cloud-blushed day, the afternoon air thick and claggy, making Seven sweat in his trousers and faded T-shirt. Overhead, birds circled in noisy clusters. Their keening caws cut through the air as they darted down to snap at the dead fish washed up on the bank (South’s, of course – North’s riverside was pristine, cleaned twice a day by South workers).
The path curved along the Thames up towards Vauxhall and Lambeth, shunted in on one side by the river and by grimy buildings on the other. Across the river – busy that afternoon with water-taxis, ferries and huge container ships from the factories – North’s promenades and glass-fronted offices shone golden in the sunlight.
As he neared a bridge, Seven’s heart began to thud a little faster. Traffic was at a standstill on the bridge, vehicles waiting for the London Guardmen in their red jackets to check their passes. This was the only way to cross between the two halves of the city (the only legal way, anyway). Southers had to have a pass for work or personal reasons, signed off by officials, but Northers’ IDs allowed them to move across the border in both directions without question.
Sweat pricked Seven’s palms. Even though they had no reason to stop him, he still felt as though the London Guardmen knew what he’d done. As though his boots were leaving behind glowing footprints on the dirty pavement, revealing somehow where he’d been last night.
Seven hated the London Guard, the men who ruled the city under the Lord Minister’s control. He hated everything they stood for, running the city as though their only job was to keep North protected from South scum like him. But he also feared them, and hating and fearing were pretty much the same thing in his world.
Just then, one of the guards turned.
He had a hand raised to shade his eyes from the glare of the sun. His gaze caught Seven’s, something snapping between them before Seven dragged his eyes away, heart stuttering. He stumbled on, not realising he’d been holding his breath, until he reached the pub and let out a hard puff of air.
The Bespectacled Wizard was a dark, stuffy place smelling of river-water and rotting wood. It slumped low on the bank beside the water, clinging to the underside of a small bridge. The river rushed by just metres away. Despite the blazing sun, the wide, low-ceilinged interior was grey with shadows, the windows so grimy they barely let any light through.
Seven moved further in, looking for Carpenter. He spotted him in a corner, sloped in a seat set into a bay window, looking out at the river. The cut through Carpenter’s eyebrow was more pronounced in the murky light of the pub. Today it made his expression seem a little threatening, as though the secret joke that usually amused him had turned sour.
Carpenter looked round as Seven sat down.
‘S,’ he said. He pushed a glass of beer at him, honeyed liquid slopping onto the already-sticky surface of the table.
‘Thanks,’ Seven muttered, though he didn’t touch it. Beer reminded him of the boys from his block of flats, the reek of cheap alcohol on their breath as they cornered him, goaded him, laughed and shouted into his face. It was the taste of their punches and kicks.
Carpenter leant back, one arm slung across the back of his seat. ‘So. You got it?’
Seven glanced nervously over his shoulder. ‘I got it.’
The pub was full, their voices swallowed under a rolling tide of rough voices and laughter, but Seven was still tense. He was just about to get out the DSC on which he’d copied Alastair White’s skid last night when the door to the pub slammed open, the crack of the old wood smashing into the wall like a gunshot ricocheting through the noisy room.
At once, the place fell silent.
Seven swallowed. He didn’t need to look round
to know who’d just entered. There was only one thing that could quieten a busy South pub so quickly –
The London Guard.
‘IDs out,’ growled voices from the doorway.
Boots, heavy footsteps sounded as the guards moved deeper inside.
Of all the times for them to be doing an ID check, Seven thought, it’s now, when I’ve got a stolen skid from Alastair effing White tucked down the front of my pants.
He must have been acting as skittish as he felt, because Carpenter leant across the table. ‘Easy now, S,’ he said quietly, before swiping up his glass and leaning back, taking a long drag.
Seven didn’t know how he did it. Carpenter made everything he did seem as though it were the most natural thing in the world. Picking up his own pint, Seven took a sip, then slammed it back down a second later, coughing as the liquid went down the wrong way.
‘IDs,’ came a voice behind him.
Seven had been coughing so loudly he hadn’t noticed the thud of boots drawing closer. Jumping at the voice, he dug into his trouser pocket, scrambling for his identification card, while Carpenter calmly handed his card over. There was a high-pitched beep as the London Guardman swiped it through one of their checking devices, indicating it as valid.
The guard tossed Carpenter’s card back. ‘Now yours.’
Seven started again at the guard’s voice. This was why he loved night-time, why he loved thieving: it was just him and the darkness. At night, he felt like the master of the world.
In the daytime, he just felt exposed.
‘Oh, er, yeah,’ he spluttered. ‘Here –’
He was cut off as the guard grabbed his card the second he’d raised it.
A heartbeat moment of terror. Then –
Beep.
Seven sagged in relief, taking his card back as the guard moved off to check others. The card was a fake one Carpenter had organised for him when he’d first joined his crew, with a false name, address and work details. It hadn’t ever failed him (yet). He slipped it back into his pocket.
‘You need to work on that, S,’ Carpenter said, raising an eyebrow. ‘Act suspiciously and they’ll think you’ve got something to hide.’
Seven grinned shakily. ‘Don’t know what you’re talking about.’ He pointed at himself. ‘I’m the king of not-suspicious. The model of calm.’
‘And the master of bullshit,’ Carpenter added.
Seven laughed, but he didn’t relax until the London Guardmen left the pub a few minutes later, the noise and chatter rising up again. He waited a while longer to be sure the guards weren’t coming back before pulling out the DSC from its hiding place in his pants and handing it to Carpenter under the table.
As it left his fingers, Seven hesitated. He felt a strange pang of unease, as though there was something terrible inside they should have left buried in the darkness of White’s memorium.
‘You know I keep my crew safe, S,’ Carpenter said, sitting back, the DSC already hidden somewhere on him.
Seven nodded. ‘Yeah, I know.’
And he did. He wasn’t lying about that. The trouble was, he also knew that nothing Carpenter did to look after the members of his thieving crew mattered if the London Guard found just the slightest break in their protection. They were criminals – the lowest even of those – and if Seven was caught, no amount of prayers to non-existent gods would save him.
Almost every skid-thief he’d seen caught over the years had been convicted through fast trials. Fast trials were only used if the prosecution obtained memories explicitly showing the suspect as guilty. Half the time these skids were confessions, freely given by the suspects. Well, not freely given exactly. Seven didn’t want to know what prosecutors like White did to obtain them.
There was only one outcome of fast trials: a guilty verdict. And there was only one outcome of a guilty verdict for a crime like skid-thieving.
Execution.
14
ALBA
Once again Dolly and Alba took the long way home from Knightsbridge Academy. Veering off the path to the house that led up through Hyde Park Estate, they wandered instead through fuzzy, sun-blushed fields towards the Serpentine, the lake at the heart of the estate. Long grass tickled their legs. High above, the sun was bright and hazy, washing the world in golden light.
When they got to the sloping bank of the Serpentine, Dolly laid out a blanket under the shade of a mulberry tree. The lake spread before them in a vast pool of pure, crystalline blue, spotted in places by floating islands of algae. Insects buzzed, hidden in the green blades surrounding them. The low growl of a lawnmower sounded in the distance.
Sitting down on the blanket and stretching out her legs, Alba gazed at the grounds of the estate. Everything was touched with a silvery fire from the sunshine. She wondered if it was moments like this that people kept in their memoriums; it’s what she’d choose to record. A never-ending supply of peaceful moments to dip into, when the world seemed to turn with such a simple, perfect elegance, everything calm and steady and right, and all the bad things slipped away, shadows melting under the sunlight.
‘Alba,’ Dolly said suddenly. ‘I need to tell you something.’
And just like that, the shadows were back.
Alba knew something was wrong from the tone of Dolly’s voice. Despite the heat, she felt as though she’d been dunked into ice water. Every muscle in her body went taut. She turned to Dolly and saw the sadness in her eyes.
‘It’s – it’s about you going to university.’ Dolly was speaking slowly, as though the words were sticking to her tongue.
‘Don’t,’ Alba whispered.
‘Your mother –’
‘Don’t. Please.’
She knew immediately what Dolly was trying to tell her. She felt it like a stone dropped into her chest. It was something that had always been a possibility, but that Alba had hid from her mind for as long as she could –
Her parents had found her a suitor.
They were going to marry her off.
Dolly’s lips tightened. ‘It’s not decided yet,’ she said fiercely. ‘I’ll find a way to make her change her mind. We’ll get you out of here, Alba. I promise.’
But Alba just shook her head. A hollow feeling opened up in her stomach. She’d clung to the knowledge that in two years’ time she’d be out of here. That no matter how bad it got, however much her parents tried to keep her within their cold, gold cage, each day that passed pulled her one bit closer to freedom.
Now they’d snuffed out her one tiny flame of hope.
‘How do you know?’ she asked quietly.
‘Your mother invited a matchmaker to dine with her today at the house. Mrs Archibald, from Fulham Grove. She works for many of North’s prominent families. She has … found you a suitor.’
The word suitor shivered down Alba’s back. She’d seen girls leaving Knightsbridge Academy only to be married away to boys (or even men) from North’s most powerful bloodlines, to ensure that the future of the city lay within the hands of the North’s elite. But up till now Alba’s parents had not mentioned marriage or brought suitors round for her to meet.
She hoped that they knew how much she wanted to go to university. Her father had to; they’d talked about it so many times. He wouldn’t do this to her. He wouldn’t snatch away her dreams.
No, Alba realised. He would, because her mother had made him. She must have convinced him this was the best path for their daughter, and Alastair White couldn’t say no to his wife. He did everything for her.
For her. Not for me, Alba thought, tears pricking her eyes.
Alba stared out at the lake. She wondered dimly how long it took to drown. If it hurt. She almost laughed – as if she had no experience of pain! – then put her hand over her mouth, tears blurring her vision.
She felt as though she were already sinking.
‘Your mother made all of us leave before they could discuss it properly,’ Dolly continued, ‘so I don’t know who your suitor is. I ima
gine it’s a good offer though. Your mother was in such a favourable mood after the meeting.’
Alba swiped at her eyes. She was furious with herself. How could she have not seen this coming?
‘I shouldn’t have told you,’ Dolly said, sounding pained.
Alba shook her head. ‘No. I’d rather find out from you.’ She snorted, though it came out as a half-choked sob. ‘I bet dear Mother wouldn’t have told me until the night before the wedding. Once she’d got me safely in handcuffs, of course, so I couldn’t run away.’
‘It might fall through.’ Dolly reached for her hand again, their fingers twining together. ‘We’ll try and find a way to get you out of here.’
Alba screwed her eyes shut. She felt like screaming. She knew Dolly would try – she knew Dolly would do anything for her – but she also knew her mother would never give in. This must have been what she’d planned for her all along.
In a few years’ time, Alba would be in a different kind of prison. The walls would look different but they’d still be there, black and towering and holding out the rest of the world as much as they held her in. Because, more than anything, by being married off Alba would never have the choice to define who she became. And Dolly would be taken from her and she’d be given a new handmaid, one who hadn’t brought her up like her own daughter or sister, who hadn’t held her hand and wiped her tears away and sneaked her food from the kitchens in the middle of the night, and always always always was there for her, every minute, every day.
No.
Her parents had controlled too much of her life already. Alba would not give them her future as well.
15
SEVEN
The house looked the same as it had the night before when Seven arrived, just before midnight, slinking through the shadowy row of elms to the west of the building. The marble façade glittered against the darkness of the grounds.
Seven stopped beneath the tree closest to the house. He looked out, imagining the girl inside her room, waiting for the clock to tick midnight to slip from her bed and come outside.
