by Angie Sage
“I must fly back to my house now,” I say.
“Are you crazy?” Parminter looks at me like she thinks this is a distinct possibility.
“Maybe. But I have left a child there.”
“A child?” Parminter and her mama both gasp. “What child?”
I do my best to explain and Parminter looks at me in despair. “Maximillian, please. You can’t go back. It is too dangerous. And you are exhausted. You cannot fly all that way after a fly-lift.”
“Parmie, sweetheart,” her mama interrupts. “You must let Maximillian do what he feels is right. And if he is a Protected Person, then he will most likely be safe.”
Parminter will not give in. “But the Night Roaches . . . ,” she protests.
“I will be flying in daylight,” I say.
Parminter’s mama turns to me. “Maximillian, you must rest for a while. Sleep. I will wake you an hour before sunset. That will give you enough time to get home safely.”
I do indeed feel very tired and my right wing aches as though it is about to fall off. “Very well,” I agree.
“I think, my dears,” Parminter’s mama says seriously, “that it might be best if you all go into the safe room now.”
We help Andronicus through the gap in the wall and find ourselves in a small room with a tented ceiling. It is remarkably warm. “We’re behind the oven,” Parminter explains. “We can get out into the shop through a false wall, but that’s got sacks of seeds stacked in front of it. We’re totally hidden. You’d never know.”
Parminter and her mama fetch rugs and cushions, we make ourselves comfortable and Parminter’s mama leaves. I hear the sound of the hay bales being stacked back up and I feel bad. I have brought trouble to the door of Parminter now. I am, as Mama used to say, “bad news.” However, I know that Parminter would not be pleased if she knew I was thinking of Mama and so I try my best to get Mama’s voice out of my head. Andronicus is already asleep and I settle down beside him.
Parminter sits opposite, her knees drawn up to her chin, her lovely delicate wings, which have a soft purple glint to them, spread out behind her like a shimmering cloak. She looks beautiful. But also worried. “Maximillian,” she says, “you will come back, won’t you?”
“Of course,” I say. “But I must help the boy first. I’ll come back as soon as I’ve found a safe place for him.”
Parminter is not happy about this, I can tell. “But that could take days. Weeks maybe,” she says.
I do not know what to say. I have made everyone sad now. I lie down beside Andronicus and close my eyes, conscious that Parminter is watching me.
And she is not the only one. For there is also you, who are watching this sorry tale unfold in ways that I never expected. Yesterday I believed that I, Maximillian Fly, was an angel of goodness flying to the rescue of not one but two of your kind. Now I know that I am nothing of the sort. Indeed, I have been a disaster for my two young fugitives. Thanks to me one is now alone and terrified, locked in the attic room of a dark house sealed with tar, while the other has been taken away against her wishes by the very Vermin I brought into my home without a care for the danger it posed.
But I will try to make amends. I hope you will return with me to my house and see that I am doing my best to help my Kaitlin Drew’s little brother. Even though I confess, I would far rather stay here. But I must not think only of myself. Oh, how right Mama was: I am a selfish creature. I am a waste of space and bring sorrow to all I meet. But I shall sleep now. . . . I shall sleep.
Chapter 19
Buried Alive
P
It’s Parminter here.
Now look here, you young one who is watching us, I don’t know who you are or where you are but I am not happy about this. Not happy at all. I thought you were just another disapproving voice in Maximillian’s head but now he’s asleep I can feel you staring at me. It’s creepy. And this is not helpful to Maximillian. He has enough trouble with his mother, always trying hopelessly to get her approval, without him doing the same thing all over again with you.
What gives you the right to judge this good and honest person whom you have never even met? My Maximillian is a much put-upon angel. He always tries to make things right, so often to his own disadvantage.
So let me tell you how it stands right now, seeing you are still hanging around watching us and will not go away. Maximillian and Andronicus are safe—for now. Andronicus is lying flat on his back, mouth open, snoring at the tented ceiling, and my poor Maximillian is folded into his wing cases, asleep. But soon Ma will be back to wake him, as she has promised, and then I shall have to watch him fly away, alone and helpless to his dark and creepy house, where he has known so much misery—and I blame you. Yes, you. For some reason my dearest Maximillian thinks he has something to prove to you. Why, I have no idea. I wish you would just go away and find something else to do. Read a book or something, why don’t you? But you don’t. You are still here, watching, waiting for Maximillian to wake up so you can torment him again. Why? What do you want?
You don’t respond. I can see why it drove Maximillian to such extremes. Here you are, watching us, despite me telling you to go. I assume you are Wingless, for I have noticed that the young Wingless have a confidence that a young Roach lacks. I suspect it is a confidence born of winning the lottery of life—for, let us be truthful, no one would freely choose the life of a Roach. Oh, we make the best of it, but deep down there is a profound sorrow at our loss of what we might have been. So, tenacious young Wingless one, I will tell you Maximillian’s story, so that if you persist in shadowing him you will at least understand what has made him who he is. And I shall enjoy the telling of it too, for I love talking about Maximillian. So, are you sitting comfortably? Good. And now I shall begin. . . .
About nineteen years ago, Maximillian was born to a young couple who lived in the center of the city in the wife’s old family home. He was their first child. He had his own nursery at the top of the house and a nurse too, who later became a good friend of my mother.
Maximillian was a delightfully lovely baby. Once, in a rare and precious moment of confiding in me, he showed me an old, creased photograph of himself as a still Wingless baby, which he had found folded and stuffed into a gap between the floorboards. He had a few wispy dark curls, big twinkling gray eyes and the sweetest little dimpled smile. He would have been a handsome Wingless man, no doubt about it.
Maximillian’s mother was adamant that there was no “Roach taint” in her family or that of her husband, whom she had chosen for that very reason. However, her own mother had never told her that her twin sisters had been disposed of while cocooned. It happened a lot back then and I suspect it still does. There are many poor little souls buried in backyards, having obligingly spun themselves into their own coffins. It is traditional to plant an apple tree over them, and at the end of Maximillian’s yard you will find a pair of ancient apple trees that lean toward one another for support.
Maximillian’s parents were out at an important dinner when he cocooned. My mother’s friend, the nurse, watched it happening. She was frozen with horror. By the time Maximillian’s parents returned home, he was a little lozenge of shimmering gray silk, tough as steel. Maximillian’s mother was frantic. She took a knife to the cocoon and pushed the point deep into it, trying to cut away the strands. This is the reason, should you wonder, why Maximillian has only three upper limbs.
I suppose it was then that Maximillian’s mother realized there was nothing she could do. Coolly, she instructed the nurse to “do what must be done.” The nurse asked what she meant and Maximillian’s mother told her, very deliberately and coldly, “Bury. It.” The nurse refused.
Maximillian’s father was a good man, but he did not stand up to his wife. And so he allowed his baby son to be taken to the yard and buried alive. From the nursery window at the top of the house, the nurse watched Maximillian’s mother dig the grave while his father cradled his son’s cocoon and then she watched in tear
s as the baby she had loved as her own was buried in the cold soil and left alone in the darkness to await death.
You may not know this, but a cocooned baby is not killed immediately by being buried. Because they are in a state of suspension the lack of air does not matter, neither does the cold. But until the hard chrysalis grows beneath the cocoon they are vulnerable. They will be eaten by worms and rats, dug up by dogs, taken by foxes.
But that is not the worst that can happen to them.
Did you know that Night Roaches are created from stolen cocoons? Well, I didn’t either until Ma told me. She said that when I was a cocoon she was constantly terrified that a Night Roach would swoop down and take me to the Steeple nursery. Ma says that the Bartizan has found a way of modifying the little ones as they sleep in their cocoons so that they emerge with talons and compound eyes. And then they keep these poor creatures in total darkness so that they learn to see and hunt in the dark. As a consequence they lose all their beautiful pigment and turn as white as the blind worms beneath the earth. By the time they are teens they have become murderous cannibals, corrupted forever by the Bartizan.
The night that Maximillian cocooned the fog was late, and as the nurse stood at the window watching Maximillian’s mother and father walking slowly back to the house, she saw the very sight she had feared—the pale shape of a Night Roach circling like a vulture. She waited until she heard the bedroom door close and then she was out of the nursery, racing silently down the stairs. She was very brave, for a lone Wingless adult is easy pickings for any Night Roach.
She ran into the yard, waving her arms, and the Night Roach went off, to get reinforcements she guessed. Frantically, she threw herself onto the grave and began scrabbling at the earth, determined to take Maximillian away to safety. And then she heard footsteps behind her. She leapt up, ready to fight for Maximillian and found herself face-to-face with his father. One look told her all she needed to know and together they dug up the cocoon. Luckily for them, as they dug the night fog came down and they were safe.
They fled to the other side of the city and rented a tiny room in a ramshackle house at the end of our street. The nurse, whose name was Joanna, helped out in our farm shop and she and my mother became friends. By then Maximillian was out of his chrysalis and my mother said he was the sweetest, happiest little toddler you could imagine. She told me she loved to watch him jumping into the air on his sturdy little legs, trying out his baby wings. Indeed, Maximillian was the reason why Ma was not upset in the slightest when I cocooned—she knew that a Roach child is a blessing.
I suppose you are wondering how, after all this, Maximillian came to be living with his mother back in his old family home? Well, you can imagine that Maximillian’s mother was not pleased when she found her husband and the nurse gone, and it did not take her long to discover the empty grave in the yard either. She hired a Sneak and set about tracking the runaways down. It took a while and by the time she found them Maximillian’s father and the nurse were expecting a child of their own. In revenge, Maximillian’s mother got custody of her son, which was easily done, as even then she was a powerful woman.
And so, one terrible day she sent a Bartizan official to collect little Maximillian. My mother said she heard Joanna’s screams from here. Fearing a terrible accident, she rushed to help and saw the little Maximillian bundled into a Roach bag—a barbarous thing—and being taken away.
Maximillian became his mother’s prisoner. She refused his father any access to his son although I believe he managed a few clandestine visits when she was at official functions. They were snatched, miserable affairs and he would return home in despair.
But life goes on. Fearing his wife’s vengeance—for she was becoming increasingly powerful within the Bartizan—Maximillian’s father changed his surname to Drew and he and Joanna moved to the little house next door to our farm. They had three children of their own and not one cocooned, for they were both from poor families who had never been able to afford the modification.
Ah, the modification. You’re puzzled now, I can feel it. So Maximillian hasn’t told you why some of us cocoon, but most don’t? I am not surprised—it is not something he likes to talk about. He still feels a failure for being a Roach and disappointing his dreadful “Mama.” I shall explain. Maximillian has told you about the Contagion that destroyed virtually all human life on Earth? Oh. I see that he hasn’t mentioned that little detail either. Sometimes I think Maximillian is still hiding in his cocoon, afraid to look at the world around him.
So here’s the thing. About two hundred years ago Hope was just a normal city open to the sky and the world outside—and then, somewhere, the Contagion began. It spread fast and was devastating. They say you woke in the morning fit and well, felt a little feverish at lunchtime and were dead by nighttime, boiled in your own body heat. It spread like fire across the world but because Hope is isolated at the end of a long peninsula—and because we were lucky—the Contagion did not reach us. But everyone knew it was coming. And so our scientists began a daring experiment. Knowing that cockroaches could survive pretty much anything, they decided to introduce just a tiny bit of cockroach DNA into people, thinking that then maybe we too could survive anything.
It was an expensive process but people were desperate and most of the richer families tried it. It didn’t work. A group with the modification left the city and caught the Contagion. Others went to find them and they caught it too. So people stopped having the Roach modification and thought no more about it. Until the first baby went into a cocoon and a month later emerged as a beautiful new kind of human.
I will have to wake Maximillian in a few minutes, but before I do there is just one more thing I want to tell you, because you won’t hear it from him. It is how we met. His mother walked out on him just over a year ago. Ma has a weird and scary theory about why she went, which I am beginning to think could be right. . . .
Anyway, I first met Maximillian a few weeks after his vile Mama had left. I found him wandering along our street, painfully thin and so nervous that he could hardly speak. I took him back to our shop—I could tell he was hungry—and gave him a pile of flax cakes and some spicy vegetable strips. He refused to take them, but I told him it was an uncollected order and he would be doing me a favor.
Seven days later, when Maximillian very shyly walked into our shop, I have to confess I squealed with excitement. He turned and walked straight out again, and I ran after him. I apologized for scaring him. I told him I’d been frightened by a mouse. He said he assumed it was he who had scared me, as he knew that he was not pleasant to look at. I told him, quite truthfully, that he was very pleasant to look at indeed and he laughed as though I’d made a joke. I walked with him, trying to think of something to say and not succeeding. I expected him to tell me to go away but he didn’t, so I just stuck by his side. It was a long way to his house, right across the city, and I wondered why he didn’t fly it. It was only later that I found out he didn’t know how to fly. And that I was the very first Roach he had ever spoken to.
I was amazed to see that he lived in a grand old house on the Inner Circle. Of course it was falling to bits, but they all are now. We stood on his doorstep for what felt like hours. I hoped he would ask me in but he didn’t, so in the end I had to go.
After that Maximillian came to the shop about once a week and I would always find him a “lost” order or add more vegetables or flax cakes. After a while he stopped protesting and even began to smile at me. At last I was brave enough to ask him for supper and to my surprise, he accepted. We had many happy times eating flaxseed cakes and soup beside the stove and one day I found the courage to ask him if I could show him how to fly. He agreed! Of course he was a natural. I think that this was when he began to accept his Roach heritage.
I finally got to see inside his house when I took around some genuinely uncollected orders. Even then I had to throw a fake coughing fit and ask for a glass of water in order to get over the threshold. As soon as I w
as inside I understood his reluctance. The house was a squalid mess. It seems his mother had delighted in chaos. Maximillian had made little walkways through the towering piles of “Mama’s treasures” and he lived in a tiny, remarkably neat space that he had kept clear at the very top of the house. The only other island of order was the room in the basement where his mother kept her collection of Meissen china, upon which she had lavished all the love and attention that she should have given to her son.
Over the months I helped Maximillian clear the chaos. This was not easy, because although he is by nature an orderly person he could not bring himself to touch anything of “dear Mama’s.” In the end we compromised and placed all her things into the rooms on the floor beneath his attic; then I locked them and hid the keys. So at last Maximillian had the clean and tidy space he deserved—although as you may have noticed, he doesn’t believe he deserves anything. And he most certainly does not understand that his precious “Mama” is a monster who has tried her best to ruin his life. But I will not let her do that. I will not.
But now I must wake him, so I’ll be off. I just wanted to show you the Maximillian you do not see. Please be nice to him. And understand that no one can judge him more harshly that he does himself. That’s all from me.
M
I wake and wonder where I am. I blink to focus my eyes, and Parminter comes into focus. She is gazing at me with a very strange expression. I suspect I have been emitting unpleasant sounds while I sleep and I feel mortified. Mama always said I was a repugnant sleeper. I apologize for my noises and Parminter sighs. “There is nothing you need to apologize for, Maximillian,” she says, still looking at me in this strange manner. “And there never was,” she adds. “Ever. Just remember that.”
I nod, even though I do not understand what she is talking about. Parminter gets up and brushes down her lovely, shiny wing cases. They are very neat and well formed, with a perfect curve to them. And the soft purple color sets off her deep golden eyes beautifully. She tilts her head and asks what I am thinking. I deny that I am thinking anything at all and she laughs. And then very quickly, because I know she does not want to tell me, she says, “It is an hour before sundown. You will have time to reach your house before dark if you go now.”
