by Chris Ward
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‘I don’t want you to talk to him,’ Father said over dinner a few days later. ‘I know you’ve been in his room, and I want you to stay out. No,’ – he lifted a hand as I started to protest – ‘don’t bother denying it. Just keep away from him. City folk are trouble. As soon as he’s able to walk, I’ve decided to hand him over to the mayor.’
I glanced across the table at Mother, who said nothing.
‘Will they send him back to the city?’
‘Maybe, I don’t know. He could be a wanted criminal. It’s only because the lad can’t walk that I’ve not involved the police.’
‘If they don’t send him back, what will they do?’
‘That’s not for you to worry about. We have our ways of dealing with unwanted outsiders.’
I fell silent. I’d heard rumours at school about what happened to what we called ‘trespassers’, people who somehow got out of the cities and caused mischief out in the GFAs. We built those rumours up, of course, in the way kids do, into gruesome public executions that none of us had ever seen, because until you met a ‘trespasser’ you didn’t really see them as like you, but purely an outsider, a non-entity. That’s what the perimeter walls did.
Simon and Jess were a little older, their eyes a little more hardened, but they were people just like me. I’d grown protectively fond of them. I didn’t want them to leave, but I didn’t want them hurt, either.
