Perfect

by Cecelia Ahern

  “This is a CCU plant. Next door is a CDU plant. They’re sister companies.”

  “What do they do?” I ask as Lennox jumps out of the Jeep before it stops and disappears into the shadows. Carrick parks the Jeep.

  “Carbon capture utilization and carbon dioxide utilization,” he replies.

  I look at him with even more confusion.

  “I thought you were the whiz kid.”

  “In math, not in whatever this is.”

  “Come on, I’ll give you a tour.”

  Carrick holds the car door open for me and his manners remind me of how he was raised in a Flawed At Birth institution. F.A.B. institutions are for children of Flawed parentage. The Guild’s reasoning for taking these children is to dilute the Flawed gene pool, and these special schools retrain their Flawed brains. Carrick was taken from his Flawed parents at the age of five and was raised in a state school boasting the best facilities, education, and standards. The Guild, the state, raised him to be strong, to be one of them, to be perfect, but when he graduated, he turned on them by doing the one thing F.A.B. children are told not to do: He sought out his parents. He was branded on his chest for disloyalty to society.

  Carrick is eighteen years old and a giant of a man; his only flaw was wanting to find his parents. He walks me around the compound explaining, using a key card to access the doors.

  There are a dozen metal containers that look like shuttles side by side, the kind of thing you’d see at a brewery plant, or at a NASA facility, looking like they’re about to lift off.

  “As you know, the earth produces more carbon dioxide than can be absorbed. Carbon points have risen to the highest levels for eight hundred thousand years. Most of it comes from oil or coal, fossil fuels buried underground for millions of years. It’s a polluting waste product, so this CCU facility harnesses it and puts it to better use as a resource, reusing the carbon to create new products.”

  “How does it do that?”

  “It captures the carbon dioxide from power plants, steel, and cement works, or collects it from the air. It extracts the carbon, which provides the raw material for new products like green fuels, methanol, plastics, pharmaceuticals, building materials.”

  “This is government owned?” I ask, wondering why on earth he’s brought us here. How can we be safe in a state-owned factory when they’re the very people we’re running from?

  “It’s private. This is a pilot plant, everything here is research, just testing, nothing is on the market yet. Whistleblowers can’t carry out surprise searches for Flawed without prior warning, which is, at minimum, usually twenty-four hours’ notice.”

  “That’s why you chose here?”

  “I didn’t choose it. I followed the others.”

  “The others?”

  “I’ll introduce you later. First, I’ll give you the tour. There are four units. This is the capture regeneration section.” He swipes his card and the red light on the security panel turns green. He pulls the door open and lets me walk in first. Once inside, I see that the enormous plant is like an airport hangar, with more containers and pipes stretching in every direction, ladders climbing up the walls and ceilings to access them. Carrick hands me a high-visibility jacket and hard hat.

  “This is where I work. Don’t worry, I don’t do anything important, just drive the forklift, so you’re going to get this in layman’s terms.”

  “I won’t notice the difference,” I say, looking around, completely overwhelmed by the futuristic metal facility.

  “This container here is where the flue gas is routed to a pretreatment section. It cools, then the flue gas is sent to the absorber column, to remove the carbon dioxide. The flue gas enters the bottom of the absorber and flows upward.” He walks as he talks, pointing at the equipment, and I follow. “It reacts with the solvent solution, where a bunch of stuff happens.”

  I smile.

  “The treated flue gas is sent here to what’s called the stack so it can be released to the atmosphere. The carbon dioxide liquid leaves the absorber and is pumped to the regeneration section, where the CO2 chemical absorption process is reversed. The CO2 liquid leaves the bottom of the absorber and is sent to heat exchangers where the temperature rises. More stuff happens. Then the carbon dioxide vapor is sent to the carbon dioxide product compressor. Which is over here.” We stop at the product compressor. “And there it is. Want to know anything else?”

  “Yes. Who are the others you followed here?”

  He nods. “We’re getting to that.”

  FOURTEEN

  WE LEAVE THE factory behind us and take quite a walk in the enormous compound to a less futuristic side of the facility. This new section feels more residential, contains rows and rows of white portacabins, all layered on top of one another, five levels high, ten boxes across, steel balconies and staircases connecting them. We enter a simple one-story concrete building with a reception area, with a desk that’s empty at this late hour, a few chairs, and technological and scientific magazines scattered on the coffee table. A beefy security guard is asleep in an armchair in the corner.

  “One hundred employees live on-site,” Carrick explains. “This place is out of the way—the closest village or town is too far for a daily commute—so the owners thought it best to house them here.”

  “Owners?”

  “Private company, Vigor.” He shrugs. “I’ve been here only two weeks, but I haven’t seen them around. Whoever they are, they’re sympathetic to the Flawed. They’ve allowed a gang of evaders to work and live here. He’s one of them.” He nods at the security guard, who’s snoring quietly.

  He points at the poster on the wall behind the reception desk and I see the same red V logo I’ve been seeing all around the plant. The V in “Vigor” is designed as a mathematical square root sign, and I’ve seen it before somewhere, though I can’t place it.

  √IGOR. TURNING A PROBLEM INTO A SOLUTION.

  “There are four different recreational areas, depending on which unit you’re in. Flawed are all employed in the same unit; it’s this way.”

  He pushes open a door and we’re back in the night air and walking across to a collection of portacabins. Despite the late hour I can hear voices and activity coming from one of them and I know that our time alone is running out for now. There’s something important on my mind that I need to discuss first.

  “Carrick, I need to know something.” I swallow. “Have you told anybody about…” I indicate my back.

  “No one.”

  I feel relieved, but awkward for bringing up the sixth brand. Things have been easy between us, but thinking about the branding chamber has caused me to tense up again.

  “Apart from the guards and Crevan, Mr. Berry and I are the only two who know,” Carrick assures me. “I’ve been trying to contact Mr. Berry, but I haven’t had any luck so far,” he explains. “It’s been hard, trying to do things while I’m off the grid.”

  “The guards are all missing, Carrick,” I say urgently. “Mr. Berry is missing. I was afraid Crevan had gotten to you, too. We have so much to talk about.”

  “What?” His eyes widen.

  At the end of the corridor, the door opens and I hear voices, laughter, a gang of people. I’m not ready to meet them yet; I need to talk to Carrick first. I speak quickly. “I told Pia Wang about my sixth brand.”

  He raises his eyebrows, surprised that I would share this information with a Flawed TV and Crevan Media journalist. It had been Pia’s duty to tell my story, and after the trial she had set out to destroy my character, as was the norm with all her Flawed interviewees, but something happened with me. She believed me. She doubted my trial from the beginning and she couldn’t justify her one-sided reporting any longer. She sensed something was amiss.

  “I know it’s hard to believe, but we can trust her. She was doing all she could to gather information to write a revealing story about Crevan. I haven’t heard from her in over two weeks. It’s not just our communication that has been b
roken: I’ve been checking online and she hasn’t written an article under Pia Wang … or under her pseudonym.”

  “Her pseudonym?”

  “Lisa Life.”

  Carrick whistles. “Wow. She’s Lisa Life? Okay. Now I get why you told her.”

  Lisa Life is a notorious blogger, writing stories critical of the Flawed system. The authorities have been trying to find her and shut her down for months, but she just keeps changing servers.

  “You can’t tell anyone,” I say. “She swore me to secrecy.”

  “My lips are sealed.”

  “Anyway,” I say, “she hasn’t posted anything for weeks. I hope she’s being quiet because she’s in the thick of writing her big, juicy Crevan reveal that will tear him apart,” I continue, “but … Pia isn’t the type of person to ever be quiet. The last I heard from her she was going to speak to the guards’ families.”

  He frowns, still back at square one. “Have their families reported them? Are the police looking for them?”

  “I think they’re afraid to. Mr. Berry’s husband said he just disappeared. I was worried about you this whole time, afraid that Crevan would make you disappear, too. Crevan has no idea that you were in the viewing room, he never saw you and I didn’t tell Pia about you, so I think you’re safe. Also Crevan had no idea that Mr. Berry was filming the branding until he overheard a phone conversation between me and Mr. Berry’s husband. He told me that I have the footage,” I whisper.

  “So that’s why Crevan wants you so badly? He wants the Branding Chamber footage?”

  I nod.

  “He’s afraid you’ll reveal the video.”

  “I think so.”

  He looks at me with the utmost respect. “Then we’ve got him. I knew it, but I didn’t know why. He’s afraid of you, Celestine. We’ve got him.”

  FIFTEEN

  “YOU TWO HAVE plenty of time to talk,” a woman calls suddenly, startling me. She’s standing at the open door of the cabin that the noise was flowing from. “Come join us, Celestine.” She has an enormous welcoming smile on her face.

  I blink. Then I realize: My face has been in the news for two weeks now; of course this stranger knows who I am.

  “Um, thanks,” I say.

  “Celestine North,” she says as I reach her. She opens her arms and embraces me. “It is an honor to meet you.” She wraps me up and I’m stiff at first but slowly relax into it. When was the last time I received a hug? I think of my mom and dad and fight the emotion that follows. “I’m Kelly. Come inside and I’ll introduce you to everyone.”

  I look back at Carrick for help, but Kelly takes me by the hand and brings me along with her. Once inside the cabin, I see a roomful of strangers staring at me. Carrick follows us into the room and disappears into a corner somewhere.

  “This is my husband, Adam,” Kelly introduces me.

  Adam hugs me warmly. “Welcome.”

  “Come and meet Rogan,” Kelly says, dragging me away.

  In a darkened corner, a younger teen lurks.

  “Say hi to Celestine, Rogan,” Kelly coaxes him, as a parent would do with a much younger child.

  He gives me a weak wave, like the effort to care is too great.

  “Oh, come on,” Kelly says to him, and he slowly stands, shuffles over to me with feet too big for his body, trousers too big for his waist, and reaches out to shake my hand. It’s limp. It’s damp. He doesn’t look me in the eye and quickly scampers back to his beanbag. If I were on the outside I would say he was disgusted by a Flawed, but in here, in the company of so many Flawed and assuming he’s one of us himself, I put it down to shyness. Kelly talks a mile a minute, introducing me to the rest of the group.

  There’s Cordelia and her little girl, six-year-old Evelyn, who shows me that her top teeth fell out, pushing her tongue through the holes. I’m surprised to recognize the two men I was standing beside at the cash register when the entire drama started at the supermarket riot two weeks ago. Now I know their names are Fergus and Lorcan. Fergus has stitches across his forehead, and Lorcan is covered in bruises. I meet Mona, a girl around my age, with a smile so bright and sizzling energy that would light up the darkest day. I immediately like her. There’s an older man named Bahee, a chilled-out dude wearing circular blue-tinted glasses and a long gray ponytail, who’d look comfortable sitting around a campfire and singing “Kumbaya.”

  “And you already know our eldest son, Carrick.” Kelly smiles. Carrick comes a bit closer. “I’m so glad you were with him in the castle.” She takes my hands, her eyes filled with tears. “We know how horrific the experience is. I’m glad you were there with my boy.” She reaches out to him, but he recoils slightly. It’s as though his actions have surprised himself, but it’s too late—the damage is done. Kelly pulls her hand away from him, trying to hide her hurt expression.

  “You found your parents?” I ask in surprise.

  I look from Adam to Kate, finally and suddenly seeing a resemblance between Carrick and his dad. But he’s nothing like his mother; she’s tiny, birdlike. Carrick towers over her, though he does with most people. She’s more like Rogan, who would barely shake my hand. I look to Rogan then and realize that he’s her son.

  “That means you two are…”

  I wait for them to say something but nobody speaks. They don’t even look at one another. There’s such an awkward atmosphere, so much tension. But of course being reunited with loved ones after thirteen years was never going to be easy.

  “They’re brothers!” Mona suddenly announces. “Yay! Do I get a point for that?” she asks sarcastically, punching the air. “It’s just one big happy family around here, isn’t it, guys?”

  “Mona,” Adam says, annoyed, as Kelly turns away. It doesn’t seem to bother Mona in the slightest.

  “You didn’t tell her you found us, Carrick?” Kelly asks, confused and hurt.

  There’s a long silence as Carrick pulls at his earlobe self-consciously, trying to search for an answer that will help his situation.

  “Hey, has Carrick showed you the sleepboxes yet?” Mona jumps in at just the right time.

  While I deal with the shock of Carrick finding his parents, I’m dragged away by a chirping Mona, who talks so fast I can barely keep up.

  “Doesn’t matter, I’ll show you. You can share with me.”

  The accommodation is a series of portacabins piled on top of one another, but not just regular cubic cabins with basic beds inside—these are modern, state-of-the-art. I steal a glimpse inside one of them as we pass and see an entire living space cleverly built in the pod. There’s a bunk bed—single on top and double beneath—built-in shelves, drawers beside the beds. There’s even a toilet and shower. Everything is glossy white.

  “Each sleepbox has an en suite bathroom, air-conditioning, a flat-screen TV, and a personal safe,” Mona says in a funny accent, as though she’s my hotel guide. “The rooms all include a double bed and a single bunk bed.”

  I laugh. “I’ve never seen anything like these before.”

  “Nothing but the best for CCU workers.” She lowers her voice, though the section of non-Flawed living space is so far away nobody could possibly hear us. “The owner of Vigor is sympathetic to the Flawed. None of us have ever met him; he’s a secret shadowy figure,” she says sarcastically, eyes wide and fingers moving spookily.

  “Is that Eddie?”

  She laughs. “No. Eddie runs the place. I’m talking about the big boss: the owner, creator, inventor, whatever, of Vigor. Bahee claims to know him, but I’m not so sure. Bahee is a scientist; he can sometimes be a little bit…” She whistles to finish the sentence. “Anyway, Eddie knows about us. He keeps us living away from the others, manages shifts to keep us apart most of the time. Nobody but him and us knows that we’re Flawed, and it has to stay that way. Obviously here we’re all evaders.” She rolls her eyes at the term. “So you won’t see any armbands on us. If you have a brand on your hand, you get a job that requires gloves; if you have a brand on you
r temple, you get a job that requires a hard hat or you find a fancy way of keeping your hair down. Don’t trust makeup to cover it. It gets hot here; it can melt off your face faster than you know. If the brand is on your tongue, you don’t talk too much. Get it?”

  I nod emphatically. I have a brand in every place she’s mentioned, and more.

  “Cool.” She studies me to make sure she believes me and seems happy with what she finds. “Had a girl in here who fell in love with a scientist. Lizzie. She shared my room. She kept talking about telling him. Needing to share with him her true self because she was so in love.” She rolls her eyes. “Honestly, I had to hear this crap every night. As you’ll see, that didn’t work out too well for her. She told him what she was, he was grossed out, and so she ran off. Could have got us into a whole lot of trouble,” she says angrily, unlocking the door to her cabin and pushing the door open.

  It’s identical to the cabin I stole a glimpse of. The single bed above is clearly Mona’s, with posters and possessions, a teddy bear on the bed. Beneath it is the double bed. It’s just a naked mattress, where Lizzie once slept, where she thought this place was her home, where she was in love with a scientist, and then abandoned it. How replaceable we all are.

  I understand how this girl Lizzie must have felt when she wasn’t wanted by her boyfriend as soon as she revealed that she was Flawed. I recall the way Art looked at me in the school library after my brandings, how he couldn’t bring himself to kiss me. I suppose that is the point of a tongue branding. They say it’s the worst of them all. In fact, it turned out to be the second worst. Crevan himself held the hot weld to my spine to show that I was Flawed to my very backbone. But no one here will ever know about that, no one but Carrick, who witnessed it.

  “When did Lizzie leave?” I ask, looking at her empty double bed.

  “Two weeks ago. No good-bye,” she says angrily. “She left most of her stuff here, too. You spend every day with someone and you think they’re your friend.… Anyway—” She changes the subject, pretends not to care, though it’s clear she’s hurt. “So, ground rules. You sleep here, wash there, and do your thing in there. Depending on your job, you can go to bed and get up whenever you want. There are night shifts and day shifts. You can help yourself to the food in the kitchen in our rec room. The plant has a better cafeteria—more options, tastier food—but it’s harder to avoid people getting too close there. Kelly and Adam work in the kitchen; Bahee is a scientist; Cordelia a computer whiz; I’m a cleaner. You can talk to the other staff, but don’t get too close. No one knows we’re Flawed, but some people ask too many questions, you know? Best thing is to keep to yourself, but not too much, or you’ll stand out. Whatever you do, stay away from Fergus and Lorcan; they’re only after one thing.” She looks at me knowingly.