She motions to him and he kneels down next to me. Close, but, even after everything, still not quite touching.
‘Luke,’ Lainie says. ‘Are you ready to welcome Dot back into your life?’
Blaze kind of shrugs. ‘If I have to.’
He turns his head towards me so for the first time since he came through the doors we’re looking right at each other.
‘If that’s what I have to do to be with her.’
35
ME AND BLAZE are side by side. My head’s bent, but through my curtain of hair I can see his profile, the one familiar thing in all this strangeness.
Lainie Shepherd’s assistant wipes away the sticky blood from my neck then runs another cool swab over the skin.
She leans over me. ‘You’ll feel a slight pressure now. No pain. Nothing to worry about.’
And then … well, it’s hard to explain the next bit exactly. This single word comes to me, and I don’t mean someone like Dot tells it to me or anything like that.
It’s more like the word blooms inside me. As in, it’s me, finally telling myself what to do.
No.
Blaze was free but he came back. To have the procedure just so we can be together. That’s enough for me to be sure I can’t let either one of us have it. Ever.
So the next thing I do, I sort of haul my head upwards. I slam it into the underside of the assistant’s jaw, crunching her mouth closed. She yelps, with surprise or pain, I don’t know which.
When she reels backwards, I get up on my feet. Beside me, Blaze is standing too and he’s yelling and yelling and the entire room just erupts.
Woven through all the shouting I hear Lainie Shepherd.
‘I suggest you stay right where you are.’
Me and Blaze start trying to move through the crowd.
‘You signed a contract. You do realise you’re obligated to have this procedure? The terms clearly state –’
‘Go!’ I tell Blaze. ‘Run!’
But there’s nowhere to run. The aisle is heaving with people.
The double doors are blocked. All around are security guards with those black gas guns, each one pointed directly at us.
The guns make a snapping, cracking kind of sound as they fire. A cap hits the silky banner on the wall behind my head, explodes and releases its contents with a hiss.
Lainie Shepherd is moving through the crowd.
‘Keep your mouths and noses well covered,’ she’s saying, a blue mask already covering her own face. ‘Don’t breathe anything in.’
More cracks. Caps are everywhere now, ricocheting off the walls and the chairs and the roof. A planter’s hit, sending water and newfruit blossoms arcing through the air.
The air smells like smoke and gas and panic.
The space between us and the guns is getting smaller. My head feels like it’s swollen to twice its normal size. My neck’s too reedy-thin to support it. My eyes are doing that burning thing and I’m sort of swaying on my feet.
I swing around, grabbing for anything to support me. I end up banging into the stand where the equipment was. The top of my leg slams into it so that I suddenly feel the twisted shape of Alex’s matchbox in my pocket.
Gas and fire.
Somehow, the two things are linked in my head. I don’t remember why I think so, but I’m pretty sure that something big will happen if I light a match in here.
I try taking out a match but my fingers feel too thick and stumpy to handle the tiny little mashed-up box. When I do manage to pick one up, it snaps in my trembling hands.
Another match.
The shaking in my hands is even more intense. But the match lights this time and I flick it into the air. It spins there and every sound is wiped out by this one gigantic woomph.
I haven’t heard a sound like that since the night Julius died.
This time, it’s deliberate.
That night, I realise now, everything that happened was a terrible, awful, painful accident.
Flames mushroom up and out. Heat crackles after them, and vents on Lainie’s roof release this stinking foam that’s meant for putting out fire.
There’s smoke, flashing lights, alarms, everything. So many people are running and shouting that it’s pretty much impossible to work out who is who.
Blaze snatches up a chair. It hurtles over our heads and straight into a window. Shards of Shepherd-blue glass fly out and clear, bright light rushes in through the jagged hole.
The silky banner with Dot’s face is torn between the eyes where the cap hit it, rippling and billowing now in the sudden gust of air.
Me and Blaze just run for the window, hands up to push our way through.
I’m afraid to jump through the hole and slash my skin and maybe that’s why I stop. Only for a second but it’s enough.
Someone grabs me and yells, ‘That’s her!’
I’m just waiting for a knee in my back or an arm round my throat. But it never comes. Right beside me another voice yells.
‘Nah, she’s work experience. The girl’s gone that way.’
The hand lets me go and suddenly I’m jumping through the window with Blaze right behind me. And then we’re running.
____________________
We are free.
Behind us, the Shepherd complex. It’s daylight and I see the whole building from the outside for the first time. It’s long and low, every window shrouded in blue-frosted glass apart from the one we just smashed. One long corridor with a curved section at one end.
I get it. It’s a shepherd’s crook.
Flames are already jumping from Lainie’s office at the curving tip of the crook. They’re working on swallowing the whole building, where Fern and Gil and everyone else are.
Except now there are guards and orderlies and whoever else spewing out of every entrance. There are sleeping bodies on stretchers but I can also see people I recognise up on their feet.
Sage, still groggy and staggering, and Luna too, coughing up her insides from all the smoke.
‘It’s this way out,’ Blaze says, plunging forward.
In front of us all I can see is this endless tarmac full of cars. I follow him though. Blaze has been out there once before so I figure he knows how to weave his way through the cars and find the fence he’s been talking about.
And that’s when I hear a voice shouting my name. I spin around and someone’s running towards us.
It’s Brook, barefoot, a Shepherd hospital robe flapping around his lean legs. Behind him, a bunch of security guards with guns.
‘Viva!’ Brook shouts.
I stop. I’m trying to make sense of what I’ve just seen and heard. Okay, so Brook’s awake, just like some of the others. But how does he know my real name?
‘What are you stopping for?’ Blaze says. ‘We have to keep moving!’
Dust and grit swirl around my ankles. Ash rains down around us, turning the Shepherd carpark an even duller shade of grey. Shouting voices compete with the angry sound of flames.
But all I hear is what Brook says next.
‘Dennis is in there,’ Brook jerks his head at the crook-shaped building. It’s really blazing now. ‘You have to go back for him. He says he’s only coming out if it’s with you.’
I don’t ask how Dennis got there. I just grab hold of Brook and look at him closely. His eyes are this pale, clear blue without their normal big black circles in the middle. For some reason I think about that mark on his ankle, a circle.
A circle-shaped tattoo, not a dotmark after all.
‘Where?’ I say. ‘Which room?’
At the same time Brook tells me Dennis is in his room, I think of Alex talking about the Circle, trying to tell me more, but me not wanting to hear it.
Something sails through the air and lands at my feet.
Alex’s pass.
I snatch it up and put it around my neck. I spin on my heels and head towards the straight section of the building.
‘Don’t!’ Blaze yells. ‘It�
��s Brook. Don’t trust him.’
And he lunges out to stop me but Brook elbows Blaze hard in the stomach.
There’s this ooof sound and Blaze staggers backwards. He goes on calling my name, yelling at me to stop, to think about what I’m doing, that getting myself killed won’t save Dennis if he really is inside.
I’m pretty sure Blaze is about to punch Brook but I don’t wait to find out. I just run and I hope they’ll figure something out before security grabs both of them.
As I go I’m wondering a billion things at once. Like, how Brook must be Circle and was he always that way, the whole time we were doing the trial?
How did he fool everyone? Did he get Dennis out and keep him hidden somehow?
But as my feet slap the tarmac I’m mainly thinking of Julius, and how everything’s going to be different this time.
36
SMOKE HANGS THICK in the air. It wraps itself around me, blanketing my body, coating my mouth, whipping my eyes until they sting.
The noise is just as suffocating. Alarms screeching. People screaming. Running feet. Gas guns firing. A helicopter above us raining down a chemical spray.
Shepherd might have reinvented paradise but right now it feels pretty much like hell.
Inside, windows are exploding and a section of the roof has collapsed. Every entrance is crammed with people, trial participants dazed and wandering, medics with other participants flat out on stretchers.
Choose an entrance, I tell myself. It doesn’t matter which. Every door’s as dangerous as the next.
So I dive for the nearest door. Bursting out the other way is a stretcher, two men in Shepherd uniforms on either end.
I squeeze to one side.
‘His arm,’ one man shouts, and I see the figure on the stretcher has a pale limb thrown over the edge.
Five long fingers are trailing the air. Fingers that have crawled over my skin. Fingers that only recently were hurling rocks at my head.
I don’t stop to take another look at Gil. One of the men is busy replacing his arm on the stretcher. The other one looks straight at me. I freeze.
Jordy.
‘Watch what you’re doing, mate,’ says Jordy to the other man.
‘Me watch out?’ the man snaps back. ‘That was your stuff-up.’
A slight nod from Jordy and I duck my head and dodge through the door. Is Jordy Circle? How many others are there?
Heat shimmers and smoke obscures everything. I try to think clearly, work out which way Brook’s room is.
And then – do I imagine it? – I hear Dennis’s voice.
Viva! Help!
‘Coming,’ I scream. It comes out like a seal bark, as coughs grab at my chest. ‘Where are you?’
I’m scared, quavers the little voice.
‘It’s okay,’ I tell Dennis. ‘Even big kids get scared sometimes.’
I’m running in the direction of the voice, even though I don’t know if it’s real. It’s the only thing I can think to do. I have to find him, even though I don’t know which room is Brook’s.
Now, before the entire building burns. Or falls.
‘Hey.’A hand clamps my shoulder. ‘How’d you get in here?’
I can feel the butt of a gas gun in the small of my back.
‘It’s this way,’ the guard says, and he propels me forward.
But it’s weird. He’s pushing me into the corridor, not out.
‘There’s me, Alex and a few dozen others,’ the security guard pants. ‘We’re Shepherd but we’re Circle too. And Brook is …’
I’m sure this is all really interesting. And I’d like to hear what the guard has to say, I seriously would. It’s just that my head’s already full of Dennis’s little voice calling to me, on top of my own reminding me what I have to do.
‘I know,’ I snap. ‘Just get me to Dennis.’
And the two of us run down the corridor, the endless handle of the shepherd’s crook.
‘4–0–2,’ says the guard. ‘This one.’
By now the air’s pretty much solid with smoke. I can’t see any numbers on any of the doors but when the guard blips one open I have all the confirmation I need. I mean, it’s hard to miss Dennis’s keening cry and the sound of his voice saying my name over and over again.
And then I guess Dennis recognises my voice because suddenly this small, shivering shape catapults out from under the bed.
‘It’s you,’ says Dennis, and it comes out happy and relieved and hysterical all at once.
Dennis grabs on around my knees, so I unclasp him and hoist him into the air.
‘I can carry him,’ the guard says.
But at the exact same time, me and Dennis both squeak, ‘No!’
It’s been a long time since I’ve felt this kind of weight in my arms. Now I have it, there’s no way I’m letting go. I don’t care that flames are starting to lick their way along the roof. It doesn’t even matter that there’s a whole pack of security guards outside looking for me.
All I know is, I’m hanging onto Dennis and the two of us are getting out of here. Right now.
Together.
37
‘WAIT,’ SAYS LUKE. ‘You can’t start yet.’
I stop mid-lick, my tongue pressed to my ice-cream cone. ‘It’s dripping all over me.’
‘So let it.’
Luke is laughing. His hands are literally covered with sticky green splashes of melted ice-cream, the same way mine are. ‘We have to be on the sand before we start eating.’
‘Why?’
‘That’s the rule.’
‘I thought we didn’t have them anymore.’
‘We don’t have Books. There are still rules.’
‘Okay then. What are they?’
‘Still working them out.’
‘In that case …’ I swirl my tongue around my ice-cream while Luke pretend-huffs, his free hand in mine.
To be honest, it’s getting late and pretty cold but we clatter our way down the wooden staircase to the beach anyway, our long shadows crinkling over every step. The stairs are hardly wide enough for one of us, let alone the two of us next to each other, hands firmly clasped together.
But we don’t let go.
At the bottom of the stairs, we take our shoes off. Straightaway, Luke plunges his feet into the sand and wiggles his toes around.
‘Exactly how I remember it,’ he says.
And then he sort of goes inside his head and I let him, because that’s what he does when the same thing happens to me.
We’re both recovering stuff and we still have a way to go. Some things we’re not sure we’ll ever remember properly.
Other things, like Father Mike for Luke and Julius’s accident for me, are back completely and won’t ever go away.
I think about Julius all the time now. Not just the accident, but Julius when he was alive. Sometimes I even talk to him, although not the way I talked to Dot. I mean, I definitely know Julius isn’t up there in the clouds or anything.
He’s gone and that makes me more than sad every single day. But the one way I can hold onto him is to remember him, so that’s why I talk to him. To keep him alive inside my head at least.
I lean over and take a big bite out of Luke’s cone and that’s when he comes back to right now.
‘It’s okay to eat mine as well as yours now, is it?’
I shrug. ‘We’re still working on the rules, aren’t we?’
‘Goes both ways then,’ he says, taking a huge mouthful of my ice-cream.
So I steal another bite of his.
Even though I’m pretty sure ice-cream is something people are supposed to eat in summer, now seems like a perfect time to me.
In front of us, grey-green waves are breaking, churning into messy foam before sloshing their way up the sand. Behind us are huge dunes held together with some tufty kind of grass.
Then beyond that, almost hidden by the dunes, is the place we’re staying.
When the Circle people asked us where
we wanted to go, Luke straightaway said the beach. In his head, he was reclaiming it from Father Mike or something, I guess.
Anyway, it turned out Brook – who’s really called Guy – knew someone with cabins that are basically always empty in winter.
I guess no-one really goes to the beach in the cold weather, except for a pair of escapees and some activists figuring out their next move against a humungous drug company.
‘So what was that one about?’ I ask Luke.
Without my having to say it, Luke knows I mean what he saw in his head.
‘Not about Repton.’
‘What then?’
‘Nothing from way back,’ Luke says, which is our term for everything that happened to us before Grace. ‘It was something from Dot’s place.’
‘And that would be?’
‘By the pond. I never told you who my someone was.’
And then, of course, he stops talking. We might be free, but Luke and Blaze are pretty much the same guy and neither is the best at saying what he feels.
‘You can’t start something like that and then go quiet.’
Luke blushes. ‘It’s kind of …’
‘You can look away, remember.’
So he does. Luke stares the other way across the beach as he gives his little speech all over again, the one about the point of things being ice-cream on the beach.
But even more important than that, Luke tells me, is doing those things with someone who matters to you. As in, your someone.
This time, he adds the last bit. That for him, that someone is me.
So it’s sort of obvious that I should put my hand on his neck and move his face towards mine again, so the two of us can join our sticky, ice-creamy lips.
Which is exactly what happens.
Luke doesn’t pull back or anything like that. Afterwards, he rests his cheek on my shoulder and even puts his arm around me.
The two of us are connected and suddenly I get it. Luke’s totally right. Seriously, it isn’t some type of magical being in the sky who’s going to make this whole living thing worthwhile.
It’s actual, real-life people.
The hard part comes when those people die or disappear or leave you behind or hurt you. But as impossible as it sounds, even those things you can find a way to handle. You and your someones, together.
State of Grace Page 22
