Elliot’s calm made a neat, precise turn into sadness.
‘You’ve got that wrong. I let them fall. I go after girls, win them over, then I see someone I like better and move on.’
Chime smiled at him.
‘That’s not the same,’ she said. ‘You’re allowed to like girls then change your mind and break hearts. It hurts but it’s not cruelty, it’s life when you are young. I’m your age, I think—I don’t know for sure: in Nature Strip, we tend not to count years—and I think that at our age, we’re allowed to move along.’
The beautiful tranquillity returned. Elliot matched her smile.
‘Not sure I agree, but I’m liking your perspective.’
After that there was a long silence, only broken once when Elliot announced: ‘I don’t know what the sky looks like any more.’
Chime did not respond.
Elliot looked at the locked drawer. ‘You dropped the candy wrappers back in there,’ he remembered suddenly. ‘No wonder this place is such a mess.’
Now she grinned at him. ‘What do you mean, such a mess?’
They stared at each other.
‘I’m from the Farms,’ he insisted. ‘I’m a Farms boy.’
Her smile deepened. ‘So you are.’
*
Elliot fell asleep at once that night and found himself smiling through dreams about rocking chairs, hammocks, steady-moving steam trains and still, starry nights.
Abruptly, he woke and was himself again.
He sat up in the dark room, appalled.
There’d been a traitor on the Royal Youth Alliance? His heart thudded louder than his thoughts, and his thoughts scrambled away from him. He’d been betrayed? Someone had arranged to have him killed by the W.S.U.? He pressed his fists to his forehead, trying to slow the rush, then realised he was breathing in gasps.
He was going to wake the room.
He lay back down, fixed his attention on the now-familiar sounds: creaks and mumbles from the bunk beds, slow drip of another leak somewhere.
It wasn’t true. He’d been in that schoolyard so often, brazen, sending messages to Madeleine. He’d asked two teachers about the science of cracks. It was probably someone from the school.
But creeping at him sideways came a memory: he’d let the R.Y.A. know he’d figured out how to get through cracks. The Princess had told him to explain it later but, within hours, the choppers had arrived.
Chime was right. Someone in the R.Y.A. had betrayed him.
Who? he asked himself. Which one?
There’d only been the Princess and four others: Keira, Samuel, Sergio and himself.
Keira. She was the obvious choice. She’d grown up amongst Hostiles; her mother was a director. She’d only been on the R.Y.A. because the Princess was blackmailing her. She must be the spy.
She was gorgeous and sharp. Sometimes she’d seemed like the only sane one amongst that bunch. They’d danced in the Turquoise Rain. He had kissed her. He had . . .
His breathing had turned harsh again.
It couldn’t be Keira. It was not. That hurt too much, long thin lines of hurt, and then he recalled that it was Keira who’d helped bring him back from the World, arranged for him to stay here, and wait—the final line dissolved—he had spoken to Keira separately. He’d told her the method for getting through cracks. She must have let the others know, because the King and little Prince had been rescued.
It wasn’t Keira. She was not the traitor.
So who was it?
It must be Samuel. Ha. He grinned. Hapless, hopeless, earnest Samuel who, it seemed, had poisoned himself with Olde Quainte magic in an effort to help the Princess. It was surely a medical miracle that he was still alive right now. No way it was Samuel—but as soon as Elliot thought that, it occurred to him that Samuel had the perfect front. Nobody would suspect him. And he was from a Hostile town. A memory swiped at Elliot: the security agents holding Samuel’s file. ‘You live in one of the most Hostile towns in the Kingdom! We’re appalled by your presence here!’
Still, if it was Samuel, it could also be Sergio. He was from Maneesh. Maybe foreign kingdoms were working with the Hostiles to bring down the Royals? Sergio had been the Princess’s best friend and stableboy for years, but wasn’t that also a great front? The security agents had been just as incensed by his presence.
Well, what about those two security agents? They’d brandished those files on the R.Y.A. members, but where were the files on the two of them? Always in the background, pressed up against the walls like camouflaged lizards.
Or was it Princess Ko herself? Why was she the only Royal left behind anyway? Could be, she’d orchestrated the kidnap of her family so she could take the throne herself. Maybe she’d only been pretending to want them back. How deep did the layers of deception go, where did the counterfeit end?
He felt clammy and feverish. His stomach was twisting.
He pressed his head into the pillow, breathed in and out.
Nothing was real. The only person he could trust was himself.
But could he trust himself? Hadn’t he lost himself completely in the World?
Was it me? he thought. Did I do it in my sleep? Was I the traitor?
He fell asleep.
*
Later that same night he woke again, his heart pounding with betrayal, his very self tangled in malice and deception—and then, weaving through the darkness came the thread of light. He lay perfectly still and watched, waiting for the light to take shape.
He saw it extending backwards: it ran through the blur of his time in the World, back to before that, it was somewhere in the place after his dad had gone missing. It was getting clearer now. He could see it in the schoolyard in the night. There was the sculpture, and there it was, the light.
It was the Girl-in-the-World. It was Madeleine. He had no memory of her face, but the light was her essence. He saw that now. The nights they’d spent talking in notes. The scrawl of her handwriting. Her passionate ideas, her temper, her crazy sense of humour. He remembered the sound of her voice, speaking through chaos, pieces of her voice like a trail through the darkness. Her hands, the shape of her body pressed against his in the space between.
There was one true thing. Madeleine. The relief was beautiful. He fell asleep imagining her hands in his hands, holding one another in the darkness.
This time he slept until the morning.
7
One day, Elliot woke to an empty room. The door was ajar and the cold tap at the basin ran softly.
He got up and turned off the tap, tightening it against its drip. His face was paler than he’d ever seen it. Might be something to do with the lights here, he guessed, but seriously, you could mistake that guy in the mirror for a ghost.
Except that his hair was wild, and he had an idea that ghosts had tidy hair. What were you going to do in the afterlife if not look after your hair? His own had grown longer than usual, pieces of it stuck out in new and unexpected directions. Well, you had to give it points for imaginative effort.
He slapped his cheeks, trying to get some life back in there, and it came to him that the sound of slapping was the only sound there was.
He stopped.
Silence.
He looked around the room. The bunk beds were rumpled and unmade, and the wastepaper basket in the corner had been knocked over.
Silence poured on silence.
It was exactly half a second later that the noises of the compound resumed—an object fell, a voice swore, another laughed, the beep-beep of a door opening somewhere, a washing machine emptying itself—and he realised he must have just been caught in one of those random moments between noise.
It was enough, though. Inside that moment he had seen them all, every person in that compound, rushing from the bunkroom, leaving him asleep. He’d seen exit doors opening and closing, sealing shut behind them. He’d seen himself trapped.
He showered, dressed and went to breakfast.
The Assistant was
still at the table. He was leaning over a pile of documents, making notes. Chime was stacking plates.
‘Where’s everyone else?’ Elliot asked.
The Assistant dropped his pen, picked up a mug, slurped coffee, then returned to his notes.
Chime continued stacking. ‘We were all called early for a meeting,’ she said. ‘There were visitors arrived with news.’
Elliot pulled out a chair and sat down. ‘The kind of news I can know?’
The Assistant glanced up at him and smiled.
‘You,’ he said and shook his head, as if there was something profoundly admirable in what Elliot had just said. Elliot thought back over his own words. The kind of news I can know? Now where was the genius in that?
‘It’s in the newspapers, so sure,’ the Assistant went on. He scribbled something in the margin of his notes. ‘You already know, I assume, that the King has been in talks with the Jagged Edge Elite? About the restoration of the monarchy? And the release of Princess Ko?’
Elliot nodded. ‘Sure.’
There were a couple of strips of bacon still on the platter and a pile of cold toast. Elliot reached for the toast.
‘It seems the talks have collapsed,’ the Assistant continued. ‘The King’s gone into hiding someplace. Security on the Princess has tightened, and she’s been sentenced to death. A Jagged Edge Elite court has found her guilty of high treason.’
Elliot set down his toast. He set down the butter knife.
‘To death,’ he repeated.
The Assistant studied him. He sorted through his pile of notes, pulled out a folded newspaper and slid it across the table.
There, on the front page, was Princess Ko’s face, beaming up from last year’s official portrait. A smaller inset showed a more recent, hazy photograph: the shape of a princess behind a barred window.
Elliot turned the paper over and pushed it away.
‘You’ve spent time with the Princess,’ the Assistant remarked. ‘I’d forgotten. At any rate, we’ll stop the conversation here, before we stray into that murky zone again—between what everyone knows and what the Hostiles plan to do.’
He returned to his notes.
‘But isn’t this what the Hostiles want?’ Elliot said, voice verging on reckless. ‘For the Royals to be dead? If the Elite are going to do it, why do the Hostiles need to make plans? Shouldn’t they just sit back and cheer?’
The Assistant raised his eyebrows, but not his head. He continued working.
‘Unless you think them killing a princess would make the Kingdom so mad they’d rise up in favour of the Royals again.’
Now the Assistant smiled broadly. ‘Elliot,’ he breathed. ‘Where did you come from? I guess I can say this. You’re absolutely right. The execution of a princess is a risky move on the part of the Elite. We won’t rescue her, but we will distance ourselves. Let the Elite take her down—and let them take the fall.’
Chime was moving along Elliot’s side of the table, collecting plates. She reached Elliot and stepped around him.
‘I’m done with this one.’ He passed his plate to her.
‘This, and you have not eaten yet.’ She pressed it back.
He returned it to the table with such force that the Assistant looked up.
‘I need,’ Elliot said, ‘to go outside.’
The Assistant took a piece of toast for himself, found the marmalade and looked around for a knife. Then he laughed. ‘Want to rescue the Princess?’
‘Just for half an hour,’ Elliot continued. ‘You can blindfold me while I go out, and when I come back, so I’ll have no clue where this place is. Someone leads me away—to a field or something, I don’t know—I take the blindfold off and get some sun. Some air.’
Chime had set the plates and cutlery on a tray, and now she was wiping the table. Spraying it with something, then wiping. Both Elliot and the Assistant watched her hand scrubbing.
‘I’m grateful for . . . I really appreciate what you’ve done, letting me hide here. I know I’d be dead if I was out on the streets. But see my face? It’s like I’m dead anyway.’
‘Look, I hear you,’ the Assistant said. ‘I really do. And it’s true, we might be able to conceal our location with that blindfold idea of yours. But even at a safe distance, you might figure out what province we are in. You can’t know that. Not even that.’
‘Who cares if I know which province we’re in?’ Elliot argued. ‘There are Hostile compounds in every province in the Kingdom!’
‘You know that for a fact?’ The Assistant smiled.
Elliot held his gaze then shrugged a little. Who really knew?
‘Well, anyhow . . .’ Elliot paused. He hadn’t meant to say this. It was too risky.
Then a moth landed on the table right before him and, Ah, what the heck, he thought.
‘Well, anyhow,’ he repeated. ‘I already know what province we’re in.’
The Assistant raised his eyebrows directly at Chime, but Elliot shook his head. ‘She didn’t tell me. I figured it out for myself, some time back.’
Now the Assistant steepled his fingers, and breathed so his nostrils narrowed. There was a long pause. ‘And?’
‘I hear distant drumming in the night,’ Elliot said. ‘There’s water leaking everywhere. The dirt here’s darker than a mineshaft.’
Another pause.
‘Half the lettuce leaves are shredded like a miniature web snail’s been at them. And that’—he tilted his head at the moth on the table—‘is a red-spotted tree moth. Enough poison in it to kill a small cat.’
Chime had stopped wiping.
‘This is Nature Strip,’ Elliot said. ‘Any fool could tell you that.’
The Assistant leaned back, weaving his hands behind his head. He was grinning. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘You win.’
8
So here he was with the blindfold tight around his head, the soft end of a rope in his hand, and Chime leading him through the exit door.
He shuffled a few steps, thudded gently into Chime’s back.
She didn’t speak. He recalled that she’d asked him to be silent.
He could hear the exit door slide closed behind him. The rope pulled taut. Chime was moving again. He faltered along into the darkness.
This was not outside. It was some kind of tunnel, he thought. Well, that was sort of disappointing, but fair enough. They could walk through a tunnel to get to the light. As long as they got there.
The ground was rock-hard beneath his feet. The air felt deep and thick with a clammy darkness that pressed right up against his blindfold.
He felt Chime hesitate then start up again. He was trying to take sure steps—to trust her—but his body wanted to feel its way along, to shuffle and slide, to reach out with both hands.
Mostly, though, there was a singing inside him. In a moment, there’d be sunshine and wind, and he thought of how fast and how far he’d run, once they reached a field or whatever. In Nature Strip, they’d surely find one. He’d run laps, he’d run circles, hurdle fences. He’d run until he was just a shower of sweat, then he’d lie down, panting hard, close his eyes, feel the sun.
Then he’d figure out how to save Princess Ko.
He walked.
A sense of the familiar eased itself into the darkness around him. It was powerful, this sense. Embedded in the smells and in the closeness. He knew it absolutely, and it crouched just behind him, beside him, just ahead of him—but what?
There was a clicking sound: three rapid clicks, a pause, two short clicks. A rustling. Multiple, tiny, ripping sounds like fabric tearing. Apprehension shot through his chest and guts. A quick, sharp noise like vip and of course, he knew. Certainty, even as he buckled against it, refused to believe it, and before he’d even sorted out that conflict, they were at him.
He dropped the rope and tore at the blindfold, but already the claws, the fangs, the lines of fire. He got the blindfold off and it was real, here he was. In the cavern of a third, maybe fourth-level Grey, a
nd the Greys were awake and attacking from every direction. They were rearing at his jawbone, striking at his ribs, digging into the small of his back, tightening around his wrists and ankles.
Chime was shouting, but he was shouting louder, and a rake ran down his arm, a barrow crushed his shoulder. An outboard motor had come loose, the rotor of a chopper, the engine of a tractor, hurling at him, cutting deep and fast and hot into his flesh. Fishing wire whipped through the air and lashed his cheeks, fish hooks pierced his thighs and shins.
‘Stop moving!’
Chisels, pliers, needles, an old electric kettle with a power surge, a spray of boiling water.
‘Stay still!’
He was falling from a high tree branch and skidding down a gnarled and savage trunk. The trunk was decorated. It bristled with protruding broken glass and razor blades, every piece competing for attention.
Chime’s voice was its own fire.
‘Stay still,’ she was shrieking. ‘If you don’t stay still, they’ll kill you,’ her voice scaled the air, reaching ugly: ‘Would you quit—fighting—them—NOW!’
A neat, swift slice. A sword cut him in two. One half fell one way, the other fell the other.
1
Keira was sitting in her apartment in Tek, Jagged Edge, plugged into the media rundown.
The Kingdom was in a frenzy over the news that Princess Ko had duped them. Keira found that sort of funny. Like: What?! Princess Ko’s been running things?! Uh, no. She hadn’t been. Neither had the King run things, back before he got abducted. It was always the Jagged Edge Elite: her own province in charge. Only nobody ever admitted that.
The rundown moved on to the news that Princess Ko had been arrested, along with R.Y.A. members, Samuel and Sergio, on charges of treason and fraud. Police were now seeking the other member, Keira Platter.
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