Storm

by Virginia Bergin

“Enjoy,” Xar says.

  I guess the kid must still be feeling sick or something because she doesn’t seem to want any, but me? I don’t need telling twice; I grab a slice of toast and a mug of tea, stuff toast into my face.

  Xar shivers, pulls on his shirt.

  “And then it’s bye-bye, I’m afraid,” he whispers, smiling, and slouches back up the stairs.

  The kid. I feel the kid breathing next to me. Grace, tray rattling, starts to sob. I flip. On the spot.

  I yee-haa.

  What’s to lose?! I glug tea to try to get the enormous glob of toast in my mouth swallowed.

  “We’ve got nowhere else to go!” I shriek after him, half choking on toast. I slug more tea.

  “Not my problem…” says Xar in a quiet voice, slouching out of sight.

  Now Grace is bawling.

  Ruby Morris Decision: blab.

  “They’ve got a cure,” I bellow. “There’s a cure!”

  King Xar pops his kingly head over the stairwell.

  “There’s a cure,” I say at him.

  Xar speed-slouches back down the stairs—Yeah, gotcha now, I think. I do know I kind of said I wouldn’t tell anyone. I don’t much care right now. All I want is a safe place to stay and more toast. I just REALLY want—MORE TOAST. I cram another mouthful in.

  I chew, nodding—bravely, meaningfully—at him. He just stares back. Speechless, I guess. Grace stops bawling, but her breathing is all jagged and weird. It’s a horrible sound.

  “You can go now,” Xar tells her, and she shuffles back to the kitchen, gasping weirdly.

  “Ladybird,” says Xar, breaking the silence. “We need to talk.”

  He holds out his hand to me. “Forgive me,” he says.

  It goes without saying that I’m basically never going to forgive Xar, but I am prepared to accept everything he has to offer by way of an apology, which consists of a breakfast the French chef would be hard pressed to improve upon in Xar’s private suite.

  It is important to note that, in my mind, what this apology also consists of is us being able to stay, and for that reason I am prepared to tell him EVERYTHING.

  And so I do that, lounging on a ginormous sofa with the Princess.

  She is listening. I know she’s listening. She shows no sign of it…but I know her enough to know that’s what she’s doing. And I don’t get so caught up in telling it all that I completely forget she is there. When I get to the most horrible parts (which, for me, are the kids on the ward and the “sampling” of my family), I find myself glancing nervously at her and trying to find a way to say what I need to say without letting my own horror splurge out any more than it demands to.

  Xar does show signs of listening. He sips some kind of green herbal tea from a china cup so thin the light from the lamp behind him shines through it, making pretty ripples on the fancy plaster ceiling where fat-cheeked cherubs cavort among fruit and flowers. He cocks his head this way and that as I speak, frowning and making “mm-hm” sympathetic noises of encouragement when I struggle to say how it was. And when I have finished, he asks many questions I can’t really answer, and one that I can:

  “Did you tell them about this place?”

  “No.”

  And then me and the Princess lie sleepy eyed on the sofa while Xar improves his understanding of what a phage is from a bunch of books that look even tougher to get your head around than anything I dared pick up in Dartbridge Library.

  I keep thinking he’s going to ask me another question, but he doesn’t.

  Finally, “So could we just get some sleep now, please?” I ask.

  Xar looks up like he’s surprised we’re still there.

  “We’re really tired.”

  “Sure,” he says, and waves at his ginormous four-poster bed, even huger than the one in the dressing-up room. He goes back to reading.

  “Isn’t there somewhere else we could sleep?” I ask.

  Xar looks up—a flicker of annoyance. “No,” he says, like it should somehow be obvious. “All the rooms are taken.”

  “Oh, er…” I start up, thinking Grace wouldn’t mind if we bunked with her.

  “You’ll find it perfectly comfortable,” he states, and goes back to his book.

  I don’t really want to go to sleep there, in his bed, but I’m too tired to argue it. I pull the sleepy Princess off the sofa and haul her up into that bed. She’s out like a light. So fast I’m not even sure if she was awake in the first place.

  Me, I get in too—but as soon as I lie down, my eyes zap open. Wide-awake.

  I shut them, I try to do the color-shape thing, but my mind is buzzing.

  I give up. I just stare at the window, and I watch the light behind it get stronger and stronger as dawn, finally, comes.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Swear to I’d shut my eyes for two seconds when Grace shakes me awake. She looks as terrible as I feel.

  “I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry,” she blurts into my face. “Look, I kept your stuff for you,” she says, shoving a plastic bag of my clothes at me. “I took care of it. I’m so sorry. Please forgive me? I’m so sorry.”

  “About what?” I say, really, really annoyed, rubbing my eyes and—ARGH—feeling like I am being tortured. Whatever part of sleep she just woke me from, it’s the one that hurts most to be dragged out of.

  “They made me do it.”

  Whu—?

  “He made me do it.”

  Whu—?

  “But you’re OK, right? You’re OK?” says Grace, stroking my stumpy hair.

  “Yeah, I’m OK, Grace,” I whisper. The Princess is still asleep beside me. I look to where Xar was sitting—he’s gone.

  “I’m so sorry,” Grace blurts.

  “OK,” I whisper-hiss at her, getting out of bed and leading her away from the Princess—and away from me; I’m leading her to the door. I don’t know what this is, but I do not want to hear about it now.

  “I didn’t want to do it,” she gibbers. “I didn’t want to.”

  “OK,” I say again. I just want her to go. I was asleep! “Later!” I open the door.

  “I didn’t want to do it even before I saw it was you,” she says.

  Whu—? My sleepy mind wakes up enough to shut the door.

  “Grace?” Weird prickly things happen up and down my spine. My guts—the guts that I have been trying so very hard to ignore—they lurch. “What?”

  “They told me I had to,” says Grace. “It’s how it works. If you want to stay here, you have to prove yourself. It was just my turn, Ruby. I didn’t know it would be you. I didn’t!”

  My head is really not wanting to try to make sense of this.

  Grace rubs her belly, soothing the baby inside her. “I need a safe place, Ruby.”

  “Yeah,” I tell her, thinking, We all do. “So what did you have to do?”

  “Kill someone.”

  No… My head is not having it. Did she just say…?

  “I mean, you know what Xar’s like. He thinks everyone should die anyway. So you’ve got to prove you agree with that to live.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I know! It’s totally up! But when he talks about it and stuff, it’s like it kind of makes sense…kind of…”

  I can’t even manage to shake my head properly.

  The apocalypse—it sure does bring out the best in people, doesn’t it?

  “…and anyway, tons of people died already,” Grace is waffling on. “That’s how you’ve got to think about it. Tons of people died.”

  “Are you saying… Grace, was the water in that tea bad?”

  She nods.

  “You were going to kill me…?” I can’t look at her. I turn my face away and see the kid in the bed. “And her?! You were going to kill a kid?”

  “You
’ve got to see it from my point of view,” Grace pleads…but I hear a snarl creeping into her voice. “What else could I do?”

  I look at her again. I feel physically sick.

  “It’ll be the same for you,” she comes back at me. “It’s what you’ll have to do.”

  I shake my head at her… No.

  “You will!”

  What the army have been doing, that was bad enough…but there was a point to it, wasn’t there? A sick, disgusting thing (killing people) to try to stop a sick, disgusting thing (people getting killed). This?

  “It’s disgusting. It’s sick. It’s mad.”

  She stares at me. It’s horrible. It’s like I can see inside her brain, see that creepy little wiggly-legged crawling all over it, laughing at the mess it has made—of the mind of a girl who (I must remember this) did not seem to be so different from me. Who cannot be so different from me.

  “Grace…” I don’t know what to say to her. I can hardly speak anyway. I feel like I’m definitely going to cry or throw up. Or both.

  “But I chose the tea, Ruby,” she gibbers on. “That was my choice.”

  I cry. I’d like to feel that it was my small, sad, human heart, but it is stress, exhaustion, and horror that make me weep.

  “I just thought…you know, if you’re going to have to kill someone…I mean, that’s nicer, isn’t it?” Grace is yammering on. “The other choice was a gun! I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t shoot someone!”

  My face scrunches up in disbelief—in disbelief that is wafer thin. I am coming to realize that I could believe anything about anyone.

  “I just did it for the baby. You’ve got to understand that! I just did it for the baby!”

  I gotta stay calm here. I also gotta go. GO.

  “Get up,” I tell the Princess, who is now awake and listening. I pull her up out of the bed.

  “We’ve got nowhere else to go!” Grace shouts, sobbing as I grab that sorry bag of stuff and drag that kid out of that room—and down the stairs and out of that place.

  I stuff the Princess into the car. We’ve not got much gas left, but we are so going. We are SO going.

  Trusted those people so much I didn’t follow my usual rule of reversing into that drive, so I have to reverse out of it now.

  Seconds, extra seconds.

  I look back—for the gazillionth time—when I know we’re not even going to make it to the highway. That in itself wouldn’t bother me—am I not (I am so!) the queen of car grabbers? But I will not have time to grab us a car.

  “I’m so sorry!” I tell the Princess, dodging stopped cars. “Those…people…are…very…bad…people.”

  Those people are after us.

  A couple of cars’ worth of them. Those I could outrun. I could certainly try. It will not be so easy to outrun the motorbike that Xar is on; he’s right behind us, so close I can see him smiling. If I didn’t have plenty of memories to make nightmares from already, this would be a stunning new addition. I do not want it—I refuse to have it—and I am a fearless driver. I am braver than Xar. I take a roundabout the short way (over) and watch Xar flounder and stop and have to double back. I’d laugh. I should be triumphant. But what I know is that we have no gas left. The needle is sinking into the red of doom.

  It is empty. It’s empty.

  Gotta run. Jump out of that car. Some huge building towers above us; glass door all smashed in—in we go. More doors; the metal shutters covering them pulled back, ripped away—the doors themselves smashed in. Museum. Great big hall, steps straight ahead of us, and us straight up them and Xar’s motorbike stopping outside, and take first exit off stairs, and it’s a stupid dead-end tiny room, and back out and—

  “Aw, Ladybird,” says Xar, his voice echoing around the building. “What did you run away for?”

  We stop, hear his footsteps. Then hear nothing but his listening.

  “Come out, come out, wherever you are…” he says. And I hear him decide. He is coming up the stairs.

  I take the Princess’s hand, and we creep up another flight of steps.

  It is a maze, this museum. It is an echoey marble and stone maze, with no way out and no place to hide. Stairs and more stairs and rooms and galleries that lead nowhere or back to more stairs. We creep-run past cases of dinosaur bones, then dead, stuffed things, glass eyes glinting in the dim light. I don’t want to think about the dodo. Every exit door I try is locked; every window has bars outside it—and every possible hiding place is too small or too blocked up—too tiny a gap left even to shove a Princess into.

  At the end of the geology section, I realize we are back where we started, back at the stairs. I squeeze the Princess’s hand. I want to tell her that I am sorry. That I meant to help, but that instead I have brought her to this place. Not the museum, specifically, because I have a feeling that she’s the kind of kid who’d find it quite interesting. But to this place, where even the SAS… You can imagine looking it up in the index of the SAS book: “Trapped…in Antarctic, in Arctic, in desert, in forest—ah!—in museum, by nutcase.” You can imagine frantically flicking through to the correct page. You can imagine the advice: “Hide.” Maybe you turn over the page and read one of their terrifying case studies on the subject. These seldom end well and are generally included to prove the SAS’s point. If you don’t do what they advise, you will probably die. (They should have written books on how to be a parent: “If your child fails to heed your advice about keeping shoelaces tied, try reading them this cautionary tale. ‘When on a family picnic in the alligator-infested swamps of Florida, little Bobby Jones failed to tie his shoelaces and…’”)

  I’m going on about the wrong things again, aren’t I?

  “Awwww, Lay-dee-bird,” says Xar, “where’d you fly to?”

  It’s what I do, isn’t it, when…

  He’s behind us. Could we make it down the stairs to the door? We’re not even going to get a chance—cars are pulling up outside. We go up instead. We have to.

  …It’s what I do when I can’t bear…

  It’s useless. Useless, useless, useless paintings. On into the historic pottery section, crammed with ornaments and plates and glass and—under the huge cases, there are gaps that look just big enough to stuff a kid into. I pick one by the wall and shove her in.

  …how horrible a thing is.

  Other footsteps coming into the building.

  The echoey sound of Xar’s footsteps, coming up the stairs.

  I back away, on through the pottery, as his voice booms out, “I think we should have ourselves a little bonfire, don’t you?”

  And I hear…splintering wood…

  I know what he’s doing; he is tugging and tearing a painting off the wall and I hear him fling it off the balcony, down into the hall.

  “Ging Gang Goolie, children,” he yells.

  Oh, and this thing, it is very horrible.

  The museum fills with the sound of the members of King Xar’s Court building a fire. Know what that sounds like? Stuff being smashed and broken and dragged and thrown, echoing so loud it’s like the building itself is being smashed to smithereens around you. But not loud enough to block out the sound of Xar.

  “You have been a very stupid girl,” he says.

  He grunts loudly, tearing another painting from the wall.

  “But I don’t want you to feel bad about that.”

  He starts on another.

  “Because people are stupid.”

  And another.

  “Don’t you think so, Ladybird?” he roars.

  I guess the paintings get dumped over the edge, because there’s a pause. In the mess of noise, it’s him I’m tuned in to, him I’m listening for—oh .

  He smashes a glass case.

  “IT’S PEOPLE THAT ARE THE PROBLEM,” he roars.

  He’s in the gallery behind me, whe
re the Princess is hiding.

  “PEOPLE DESERVE TO DIE.”

  Smash, smash, smash, smash…all those pretty things my grandma would have loved. And in between the huge smashes and the sound of whole shelves of stuff being swiped to the floor, I hear more precise acts of destruction—a pause, while he perhaps admires a thing, followed by single smash.

  “IT REALLY WOULD BE THE BEST THING FOR THE PLANET.”

  There’s a frenzy of smashing now, coming straight toward me—and all I can do is run away from it, through a labyrinth of cases…that ends back at the stairs.

  “DON’T YOU AGREE, LADYBIRD?”

  Over the balcony, I see how it is: a pyre of smashed stuff—of cases and creatures and things; on top of it a gorilla, coffins painted with hieroglyphics and solemn dead Egyptian faces…and Grace, standing there, keeping watch. She sees me. I shake my head at her, pleading silence. I don’t know what her answer is because I hear Xar smashing his way right behind me, and I leap down the stairs, steps at a time, and back up the other side, through the smashed and torn remains of paintings and into the kingdom of pottery—which is not how I left it. All the superglue in the world won’t put this right.

  “LADYBIRD!” Xar screams—he’s at the stairs—and I can’t move now. Not from the terror, but because I cannot walk into this smashed-up place and be silent. I am trapped.

  “They got out!” Grace shouts. “They just ran out!”

  She is a terrible, terrible liar. Her pathetic lie echoes weakly around the building. I hold my breath; I am a thing, waiting to be smashed. There is a pause—the rest of the mob quiets; I hear their footsteps returning to the hall, even as Xar starts on Grace.

  “Are you sure about that?” Xar asks. He doesn’t ask it in a nice way. “ARE. YOU. SURE?”

  “Yes!” cries Grace.

  Really—she’s such a terrible liar she may as well be pointing at where I went…which, for all I know, she could be.

  “YOU. DON’T. SOUND. SURE. GRACE.”

  “It’s because I’m scared!” she shrieks.

  Now that does sound convincing.

  “I’m scared you’re going to blame me! I didn’t have to say anything, did I? Please, Xar! Please! I’ll do anything!”