Even though the entire garden’s prelight and quiet, we don’t go out the door. After the deer, not even Blaze wants to do that. He goes out the window first, landing silently in the grass on his bare feet. Dennis is next. Soon I’m sliding out the window on my stomach.
Halfway in and halfway out, I’m working on swinging my legs through the window so I can make a clear jump to the ground. I’ve got it covered, obviously. I mean, I can climb and everyone in the garden knows it. But maybe because we’re hurrying or maybe for some other reason, Blaze reaches up and lifts me right out the window. He kind of gathers me into a U-shape and holds me so my legs dangle over one of his arms and the rest of me is right up close against his chest.
We’re only like that for a moment, although even that might be longer than the whole window operation really requires. The only thing I’m sure of is it’s enough time for my sungarb to slither up my legs. In the moonlight, the purple bruises and red welts on my legs show up as dark streaks on my skin. Blaze looks at them and at me with his mouth open to say something. But he doesn’t.
He just puts me on the ground and holds on until I’m absolutely, definitely steady on my feet.
Then we’re ready to run for the fringe. Blaze at the front, Dennis in the middle and me behind both of them.
‘Clear?’ Blaze is saying.
Inside me, everything is sort of lurching around. It’s because of what we’re about to do, I figure. You know, run to the orchard and then into the fringe, where Dot’s creations should never, ever go.
All that’s more than enough reason for the warm, squishy, prenormal feelings inside me. Nothing whatsoever to do with Blaze and the window or the look on his face when he saw my legs. Obviously, that was just surprise.
Not tenderness or anything like that. I wouldn’t want it to be, because Blaze is not my type of guy and we’re way past hooking up anyway. Even if I felt like it (which I definitely don’t) I know for sure Blaze wouldn’t want to.
At least, he didn’t back in my hut that other night, so I’m guessing that’s still the way things are.
‘Did you hear me? I said, are we clear?’
I scan around behind me and off to the sides. ‘Um … yup. We’re good, I’m pretty sure.’
It’s then I hear it. Just a soft sound, but one I definitely recognise. Footsteps on the path, round the front of the hut. Blaze is already running, about to leap from the cover of the hut towards the orchard. I literally have to lunge after him. He has his red sungarb on tonight and his silver bag’s slung over his shoulder, packed to leave creation behind.
I grab Blaze by the neck and drag him and Dennis under the empty hut, down where the trapdoor spiders make their nests. We crawl across the dirt to the very middle of the shadows underneath the hut. I can only see a pair of feet but it’s enough to know who’s out there, prowling between the huts.
Brook.
Dennis starts to say something but Blaze jams a hand over his mouth. We have to stay still. Still and completely soundless.
At that exact moment, something drops into my hair from overhead. The first thing I want to do is scream. Loud. But I swallow it and the scream sticks in my throat like some fruit I’ve eaten way too fast. My hands fly to my long, thick hair.
I feel a spider there, big as my hand. I knock it from the top of my head and the spider scuttles down the gaping neck of my sungarb. Its fuzzy legs are all over my skin, every place at once.
I want to squirm and flap and brush it free but I don’t. I can’t.
Out on the path, Brook’s feet have stopped moving. They shuffle towards us. There’s a cracking of knee joints as Brook squats down. I flatten myself to the ground, like the lower I make myself the less visible I’m going to be.
The spider works its way onto my back. I swear I can feel all eight of its legs. As the spider crawls along my spine, I keep my hand cupped against my mouth to trap any sound that might escape. And the whole time, Brook’s totally still, just listening, while the spider roams all over me. Back, shoulders, neck, face. Everything.
Then there’s another sound. A sort of scuffle as something low and brown and furry shoots across Brook’s bare foot. A mouse, maybe, or a possum. Straightaway Brook draws his foot back and stops to listen. He waits for ages. And then, finally, he gets up. I guess he figures it was the furry brown thing he heard moving under the hut.
He starts walking again, away from the orchard, back towards his own hut.
Blaze goes, ‘Now?’
‘Now.’
We squeeze out from under the hut. We have to run. As in, this second. I know that, but there’s something I need to do first. I stand there shaking and shaking until the spider runs out of my sungarb. It scuttles across the grass and I start to bring my foot down on top of it.
I want to twist and turn and grind the spider into the ground. But I don’t do it. It says not to in the Book of Kindness. Then I remember Gil and how the Books didn’t stop him doing what he did to the deer. And Dot loves Gil, or she seems to anyway. So, for a second time, I bring my foot down towards the spider. But I stop myself again. I don’t want to be like Gil, not really.
So I’m just standing there, foot in mid-air, confused, frozen practically.
Blaze grips my arm and hisses urgently into my ear, ‘C’mon, Wren. Let’s go.’
____________________
‘Ready?’
We’re on the edge of the orchard where the fruit trees meet the fringe. I can hear this kind of rushing sound in my ears. There’s nothing making it that I can see. There’s only what’s going on inside me, my entire body trying to cope with the idea of what we’re about to do. That somehow loving Dot means stepping into the fringe, going against the Books and everything I’ve ever thought was true.
‘Wren? Are you –’
‘No.’ I practically bark it at Blaze. ‘I’m not ready and I’m never going to be, so let’s just get it over with.’
Instead of letting Blaze pull me into the trees, it’s me who goes in first. Holding my breath and everything, but definitely stepping into the fringe and finally doing what I have to do to pass Dot’s test, even if it feels like a totally pregood way to act.
Inside the fringe, the trees are so close that their leaves all knit together. It’s way cooler here than anywhere else in creation. Every one of the trees is alive with some kind of bird or little animal with yellow-green eyes.
‘Creation didn’t collapse,’ Blaze says. ‘So far.’
I’m pretty sure he’s attempting a joke, which shows how happy he is to be doing what we’re doing right now. Unlike me, with my quick little breaths and sweaty skin.
‘Sure you know the way?’ I ask Dennis.
‘I made it all the way here by myself, didn’t I?’ He gives me this look, a hopeful, pleading kind.
Approve of me, it seems to say. I figure it’s the same look he’s used to giving his brother Nathan. It’s one I bet has been on my own face a whole lot recently.
Pretty quickly, our little line of three turns into a triangle, with Dennis up the front. Dennis leads us through the trees, away from the lawn and the huts and everything that’s familiar.
The whole time we walk, I’m humming a dottrack, ‘We Belong 2 Dot’. I guess in my mind it’s protective or something. My way of saying to Dot that even though I’m in the fringe, it’s only because I love her and want to pass her test.
‘What’s that song?’ Blaze asks.
Clearly, it’s been a long time since he paid serious attention in the gazebo.
‘It’s the same one she always sings,’ Dennis says. Which is about when he stops. He spins around.
Out of the prelight comes his triumphant voice. ‘There. Told you I’d get us here.’
Ahead of us, the trees in the fringe thin out and give way to more grass, soft as the lawn we walk across every day. Rising up from that, all silver-shimmery and opaque, is a wall, five times as tall as Blaze.
I walk over to it and in the light it thr
ows out I can see it’s patterned with a swirling design made up of hooks on these long sticks, all linked together. There are words there too, in these big, blocky letters.
RESTRICTED
AUTHORISED PERSONNEL ONLY
TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED
HAZCHEM
In its own way, the wall looks sort of beautiful, all glimmery. And the second I see it I know I was right all along about the test. Dot made the wall and Dennis just for me. Dot created everything around us, so obviously she can create something as simple as a wall.
We keep moving, following the wall until the words stop and there’s a blank section, no design or words or anything. Nothing apart from a little rectangle with the numbers zero to nine on it.
The gate.
Blaze can’t stop staring at it and neither can I. I mean, it’s impossible not to see a real-life gate for the very first time since you were created and not wonder what’s on the other side. According to Dennis, it’s a place called Woodend. But I wonder whether Dot would really bother creating an entire place just to test me. Maybe there’s nothing at all there, just swirling mist or clouds or something. We’re going to have to open the gate if we want to know for sure.
Dennis is gabbling. ‘I know the passcode off by heart. Same as I remembered FancyVividBlue.’
‘Show us,’ says Blaze. ‘We want to see.’
He looks at me sideways, checking on me I guess, wanting to see if I’m as excited as he apparently is. Standing there, one of his arms brushes my shoulder but he doesn’t move it away or anything. Clearly Blaze has no idea that I won’t be coming with him if there’s anywhere to go on the other side of the gate.
Dennis goes over there. It feels like I’m floating, kind of like I’m watching myself watching Dennis. With the tip of his finger, Dennis touches the numbers and each one makes a soft little sound, starting low and getting higher, like a kind of song.
When Dennis is done he swings around to us with this huge smile on his face. He steps back. ‘It’s processing. It’s going to open in a sec. This bit takes ages.’
For a long time, me and Blaze stare at Dennis’s striped back. One and six. Sixteen.
Finally Dennis turns around again. This time, there’s a different expression on his face. He’s still smiling, only now he also looks unsure.
‘The number’s right. It’s so basic, no way would I forget it.’
‘Try it again,’ suggests Blaze.
So Dennis goes through the whole thing all over. The numbers beep again, only this time they don’t sound so much like a song. And then, guess what? The gate stays exactly where it is.
‘It’s right. I know it. One–two–three–four–five–six–seven.’
‘Go again. You could’ve pressed the wrong one accidentally.’
Dennis puts the numbers in all over again but this time I don’t think any of us actually believe the gate’s going to open.
‘They’ve changed it.’ It seems important to Dennis that we understand this. ‘I don’t get it. If they’ve changed the passcode, they must know I’m here.’
The part that really seems to bother Dennis is why no-one’s looking for him, if whoever’s in charge of Club Naturelle knows someone broke in.
I stop listening. The thing is, nothing Dennis says makes any actual difference. Dot created a gate, but it’s shut and it’s staying that way. Which means Dennis won’t be disappearing through it. Dot’s test isn’t over after all. She’s asking something more of me.
‘So climb it,’ I say.
The gate might be sheer and high, but I’m one of the best climbers in creation. Dot made me with special skills, so maybe now is when I’m supposed to use them. Anyway, between the three of us there has to be a way to get Dennis over. Blaze too, if he wants.
‘There’s no way,’ Dennis says.
‘It’s okay. I’ll help you.’
Dennis shakes his head at me in this precalm way. ‘Listen.’
When Dennis says that, I actually do hear something. As well as shimmering, the gate is making the softest buzz. Dennis picks up a twig. He throws it towards the gate. But instead of bouncing off, the twig bursts into blue and red and orange flares, at the same time making a crackling zzzzt sound.
‘It’s electric.’
Blaze asks, ‘What’s that mean?’
Dennis grabs a whole lot more twigs and throws them at the gate. Each one sparks and crackles. Dennis grabs huge handfuls of twigs and grass that he hurls at the gate, watching it all hit and fall smoking to the ground.
‘We’re locked in,’ says Dennis. Over and over and over.
‘Dennis?’ Blaze’s voice is all soft and gentle. ‘Here, put this on.’
Blaze takes a peacock-blue sungarb from his bag and hands it to Dennis. It’s only then I notice the dark, damp stain spreading across the front of Dennis’s own sungarb.
Dennis lets out this shrieking, wild kind of laugh.
‘I’m not wearing a dress. If he ever found out, Nathe would –’
‘Just until your other sungarb dries out.’
‘Clothes,’ says Dennis, angry. ‘They’re called clothes. And dark is dark, not prelight. Precalm is scared. Prenice is bad and –’
‘We’ll get to Woodend some other way,’ Blaze interrupts calmly.
But Dennis just keeps on talking in this high, thin voice. ‘And prenormal is weird and sick and horrible. Just like everyone in this place, whatever it even is.’
20
WALKING BACK THROUGH the fringe, both Blaze and Dennis are silent. As we walk I get this picture of myself cross-legged on a bed. Not the one in my hut and not Julius’s either. Somehow I know that the bed belongs to me. On the wall above it, there’s all these posters of creations like me turning what I recognise as backflips in the air.
There’s a figure too, kind of framed by the doorway.
Mum. She’s in crisp white sungarb with a thin red stripe, a neat bag over her shoulder. But her face looks pinched and exhausted. Even in a fragment of an image I can see that.
‘How was it today?’ She steps towards me to smooth the curly hair on my unwilling head.
‘Okay.’
‘Really?’
‘No.’
The next thing I see, I’m holding one arm out to her. Strapped around it there’s a device exactly like Dennis’s. The other thing I can’t miss is the thick, white material wrapped around my arms and shoulders.
Bandages.
I see Mum’s eyes flick across the tiny screen of my device. I can’t read it, because the words are too small and things are shifting and splintering the way they do when I see things. But I can hear what Mum says.
‘I don’t know,Viva. It sounds very drastic.’
My mouth moves and lets loose this barrage of words that I don’t understand. Even in these images I’m a blurter, I guess. The odd phrase floats to the top.
‘I’m the perfect candidate. This is going to fix things … if I don’t like it, I can have it removed.’
There are tears sparkling in Mum’s eyes, still there even after she tries blinking them away. In this tiny little voice she says, ‘Please don’t tell me you’re seriously considering this.’
‘I’ve already applied. I’m sixteen. You can’t stop me.’
‘Stick with the counselling a little bit longer.’
‘It’s not helping. It’s never going to.’
Mum sighs. ‘No-one blames you. You believe that, don’t you?’
I see myself reach for something buried under my pillow. It’s a piece of fuzzy red fabric balled-up in my hand. I start to stroke the fabric.
‘Who else is there to blame?’ I say.
21
BLAZE HAS DENNIS’S device upside-down on the table in my hut. He pulls it apart, one crumpled piece at a time, his fingers almost too big to pick up all those tiny squares and rectangles. He lays each piece on a folded-up sungarb and sort of stares at it, like he’s hoping the device is going to reassemble itself.
Dennis wants to get the device working as much as Blaze. He keeps talking about working out where we are. Maybe it’s not Club Naturelle after all he says. He wants to know who’s in charge, what it’s for. He even wants to find a picture of all creation from above, the way Dot would see it.
A satellite photo, he calls it. Not that it would really help, Dennis says. If the electric fence goes all the way around, there’s probably not going to be a way out. According to Dennis, that’s the way someone wants it.
I don’t bother telling him the answer to all his questions is Dot. Blaze says he’ll sort out the pieces, just keep trying until he somehow manages to put the device back together. That’s his plan. It’s just, to me, the device looks even less like something that’s ever going to work again than it did when Blaze started.
Anyway, Dennis wouldn’t quit asking Blaze when it would be fixed, so finally Blaze had to take him back to Dennis’s hut before returning to work on the device in my hut.
‘Wren?’
There’s no pause before the door of my hut opens. Brook is standing on my balcony. Blaze gets up and in one movement sweeps the bits into his pocket.
Brook stares into the hut. ‘What are you two doing shut in here by yourselves?’
Blaze shrugs. I guess the best answer to that question is not to answer at all.
Brook goes, ‘Everyone’s at the gazebo.’ He doesn’t need to add, And you should be too.
With the door open, I notice how the early morning air is damp and thick and solid. There’s a smell to it too, one I don’t recognise.
There’s charcoal in it, but something else too. It’s a rich, fleshy, fatty kind of smell. Already the smell’s working its way into my sungarb, my hair and even my skin.
Getting up, I ask, ‘What is that smell?’
‘An offering to Dot,’ Brook says, in this of course voice.
Out the front of the gazebo there’s a ring of people. Over their shoulders I can see they’re standing around a fire with a kind of big cross-bar built on top of it. There are two forked sticks rammed into the ground and another one resting between them horizontally. Speared onto the stick in the middle is a charred shape with three spindly legs sticking out.
State of Grace Page 12
