by Claire Merle
‘Why would they do that?’ she asked.
‘They said you were finding it hard to adjust back. That to buffer yourself from the truth, you’ve concocted a fantasy around your abduction.’
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Ana’s internal temperature seemed to drop; her blood crystalised. She’d come to clear her conscience, to crystalised. She’d come to clear her conscience, to assure herself he would be OK when she left the Community. A part of her had been hoping he would escape with her to the Project. Or that she would at least be able to question him about Tom’s evidence – whether he’d ever looked at it, whether he’d managed to hide the disc somewhere. But her father and whoever else was involved in this charade, had pre-empted anything like that by ensuring Jasper didn’t even trust her.
She had to find a back door into his mind; something to make him question the story they’d fed him.
‘What’s the last thing you remember?’ she asked.
‘I don’t know.’
‘Do you remember your brother?’
He reeled back from her and snorted. ‘Of course I do.’
‘How did he die?’
Jasper lowered and cracked his knuckles. ‘Why are you trying to make things worse for us?’
‘Because the truth mattered to you.’ She swalowed hard.
‘That’s why we’re here like this now. You were prepared to do anything for the truth.’
‘Stop it,’ he said.
‘If you don’t trust me, why would you want to join with me?’
He winced as though her words stung. His mouth twisted in an ugly grimace.
‘You and I are the same,’ he said. ‘We’re both damaged now. We belong together whether we like it, or not.’
Ana’s chest felt as though it was in a vice and the vice 352
was tightening. At least in Three Mils he was stil fighting, even if he couldn’t tel who the enemy was. This man before her had been clamped down, his wings clipped.
‘But you want to cal off the joining, don’t you?’ she asked.
‘I’m a man of my word.’
She leant forward, searching his eyes for a shard of the Jasper who knew where they’d been.
‘I was with you,’ she whispered.
His mouth puckered. His gaze hardened. He obviously wouldn’t believe anything she had to say about their
‘kidnappings’.
‘Try to remember. Try to remember what happened to Tom.’
Jasper rose. ‘I’m a man of my word,’ he repeated. ‘I’l see you at the joining.’ He stalked from the kitchen with an uneven gait. As he receded to the staircase opposite the main entrance, his head hunched into his shoulders and he began to lumber.
*
*
Ana spent the afternoon playing the piano she would soon leave behind. She’d reconstructed the melody for
‘Second Sight’ and now her soul twisted around Cole’s music, fused with it, until it was a part of her. Sadness and hope expanded inside her. She couldn’t wait any longer. Somehow, tonight, she would make it over the wal and find Cole.
Somehow she would make things right again for Jasper and Tamsin. She had to.
Behind her, the French window leading out to the ter-353
race clicked open. She jumped up in alarm and spun around. She blinked at a slim, agitated figure, bleary in the day’s brightness.
‘Nate?’ she gasped. The astonishment in her voice was only marginaly greater than the terror and excitement.
Nate’s eyes gobbled up the open-planned living area, the low bookshelves, the photographs and paintings, the sofas around the glass coffee table, and finaly the baby grand on the raised platform where Ana stood trembling.
‘Nate!’ she cried. She leapt the four-foot gap towards him. ‘How did you get here? What are you doing here?
How did you get past the checkpoint and the Warden?’
She reached out to embrace him, but he leant away, glancing shiftily over his shoulder.
Adrenalin tore through her blood as though it would cleave her open. Something awful must have happened for him to risk coming to see her.
for him to risk coming to see her.
‘Is Cole OK?’
He folded his arms across his chest. ‘You gotta stop looking for him.’
‘But he’s OK?’
‘Everywhere you go – Camden, Forest Hil – the Wardens are folowing you. They’re practicaly living with you.
Don’t you get it? You’re putting us al in danger.’
‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Nate, realy, but I have to speak to him. Please, tel him for me. I have to see him.’
Nate smouldered. She knew he despised her because she was the daughter of their enemy, because she lived like a Pure, because she’d brought the Wardens into their lives and driven them from their homes. She didn’t blame him.
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In fact, despite this, she felt enormously grateful – he was here.
‘Cole’s gone,’ Nate said.
‘Gone? What do you mean?’
‘He wanted me to give you this and to say goodbye for him.’ Nate chucked a coin-sized disc at the sofa.
‘Gone where?’
He shrugged. ‘Abroad.’
‘How? Where? For how long?’ The questions tripped over each other, each desperate to be answered.
Nate’s gaze fixed on her with a look of pure hate.
‘Just accept it,’ he said. ‘You’ve done enough damage.
Cole wouldn’t have been so pig-headed if it weren’t for you and that rubbish about a Glimpse. That minister Peter Reed was a total liability. But Cole was trying to be a hero.
Trying to impress you.’
‘Impress me?’ she echoed. Lila’s words in the bathroom at Forest Hil came hurtling back. He knew the time of the Glimpse was catching up with him. He split up with Rachel and took on more assignments because he knew you had something to do with disproving the Pure tests.
‘Please,’ she said. ‘Please. I need some way of contacting him. An address. Someone he’s staying with.
He’l be in touch with Lila, I’m sure of it. And when he does she can tel him I need to speak to him, and—’
Nate shook his head.
‘What for? You’re joining Jasper Taurel. Why make it worse for him?’
Ana turned her lips into her mouth and squeezed, trying to delay the tears.
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‘It’s not—’ She felt helpless. Nate wouldn’t believe her if she told him she had no intention of going through with the joining. That she was a prisoner here, waiting for a chance to escape.
‘How did you get into the Community?’ she asked. ‘Did you come over the wal? I want to go back with you.’
Nate’s look was solid and unforgiving. ‘Cole won’t be in touch,’ he said. ‘Lila’s gone with him. For good.’
‘No—’ Ana felt the hope she’d been clinging to for days, slip away. ‘No, he wouldn’t have—’
‘Wel, perhaps he thought the same about you. Perhaps he thought you wouldn’t have come back here. But you did.’ Nate was sneering now. He stepped backwards through the French window. ‘He’s probably starving on some cargo ship halfway to America by now. Al thanks to you.’
Grief puled Ana down. She sank to her knees, felt her ribs crush together as she flopped against the wooden floor.
The room spun. Something cold and hard pressed into her cheek. Her body throbbed with a dul, distant pain.
It was over. Jasper distrusted her and thought she was delusional, and Cole was gone. The only things that had kept walking through the white, barren haze, when al she’d wanted to do was lie down and let the mist claim her, had been taken away.
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30
The Joining
Time passed. Irrelevant. Meaningless. Just light inching across a wal as the world rotated away from the sun.
Day roled into night, night into day – the aftermath of a cloud
of gas and dust colapsing under its own gravity bilions of years ago, setting the world spinning.
*
A loud rap shook Ana’s bedroom door. She jerked. She must have drifted off because she was standing in front of her bathroom mirror, tap running, a large blob of foundation cupped in her hand which she didn’t remember squeezing out. Cole’s music played on her interface. Her father had given her a spare one three days ago, with the net access disconnected. Ever since, she’d been living and breathing Cole’s fusion music. The rhythms of her body felt as though they’d gradualy altered, synchronising themselves with the pulses and vibrations of melodies that made her crave and pine for him.
‘Ariana,’ a voice caled. A female voice she vaguely knew.
She looked up at her reflection and winced. An unnatural tan colour streaked her face. Her eyes were bloodshot, glazed. She looked sick. She looked like an Active Big3.
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Hurriedly, she wiped off the make-up with a hand towel.
Hurriedly, she wiped off the make-up with a hand towel.
A fist pounded on the door. ‘Hon, open up,’ the voice shouted. ‘Your dad asked me to come over. Let me in.’
‘Lake?’
‘Yeah, it’s me. Move it, before your dad gets his axe out and hacks his way in here.’
Ana stumbled across her room, tripping over plates with mouldy food and dodging a mound of dumped washing.
She turned the key. The door opened then wedged on a half-eaten box of cornflakes. Lake forced her way through, crushing cereal underfoot.
‘Blimey,’ she said, shoving the door closed. ‘Your dad wasn’t joking. It’s like the East Coast war zone in here.’
Her eyes turned to take in Ana. ‘Holy . . . Jeez . . .
Shite.’
Ana bristled defensively, but then she remembered her own shock at seeing herself in the mirror. She glanced down and realised she was stil in the leggings and T-shirt she’d been wearing five days ago when she’d spoken to Nate. That couldn’t be helping.
‘Wel this little baby is gonna be about as much good as patching up a stab wound with a plaster,’ Lake said, puling a blonde wig from her handbag and chucking it at the rubbish bin. She kicked aside a trail of clothes strewn in front of the bed and began pacing. She dug out a lighter and cigarettes from her giant handbag.
‘What you listening to?’
Ana shrugged.
Ana shrugged.
‘Do you mind?’ Lake asked, lighting up.
Ana turned away.
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‘So,’ Lake said, exhaling a ring of smoke, ‘you’re getting joined in three days.’
‘Not if I can help it,’ Ana said, flopping face down on to her bed.
‘Wel, that’s not what your dad’s saying. Either way, tomorrow you have to go down to Hampstead Community Hal and make your official declaration.
There’l be photographers and reporters around, eager for the first images of Ashby Barber’s abducted daughter. You go looking like that and the Board wil have you declared Active before you’ve got home.’ She puffed on her cigarette, bit her nails, flicked her lighter over and over.
‘Dad’l send a stand-in. He’d do it for the joining too if he could, but I guess Jasper might not join a girl wearing a coat over her head.’
‘Look, I don’t know what’s realy going on here. I don’t think you should tel me. Not if it might get you or Jasper in trouble with the Wardens or the Board. But you’ve got a decision to make. If you’re going to go through with joining Jasper in three days’ time, as your dad seems to think you wil, you’l have to face the Board and the media. You might have had a taste of what’s waiting for you from when it came out about your messed-up Pure test, but this is gonna be ten times worse. Everyone test, but this is gonna be ten times worse. Everyone wants to know about the kidnapping, how you escaped, how Jasper escaped, what the kidnappers wanted you for. You and Jasper are huge news now, Ariana. And the Board wil be watching your every move.’
Ana tried to muster up the energy to respond. ‘So let them watch,’ she sighed.
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‘Wel, you’d better stop moping around is al I can say.
The Board would just love to declare you Active after the way you and Jasper have humiliated them. Is that what you want? You want the Board to win?’
Ana felt a stab of injustice. ‘This isn’t about the Board winning.’ And actualy, yes, she did hope they’d declare her Active. Preferably before the joining ceremony.
‘Whether I join with Jasper has got nothing to do with the Board.’
‘Think about it,’ Lake said, snapping her lighter open and shut again. ‘The Board never proved your father altered your Pure tests, which means they had to admit they might have made a mistake. You’re a constant and now very public reminder to them of that. And now Jasper, who asked to be bound to you, who told them he didn’t care about your genetic defects and argued you shouldn’t be punished for their mistake, is rumoured to have had some kind of involvement with the Enlightenment Project prior to disappearing. There’s even speculation he wasn’t abducted at al. He vanishes for seventeen days drawing enormous negative media attention to the BenzidoxKid negotiations, and is then found wandering in the City amnes-ic. What are the chances of escaping, but not amnes-ic. What are the chances of escaping, but not remembering anything about what happened? What are the chances of both of you being kidnapped? Your stories are ful of bul-shit.’
Ana groaned. So much for not wanting to know what was going on. Lake obviously had a fair idea. Anyway, there was nothing Ana could do about Jasper’s involvement with the Enlightenment Project becoming public knowledge. She 360
curled up in her nest of bedcovers. ‘I’m through. I’m done fighting. I’l live in the City. It’s what I want.’
‘You wouldn’t last a minute in the City. They’d have the Psych Watch puling you off the street within a week.’
A sliver of dread coiled through Ana. She wondered whether her father’s refusal to cal off the joining had anything to do with what Lake was saying. Was that the choice
– the Community, or the Psych Watch and another loony dump? No, her father wasn’t thinking of her, he was thinking of himself, of his need to protect and control.
‘When the Board see Jasper,’ Ana said, ‘they’l know there’s no longer a threat. They’l forget about me.’
‘You’re the threat, hon. Not Jasper. The public aren’t about to forget you. If one test can be faulty, why not a thousand? If one Crazy can live in the Communities, why can’t they al? They’re backing you, Ariana.’
Ana felt a burst of peevish resentment. ‘The Board, the public, my father . . . Everyone’s trying to make me into something I’m not.’
Lake took a final drag on her cigarette, then tossed it in the bathroom sink where it sizzled and snuffed out.
‘Yeah, wel, the loser thing you’ve got going here – wow, I can see why you wouldn’t wanna give that up.’
Heat rose to Ana’s cheeks. ‘You’ve got no idea what I’ve been through, what they’ve taken from me.’
‘Everyone’s got a story, hon. But you can give people something they haven’t got. You can give them hope.’
Hope! She didn’t have any hope left, what did she care about anyone else?
But her thoughts flew to Jasper and how his own mind 361
had been twisted against him. She remembered the way his face smacked the ground when the orderly had dumped him in the courtyard after shock therapy; the bafflement and pain in his eyes when he’d started to come around.
She thought of Tamsin, imagined her friend’s attempts to stop the Psych Watch from dragging away some toddler and his mother, and paying for it with her future. And lastly she thought of Cole, on a cargo boat to the US war zone, branded a murderer for trying to uncover the truth, for seeking justice.
Up until that moment, she’d had every intention of turning up to her joining a total wreck, hoping the Board would declare her
Active. She’d even begun to suspect she was actualy sick. Despair had been eating through her like rot, consuming her body and thoughts so that she rot, consuming her body and thoughts so that she couldn’t sleep, eat or function normaly.
As she lay with her head stuffed in the bedcovers, breathing the same warm air over and over, something tiny and delicate unfurled inside her. She finaly understood –
whether the pain that could turn to disease lurked in the cels, the blood or the mind, wasn’t important. What was important was who controled it. Until that moment she believed it was the Board – their Pure test, their diagnoses.
But suddenly she knew it wasn’t up to them. If despair, grief or yearning was going to take her, she had to let it.
The paralysing fear she’d felt towards the Board, which had grown inside her for three years, began to vanish like popping soap bubbles. Lake was right. She couldn’t let them win. She wouldn’t. It undermined everything her friends 362
had sacrificed. She was going to have to go through with the joining ceremony, whether she liked it, or not.
*
The folowing morning, the day Ana and Jasper were supposed to make their declarations, Ana’s father left for work without mentioning her trip to the Hampstead Community Hal. She assumed he wasn’t taking any risks and would be sending the substitute as planned. Lake arrived shortly after ten with a score of dresses for Ana to try on and dye to return Ana’s hair to its original pale blonde.
As Ana tidied her room, the dye’s peroxide giving her a headache, Lake filed her in on the morning’s news from her father – the Taurels had managed to pul off a second joining ceremony on Saturday in North-West London, which meant she and Jasper were now booked into the St Johns Wood Community Hal under pseudonyms. Aside from close family, there would be no guests. And in an effort to distract the media, the Hampstead Hal joining ceremony would not be canceled.
Without the usual guests and after-ceremony party, Lake’s role had been reduced to fixing up Ana. But she didn’t seem to mind. Ana got the impression her joining planner would do anything as long as it paid. And there was a fair bit of fixing to be done. Personaly, Ana couldn’t bring herself to care about how she looked –
she tried on dresses and dutifuly checked her reflection, but she couldn’t see beyond her own heartache, beyond the grey eyes that resembled a washed-out, empty sky left after a storm.
