by Piers Torday
I can imagine. A prison. An animal killing ground.
She shakes her head, as if she can guess my thoughts.
‘Like nothing you could even begin to imagine, she said. Not to do with the virus or a cure. She said Stone was building something in secret, and the world had to know about it.’
The wind whips down the river.
‘Then, one day – she went to work and never came back.’
I spread my arms out. And?
‘And that’s it. I never saw her again. They came to take me away to a school like yours, but I ran away on my bike. I learned to live on the streets, until Littleman found me. He had some computers, I had the bike, and so … That’s how the gang started.’ She gives a short sigh, like she doesn’t want to let it out but keep it tight inside her. ‘Not all stories end in the happy way yours did, you know.’
I’m not sure mine has ended. Right now it doesn’t feel that happy either. But I try to give her a hug anyway. She scowls and pulls away to peer over the walkway, where we have a direct view of the Four Towers’ main entrance.
With our binoculars we watch Facto vans trundle in and out of the gates, a red and white security barrier going up and down to let them in, up and down, up and down … I rub my eyes to try and stay awake.
Then the trucks stop coming and going. There is silence down on the street below. All we can hear is the wind ruffling the water, the distant hum of the city and an occasional angry voice in my rucksack.
*I say! Are we there yet? The mouse and I are allies, but I cannot guarantee how much longer that will last in these conditions.*
*Be patient, General,* I say. *I’ll let you know when it’s safe to come out.*
Littleman insisted we go on our own to avoid attracting any attention, and refused to let the wolf-cub or stag come with us. But he didn’t know about the two secret passengers in Polly’s bag.
We huddle behind the wall a bit longer, Aida noting down the times the trucks enter and leave, scanning the entire perimeter fence through her binoculars for any weak spot, any unlit or unwatched point we could make our target.
Then she touches my arm. ‘Wait – can you hear that?’
I shake my head. For once I can’t hear anything.
‘Listen. Like a tapping.’
And then I can. A very faint tap-tap-tapping out in the darkness. I shrug. It’s probably the wind from the river, rattling the fences.
‘I think it coming from here,’ she says.
I listen some more. It does now seem to be coming from around here. Perhaps a loose board over a door then.
Her hand tightens around the prod dangling from her belt. ‘It getting closer.’
She’s right. It is.
A tap-tap-tapping across concrete.
A tapping that is coming up the stairwell, step by step.
I try not to listen to my heart beginning to pound in my chest. Aida stands up, brandishing her prod, and I grip mine as we face the stairs. The tapping stops, but whatever is making the noise is still shrouded in shadow.
‘Show yourself,’ challenges Aida. ‘We not afraid of you.’
There is a pause, the sound of rustling cloth, another faint tap.
‘Oh, excusing me,’ says a cracked foreign voice. ‘But you should be afraid, girl-childrens. Very afraid indeed.’
Like a cold hand has reached out from the dark and squeezed my heart tight, I realize who it is. I try to warn Aida, but too late.
Crook-backed, stepping out from the shadows on not one, not two, but four crutches now, like a monster spider with a white human face –
Captain Skuldiss.
Selwyn Stone’s chief culler, the man I thought the stag had killed at the battle of the Culdee Sack, stands before us living and breathing.
Aida fires a fizzing electric charge from her prod, but with a flick of his crutch Skuldiss sends her weapon flying over the parapet. I hear hurried boot steps and clanking belts behind us and whirl round to see the other end of the walkway filled with masked cullers, dart guns raised.
Aida steps back towards me, reaching out for my hand.
Skuldiss leers at us. I can see now that his legs, broken after the stag flung him in the air, have been replaced by metal poles, and he still leans on his original crutches. His face is scratched and scarred, but otherwise as pale as ever.
‘Hello again, boy-childrens,’ he says. ‘You like magic tricks? Oh, good. My first one, rising from the dead!’ He bends what remains of his body in a stiff bow.
All I remember is the cullers dragging his limp and bloody body away after the stag tossed him in the air, then their van reversing at speed out of the Culdee Sack …
‘And for my next trick –’ He raises his right crutch. A telescopic arm shoots out, with pincers on the end. They snap open and shut like a robotic crab. ‘I believe you have something for me.’
‘It’s a trap,’ says Aida dully.
I raise my prod. ‘No!’
‘Oh yes, yes, YES, I’m afraid!’ he giggles. ‘I haven’t been reading a good book in ages.’ And with a mechanical whine, the crutch arm extends until it is touching my chest. ‘How about … yes, let me see …’ and his eyes narrow into slits. ‘Maybe you have one in your bags you would like to be sharing?’
His pincers grab my wrist, squeezing it tight till I drop my prod with a clatter. But he doesn’t let go. ‘Now, boy-childrens,’ says Skuldiss, as he begins to twist my arm around, ‘give me the Iris, or I will snap your jolly arm clean out of its socket.’
Aida looks at me. ‘Don’t give it to him, Kester. It’s not worth it.’
‘Oh really, girl-childrens?’ asks Captain Skuldiss, the head of the cullers, as he twists my wrist some more, sending a wave of agony up my arm that makes me gasp for breath and my stomach heave.
I don’t think I have any option. I hold up my free hand and feel the pincers soften their grip.
‘What you doing?’ asks Aida in disbelief. ‘Don’t give it them. They destroyed everything. They monsters.’
I know. But she has to trust me, whether she likes it or not. Not taking my eyes off her, I stretch out with my free arm to put Polly’s bag on the ground.
‘Nice and gentles, please, little boy-childrens,’ warns Skuldiss, ‘No fun and games unless you want a broken wristy.’
Slowly I pick the bag up. I didn’t expect Skuldiss. But after everything I’ve been through to find Polly’s secret, I did plan to keep it safe. *Mouse. General,* I say, trying to keep my face as blank as I can, *are you ready?*
*Oh, bless my heart!* says the mouse from the rucksack. *I don’t fancy our chances much.*
*Nonsense! All you have to do is follow my orders exactly,* chides the General.
*That’s just what I’m worried about,* she says.
As I offer the bag to Skuldiss, I tip it up and the cockroach and the mouse tumble out on to the ground. For a moment they freeze in the light. A wave of colour floods the Captain’s pale face. It was the General’s tiny jaws that helped win the Battle of the Culdee Sack.
*Beasties!* he yells at the cullers behind us. *Get them!*
But my friends are too fast, darting between the heavy boots before the men even spot them.
*Run for your lives!* I shout. *Bring help as soon as you can!*
Then they are gone, disappearing into the night.
Skuldiss whacks his spare crutch on the ground in frustration. Then, composing himself, he hooks the crutch into the bag and drags it towards him along the ground.
Aida refuses to meet my gaze as he roots around in the rucksack, clawing Polly’s book out and up into his hands. She’s fuming. ‘Are you crazy? You just give him it, just like that? Have you ever fought for anything? Anything at all?’
She has to trust me. There wasn’t time to explain before we left.
‘The famous notebook,’ he says. ‘At last,’ and loosens the pincers around my wrist. It’s really sore, and I rub it, but it doesn’t make the redness or the pain go away.
He flicks feverishly through the pages. He flicks fast, and then he flicks slow. He holds the book upside down, and peers at the cover, licks his finger and tries to separate a single page into two. Then he grips it tight with both hands and holds the open book up to our faces, screaming, ‘Where is it?’
And now Aida can see what I knew he would find.
Where the Iris page once was, there is only a ragged and ripped seam.
Skuldiss’s face is contorted, and he jabs me in the chest with the pincers. ‘Where is the Iris page?’ he yells.
Now Aida is actually laughing for the first time ever and the cullers are looking at their feet, not sure what to do.
I can’t tell him. Even if I could, it wouldn’t matter how many times or how hard he jabbed me in the chest. Because it’s not going to bring the mouse back, with the piece of paper everyone in the world wants, carefully balled up in the pouches of her cheeks.
Handcuffed and stripped of our prods, we follow Skuldiss down a long corridor with metal walls and round windows. We could be in a submarine. Aida skulks behind me, getting jabs in the back from a culler’s dart gun when she drags her feet.
The Four Towers is full of strange noises. A lift whizzing up and down somewhere, a humming engine far beneath our feet … and a cry that could be the screech of machinery or something else.
Something that I don’t want to think about.
What I do want to think about, what I can’t stop thinking about, is the faces we are just about to see. We might have been captured, but it’s got us right where we wanted to be. I never thought I could be handcuffed, under armed guard and so happy as I am right now. Whatever Skuldiss says or does, I’m about to see the person I have looked for and missed for so long.
‘What you smiling about?’ says Aida suspiciously.
I shrug.
Then the Captain stops by a large metal door in the wall, studded with rivets and wide enough to drive a tank through. He leers at me and then, raising a single crutch, taps out a code in the box on the wall.
I try to look like I’m not watching or listening.
With a groan, the door shudders open, revealing a large container with girders for walls and a solid iron floor. On the Captain’s signal, the cullers shove Aida and me in before we can resist. I turn around just in time to see the massive door sliding shut on Skuldiss’s white face.
‘Don’t get too comfortable, childrens,’ he says as the door seals us in. ‘We have a lot of talking to do. I am very good at making people talk.’
Then we hear him tap-tapping away up the corridor, leaving us alone in the iron box, huddling underneath one single weak bulb, the container’s corners full of shadows.
At least, I think we’re all alone. Every noise we make seems to echo, like we’re in a big hall. It’s hard to tell if everything we hear is a reflection of our own sounds, or something else …
‘Who’s there?’ says Aida.
And then I can hear a shuffling sound, from the shadows at the end of the room. There’s someone walking towards us.
Her hair is grimy and bedraggled, her face smudged with dirt, deep rings around her eyes. But it is still her hair, her face. The face I have seen in my dreams every night since she left us. Who was never by my side but always in my mind – on the railway line, in the tunnel, underground, when I found her book, being chased through the park –
A little girl. Who happens to be my best friend in the world. And she’s holding a toad in her arms.
‘You took your time, Kidnapper,’ Polly says in a broken voice.
We look at each other for a moment.
Then the toad has jumped on to the floor, croaking and hopping like he doesn’t care who hears him, and Polly and I are hugging so tight, and she’s sobbing on my shoulder, and I want to cry as well but I’m too excited.
‘Whatever,’ says Aida, folding her arms.
Polly’s words come out in a gabble. ‘I’m sorry I ran away, but I promised my parents to keep the Iris safe, and I just thought the best thing would be to …’
I know, leave it in the most obvious place and send everyone, me included, on a wild Iris-chase.
‘And also,’ she says, ‘I thought …’
‘She thought getting picked up by Facto would be the easiest way to find us again,’ says a voice from elsewhere in the shadows that I don’t recognize. ‘Didn’t you, darling?’
I turn round to see a man and a woman who I recognize from the photos Littleman showed us on his ultrascreen. A tall man with a long nose, his arm around a shorter woman, who has hair and eyes like Polly’s. Their clothes are torn and filthy, their faces red and bruised.
‘You must be Kester!’ says the man, stretching out his hand. ‘I’m Polly’s dad, Simon Goodacre … and as I think you’ve no doubt guessed, this is her mum, my wife, Jane.’
‘We’ve heard so much about you,’ says Polly’s mum.
‘I wouldn’t believe it,’ says Aida quietly, biting her thumb.
I just look at them blankly, unable to take it all in for a moment.
‘You don’t mind, do you, Kidnapper?’ asks Polly. ‘You don’t mind that I went away on an adventure of my own to find them? And left you to look after the Iris?’
‘Please,’ groans Aida, ‘give me a break.’
‘There is nothing to apologize for,’ booms another voice, one that I recognize very well. ‘Kes and I put too much pressure on you. You should never have run away, but we understand why you did, don’t we, son?’
My dad looks as ruffled and rumpled as usual, probably no different to how he would be out of a prison cell, apart from the tired and drawn lines of his face. He might be tired, but it doesn’t stop him giving me the deepest and warmest hug he can.
He narrows his eyes when he sees Aida, the girl who broke into his house and zapped his hand.
*It’s OK, Dad, she’s on our side,* I say, standing protectively in front of her.
‘Hmm,’ he says, rubbing his beard with the injured hand, which still looks puffy and sore.
‘How that hand?’ asks Aida, in a way which sounds half like she’s saying sorry for hurting it, half threatening to do it again.
But before Dad can reply, the rest of my wild are rushing forward to surround us, leaping into my arms. Even Aida can’t resist petting the rabbits, the birds flocking about my head, Polly’s toad hopping around burping for joy –
We’re back together again.
The laughter and crying do not last for long.
Instead Aida and me find ourselves doing a lot of talking and explaining. The people we came to rescue have more questions for us than we possibly could have imagined. Between us, Dad translating my replies for everyone else, we tell the story of how I eventually found the Iris and how we were captured just outside the Four Towers. Meanwhile I explain to Dad about Dagger and his dark wild. I reassure the rest of the wild that the stag is all right, and then –
‘Shut up!’ says Aida. ‘Everyone shut up, will you?’
Slowly we all turn to face her. Hands on her hips, eyes blazing, just like the night she first broke into our house. All our chatter and excitement drift away.
‘It’s real nice you all so happy to see one another again. No, really,’ she says. ‘But there’s two things that bother me.’
Aida points at each of us in turn. ‘We been high and low for this Iris, this DNA. We bust your house, we stop a train, and now we get thrown in here by that creepy dude on sticks. Mr Stone wants it. My boss wants it. So now we got it – or that little mouse got it – can we change the world? Can we get out of here somehow and get the world back to how it was? Bring back all them animals and stuff we lost – and blow Facto out of the picture? Because that is all I am in this for, OK?’
There’s a very long pause. Dad rubs his beard again, and Mr Goodacre strokes his long nose. Polly and her mum look a mixture of a bit guilty and like they feel sorry for Aida. The toad goes very quiet.
Now it’s my turn not t o un
derstand.
Dad breaks the silence at first. ‘Ah, yes. A very good point, young lady. Now I’ve been discussing this, you know, with …’
But Aida waves her hands about like a windmill. ‘No, no, no! I don’t want any young-lady stuff or discussing. Just tell me.’
Polly’s dad crouches down to talk to her. ‘So, the Iris. The thing is, I mean, what you have to understand is that … How can I put this? It is very powerful … I mean that it has the potential to be as powerful as you say, but … Oh dear, I’m not explaining this very well, am I? … Polly?’
Polly steps in front of Aida. They look at each other for a moment like they’re going to hit each other, but luckily they don’t, and Polly starts to explain.
‘What they’re trying to say is the Iris is a weapon against Facto. It is hope. It can be all the things you think it is. A record of everything the virus and the cullers took away. With the data Kester’s mouse is keeping safe, we could change the world again. The only problem is …’
Her words hit the hard floor like the penny dropping in my skull. My worst fear.
‘You don’t know how.’ Aida’s voice is dull, like the bottom of her world just collapsed. I guess, in a way, it has. And not just hers.
‘Small correction!’ says Polly’s mum brightly. ‘Simon and I don’t know how yet. We were just the collectors.’
‘Which is why we went to Mons, to meet a scientist who could help us bring our collection back to life,’ adds Mr Goodacre. ‘Sadly we never got to meet him or hear his ideas.’
So that’s it. All of that, for some useless data.
I feel Dad’s hand on my shoulder. ‘Don’t bow your head so fast, Kes. Mr Stone may come to regret locking us all up together. I’m not the scientist the Goodacres were going to meet, but I am a, you know, scientist and … well, we’ve been having some very interesting conversations. In fact—’
Aida does a zip mime across her mouth. ‘OK, Professor Beardie, spare me your equations and calculations and stuff. It could still be done, right?’
