When We Wake

by Karen Healey

  “Really? What did I say?” I yawned. “I feel terrible. Do you hate me?”

  He sounded surprised. “No.”

  “Oh, good. But you don’t want to be friends.”

  “I think we have to be friends now,” he said. He sounded very matter-of-fact. “If we don’t have each other, we’ll have no one. Have you finished vomiting?”

  “I think so.”

  Abdi lowered me onto the floor, which swayed alarmingly, and went away. When he returned, it was with a blanket, which he draped over me. It was scratchy but warm, and I curled under it, trying to ignore the swooping sensation of the boat rolling back and forth. “We’re really friends?”

  “Sure.”

  “So you should sing to me,” I said triumphantly.

  He laughed. It was a clear, ringing sound, and totally unexpected in that dank, stinking place.

  “I’m serious!”

  “I know. That’s what’s funny. We’re kidnapped and imprisoned, and you sound so happy that you might be able to make me sing.”

  “Well?”

  Abdi laughed again, softer this time, and then he began to hum. It was “Hey Jude.” After a few bars, he began singing properly, his rich voice quiet but clear. After that, he sang “I’m So Tired” and “Blackbird.” He was halfway through “Golden Slumbers” when I felt his hands in my hair, gently picking out the pins keeping all the curls in place.

  “Nice,” I mumbled.

  Abdi’s hands stopped. “I thought you were getting some sleep.”

  “Nope.”

  “Then you should try,” he said. “I think we’ll need rest.”

  I thought about arguing, but he was singing something else, in a language I couldn’t understand. It was a soft melody that sounded like a lullaby. Caught between my exhaustion, the drugs, the gentleness in his voice, and the rise and fall of the sea, I fell asleep.

  Okay. Most of this next part might be a little dodgy in terms of chronology. Some of this stuff I learned later, listening to Rachel and the other girls talk in the kitchens, but it wouldn’t make sense to explain that every time, so I’m just going to lump it all in together.

  Abdi says that I don’t need to underline this, because everyone knows that a life narrative is edited in the telling, even if it’s just unconsciously, but I think it’s important to be honest.

  I promised to tell you the truth.

  Abdi woke me when we made landfall.

  “I think we’re here,” he said. “Don’t do anything stupid.”

  When the two men came in with their long guns, I managed to behave myself, standing quietly beside Abdi.

  “Move out,” the shorter one said. “Slowly.”

  “This is so illegal,” I said.

  “We follow the laws of God, not man,” the taller one said. “Keep your hands in sight, child.”

  I was pretty sure God had some stuff to say about violence and abduction. “If you’re going to kill me, do it now,” I said.

  Abdi bit out something that I was pretty sure was unflattering and stepped in front of me, pressing me backward, as I’d done for him in the underground complex.

  “We will not hurt you, Tegan,” the shorter one said earnestly. “You must meet God in your own time.”

  “Quiet, Conrad!”

  Conrad subsided, looking guilty, but he’d said what I’d been desperately hoping to hear. The Inheritors of the Earth had been fairly publicly consistent about what they wanted me to do. As long as they were sticking to persuading me to kill myself instead of taking a shortcut and cutting out that intervening step, I was confident I could handle it.

  I mean, it creeped me out, and I was worried about what they might do to persuade me, but I was much less concerned about a weirdo cult that expressly didn’t want to kill me than I was about a powerful government that possibly did.

  You’ve got to have priorities.

  “You could let Abdi go,” I said. Even if we didn’t have the footage, he could at least be a witness, and he could make sure Bethari and Joph were okay.

  “He could identify us to your police. He stays,” the taller guy said, and gestured to the door with the butt of his rifle. “Move.”

  We moved.

  Outside, it was evening, shading into night. We’d spent most of the daylight on the water.

  The Inheritors’ compound was a collection of low, neat stone buildings nestled in a small bay, with high, forested hills rising from the grassy plain. It was noticeably cooler than Melbourne had been, though still hot by my standards. There weren’t many places in Australia on the coast that were cooler than Melbourne.

  “Are we in Tasmania?” I asked.

  “Hush, child.”

  I opened my mouth to argue, but then I saw the cows.

  Actually, it would be more accurate to say that then I smelled the cows.

  They were being driven out of the milking sheds, what looked like a hundred of them, all mooing and pooing and generally looking one short step more intelligent than sheep.

  “But people don’t keep cattle anymore,” I said.

  “We do,” Conrad said. “We are the Inheritors of the Earth. Masters of the fish of the sea, the birds of heaven, the cattle, all the wild animals, and all the creatures that creep along the ground.”

  “And God said, ‘Be fruitful and fill the earth,’ ” I said.

  “And subdue it,” Conrad finished, and smiled at me. “It’s good that you understand.”

  “I understand that you abducted me and made me throw up,” I said cheerfully. “I hope God forgives you, because I sure won’t.”

  His face fell. We walked up a low slope to the biggest stone building with the highest roof. I looked around, trying to get my bearings. It was pretty useless—I hadn’t even been to Tasmania in my own time, and it was a big island. About all I could say was that we were on the coast somewhere.

  There were boys my age and younger in the milking sheds, taking care of the milking machines. They weren’t in loose-fitting linen like the men who’d abducted us, or the man Gregor had shot in the church, but T-shirts and jeans. I hadn’t seen blue jeans in a while.

  “You must sell the milk,” Abdi said conversationally. “And the beef, to those gourmands who still eat it.”

  “Rich hypocrites,” the other man grunted.

  “Be kind, Joseph,” Conrad said, and I wondered which of them was in charge. Or if neither was. These people were really weird. When I’d gone to Mass regularly, there’d been people there who kind of freaked me out the same way, as if they weren’t entirely in this world. Some part of their heads always seemed to be somewhere else, thinking about things I couldn’t imagine.

  The guns were very real, though, so Abdi and I kept walking.

  The biggest building turned out to be some kind of combination meeting hall and cafeteria. It was absolutely packed with people sitting at long tables, from old poppas and nonnas to the babies some of the women were holding. I noticed that most of the people seemed to be white, but not as many as I would have expected from communities like this in my time. “Racial purity” clearly wasn’t one of their things. It was hot inside, and the big fans lazily cycling overhead didn’t do much more than move the air about.

  They were all dressed in jeans, except for some of the older women, who were in long dresses, and a couple of the older guys in those linen robe things, and they were all looking at us, hushing one another as they craned to stare at the strangers.

  Conrad gestured us to a door at the back of the room. We’d have to walk past all those staring people to get there.

  I felt Abdi hesitate beside me.

  “It’s a performance,” I said under my breath. “Just a show.” If I could do a live interview with the horrible Hurfest, I could do this. I conveniently ignored how that little adventure had ended, lifted my chin, and began to walk.

  I’d wanted to pretend they weren’t there, but I was looking around too much for that, so instead I held eye contact with a few p
eople. One dark-haired girl actually let out a small scream when I did, hiding her face behind her friends. Abdi was looking straight ahead as if they were beneath his notice. Between us, we must have looked pretty fierce, even though I was wearing ill-fitting borrowed clothes spattered with my own dried vomit, and Abdi had patchy black stubble sprouting on his chin and scalp.

  Then we were through the door that Conrad held open. He shut it behind us, and for the first time in a while there were no guns pointed in our direction.

  Escape wasn’t an option, though. For one thing, I could smell something that made it clear just how hungry I was. For another, the woman waiting for us was huge, so big and muscular that I almost didn’t notice the girl in jeans hovering behind her.

  The woman sported cook’s muscles, like my mother. She had the same sort of smell about her, too, of herbs and flour, and the scent made me inhale sharply. But unlike Mum, who liked shorts and colorful tops, this woman was wearing one of those long dresses under a spotless apron. She looked us up and down and grunted. Then she moved away, and I saw the smaller table behind her. There was a big loaf of bread in the middle and bowls filled with something that was steaming hot.

  “Sit,” she said, and we sat. There was definitely meat in the bowls, along with diced vegetables and a thick gravy. My mouth got in the way of my principles by watering uncontrollably. I swallowed before I started drooling.

  “We say grace,” the woman announced, and bowed her head over the food. The girl quickly followed her. I said a quick prayer myself, though it was more a plea for help than an expression of thanks. Abdi, when I opened my eyes, was looking at me dubiously.

  The woman pushed a plate of bread toward us. “I’m Mrs. McClung, and this is Rachel. We know that unbelievers abjure the full bounty of the Lord, but we cooked this good meal, with the grace of God, and you will eat it with no complaint.”

  I almost laughed in her face. The Inheritors of the Earth must have been the only people in the country who didn’t know that, as a past-timer, I was a filthy meat-eating Earth hater.

  But it was Abdi who was the real star of the show. Without blinking an eye, he picked up his fork and popped a chunk of beef into his mouth. “Good,” he said around the mouthful.

  Mrs. McClung’s eyes nearly started out of her head. Rachel stifled a nervous giggle. She looked a little older than me, and I envied her long, light brown hair. No one had stuck her in a chair and argued for three hours about which extensions to use. Lucky, lucky her.

  I stuffed a forkful of stew into my mouth, knowing it was that or hysterical giggles as I began to lose it. Abdi was right, though; the stew was freaking delicious.

  “What herbs are you using?” I asked.

  Mrs. McClung’s eyebrows rose. “Never you mind.”

  “I taste tarragon and rosemary,” I said. “And something else, something warm. Cumin?”

  “Paprika,” Rachel said, then looked guilty.

  “Oh, of course. Hungarian?”

  “Smoked,” Mrs. McClung said grimly.

  “Deeee-licious,” I said, and speared a piece of potato. Potato is nearly always the best part of a stew. I rolled the bite around in my mouth, enjoying the richness of the meat sauce. Mrs. McClung might be a zealot-cum-prison-matron, but she was an excellent cook.

  I ate until my stomach felt round and tight, tearing off pieces of bread and dunking them in. Rachel refilled my bowl twice, looking impressed and faintly gratified. Abdi ate more slowly, flicking his eyes at the room as he chewed.

  I had no idea what he was looking at, but it turned out he was searching for something that wasn’t there.

  “Where are the computers?” he asked.

  “We don’t use those things here,” Mrs. McClung said, somewhat smugly. “We’re good, old-fashioned folk here, free of the outside world’s contamination.”

  Some of the buildings, Rachel told me later, were over a hundred years old, older than the Inheritors as a group. But the newer buildings were built in the same style, with big windows and old-fashioned electrical wiring. They turned their lights and appliances on with switches instead of talking to a house computer, and they had no Internet at all: no ’casting, no EarRings, no news.

  To me, it was weird, but close enough to familiar. To Abdi, it looked like something out of a history ’cast.

  To be honest, until we talked later, I didn’t have a really strong idea of what Djibouti was like—though I knew it was more complicated than mud huts. I’d kind of been envisioning the Djibouti of the future with a similar level of technology to my Melbourne of the past. But it wasn’t. Medicines might have been limited, but Djibouti’s geothermal energy was plentiful, and computers were cheap. Djiboutians didn’t typically get the best upgrades and the fanciest applications, but all but the very poorest citizens had a computer or access to one, even if it was fifty tech-generations old.

  Abdi’s own family was far from poor. His father owned a small shipping company that did a brisk trade throughout the Red Sea, and his mother was a politician with huge popular support. They took holidays in Arta, where it actually got cool at night, and lived in a big house with its own generator and plenty of servants. (He glossed over that a bit, but I was pretty sure he hadn’t made his bed himself until he got to Australia.) Abdi was given his first brand-new computer when he turned four.

  His parents had made it very clear to their children that they were fortunate, and that one of the consequences for that was service to those who weren’t. Abdi’s older sister had completed an engineering degree at the University of Ilorin in Nigeria and went home to work on an irrigation-system update for Djibouti’s limited arable land. His older brother was halfway through a medical-technician apprenticeship. Abdi had expected to follow in his mother’s footsteps and go into law, then politics.

  And then a curious firstie ’caster had wandered past Abdi’s cousin’s wedding and caught Abdi singing on camera, and the wealthier parts of the world had taken note of his voice. When the Elisabeth Murdoch Academy offered to sponsor Abdi through the Talented Alien program, the family had discussed the opportunity at length. It had been a difficult decision. Abdi was brilliant and studious and spoke four languages. He could get a law degree from the University of Ibadan or the University of Khartoum. He could go to Cairo or Kuwait City or Paris.

  But an education in impossible-to-reach Australia at an elite academy and a law degree from a university there might give him even higher standing on his return. His fame had been undesirable and unlooked for, but it could be made to work for him and his homeland. He would certainly encounter prejudice in Australia, but the contacts he made there could be very valuable.

  The family talked it over but could come to no consensus. It was up to Abdi to decide.

  Even back then, he might have been thinking how else he could help his people. No one in Abdi’s father’s household was likely to die of Travis Fuller Syndrome; they had the money and influence to get almost everything they needed for themselves. But Abdi had been eight years old during the first epidemic, and eleven during the second. By the time he’d turned fifteen, nearly a third of the kids in his flute classes—the poorer ones—were dead from a disease that could be fixed with four little pink pills.

  Abdi knew the risks. He didn’t want to disappoint his family, and having representatives in Djibouti who firsters would listen to was important. But getting badly needed drugs back home was even more so, and he could trade on his father’s name to shipping contacts. He made a few discreet inquiries and waited.

  Barely a week after he got to Melbourne and settled in with the family with whom he was boarding, he’d been approached by someone he only ever described as “my friend.” Abdi’s friend knew that Abdi was going to Elisa M and of Joph’s reputation as a chemistry genius. Abdi talked to Joph, and she agreed to manufacture the necessary medicines for nothing more than the price of replacing the materials. She took on the ditz role, increased her sales of recreational drugs in order to pay for the
extra equipment she needed, and handed Abdi the drugs in the janitor’s closet.

  Four little pink pills per person. And Abdi took hundreds every week to “his friend.”

  I know that a lot of you think I’m a hero. Abdi isn’t showing me all the messages, because I need to concentrate on what I’m doing, but every now and then, he’ll pass one to me when he thinks I need cheering up in a bad part.

  But Abdi and Abdi’s friend and Joph and everyone else who helped get those drugs to the people who needed them are the real heroes. They’ve saved thousands of lives.

  Those aren’t the lives you want to hear about, though, are they? Those stories have been available to you for decades, and you haven’t been listening. It’s my story you’re hitting in unprecedented numbers. It’s the Living Dead Girl you think is—

  Okay. I’m being bitter. It’s not that I think my story isn’t worth your attention, obviously. But when I’m done, or while I’m still talking, I encourage you to look a little wider.

  Anyway, like I said, we talked about that later. That first night, we were separated right after the meal. Conrad came in and told Abdi to go with him.

  “We do not allow young men and young women to sleep in the same quarters,” Mrs. McClung said.

  Abdi looked back at me and made a gesture I thought was supposed to be reassuring. I didn’t feel very reassured; my only friend in a strange place was walking out the door.

  Rachel led me to another of the stone buildings. It was full of three-tier bunk beds and chattering girls. They didn’t exactly stop talking when I came in, but there was a pause, and then their voices went hushed and secretive. All the beds had individual curtains, and little shelves built into the headboards, so everyone had some privacy and personal space.

  Rachel held out a long cotton nightgown. “You may wear this.”

  I took it and glanced at the other girls. Some of them looked boldly back, then turned to their friends to gossip. “I guess I’m big news,” I said.