The Fifth Room

by A J Rushby

  I’d thought about this for a second. Checked out the size of the group. Then, ‘You’re on,’ I’d told her.

  Emily had stepped forward towards the group. ‘Quick question: who here doesn’t play the violin and the piano?’

  There was a pause and then, hesitantly, one girl raised her hand. ‘I play the cello and piano.’

  I dragged Emily back into our room, slammed the door and held out my hand with a grin. ‘Pay up.’

  ‘Oh, come on.’

  ‘Nope. You should have been more specific. I knew there’d be a viola or a cello in there somewhere …’

  She’d reluctantly handed over my five bucks. ‘Anyway,’ I told her, ‘there’s nothing wrong with playing a musical instrument.’

  ‘But they all play the same ones! What’s wrong with the tuba? That’s what I want to know!’

  ‘You play the tuba?’

  ‘No. I just think it’s a very underrated instrument, that’s all.’

  I’d attempted to process this and failed. ‘I’m beginning to wonder if I’ll ever understand you. I’m hoping not, for my sake.’

  Emily had done that grabbing my arms thing again. I’d realised by that point she liked to do this. A lot.

  ‘Look,’ she’d said, ‘my point is that one day we’ll have to go out into the big wide world, and when we do that, we need to be citizens. We need to look like normal people. We’ve got to fly under the radar.’

  ‘Um, we’re part of the Thirty. I think we’re kind of on the radar already.’

  ‘Yes, but we won’t always be, will we? Eventually they turn us loose, you know, and then we’re supposed to go out into that big scary place called The World where we will be part of The Billions and have what’s known as A Life. That’s my point.’

  I’d finally got what she was worried about then. It was exactly the same thing my dad had been worried about for years. Why he’d been carefully holding me back instead of hastily shoving me forward like I’m sure lots of these kids’ parents did. Full freak. Emily had condensed it all down into two little words.

  That girl really made me laugh.

  Unlike Steen, Emily wasn’t angry about my sudden departure when it happened. She was more … concerned. ‘Look, I won’t ask a million questions because I know you and I know if you had to do this, you had to do it. Just tell me one thing. He didn’t hurt you, did he?’ This was what she’d asked me when I’d called her a few days after I’d left. I’d been vague in my answer, but explained it was more like the other way around.

  I go over and pick up my phone and stare at it for a moment or two. And then I set my alarm and flop back onto the bed again.

  The alarm wakes me up at a few minutes before eight. I don’t want to get up, but know I have to if I’m going to get to dinner on time, so I sling my legs over the bed and take a deep breath. Amazingly, the second two pills seem to have worked and my headache has retreated.

  I head into the bathroom and try to pull my appearance together with a high, loose bun and a dash of lip gloss. Something tells me Lauren and Andrew couldn’t care less what I turn up wearing and Steen most likely won’t look at me at all, so this will do. I tuck my room key into the pocket of my skinny black jeans and head for the door.

  I have no idea where I’m going, but Marcus had said ‘upstairs’, so I make my way to the bar and restaurant on the top floor.

  The elevator opens into the bar itself and I have to blink several times before my eyes become accustomed to the dark. The space seems to be a two-level affair, with a long black bar on this level and the restaurant below.

  ‘Ah, there you are.’ It’s Marcus who greets me, stepping over from the bar. I glance around him to see that the others are already there. Spotting our group is now here in its entirety, a waiter leads us to our table.

  Marcus falls in beside me as we walk. ‘Steen mentioned you weren’t feeling well. Is everything all right?’

  ‘Just a headache, but I’m fine now. Yay for drugs.’

  He smiles back at me. ‘I think we’d all agree with you there. After you …’ Marcus gestures.

  As I round the table, I take a deep breath and remind myself I need to try to enjoy this. Enjoy the process. As I go, I catch sight of the view. I see now why the restaurant and bar are so dimly lit. They’re not the main attraction here. Far from it.

  The restaurant is surrounded on all sides by huge panes of glass, the windows sweeping right up to the high ceiling. Below, Vienna twinkles and shines, architectural highlights picked out in the panorama by their own spotlights. I spot City Hall and St Stephen’s Cathedral. ‘Oh, look, the Prater.’ I point, seeing the giant Ferris wheel as the maître d’ seats me in my square leather chair.

  As I stare at the giant wheel with its huge wooden carriages, I can’t help but remember the weekend I’d been to a ‘Youth in Medicine’ symposium in Vienna only weeks before I’d bolted. Steen had been invited as well and we’d sneaked out of the sessions on the Saturday afternoon to take in the sights. It had been close to Christmas and Vienna was magical—lit up like something out of a fairytale. It had also been freezing cold. Despite the weather, we’d braved the giant wheel, which was a must for tourists, and had huddled in the corner of one of the carriages. I close my eyes for a moment, almost hearing the old wooden carriage creak and groan around me—feeling the deliciousness of the cold on my face and Steen’s warmth. After that we’d eaten our way around a Christmas market. Sausages and pretzels and vanilla almonds and sweet glühwein, which made our breath smell like oranges.

  I want to look over at Steen, to see if he remembers too, but I don’t. I can’t bear to see his face, blank and uncaring, so different from the one I used to know.

  Marcus is seated beside me and Lauren across from me, a flickering candle between us breaking up the darkness. I nod at her as she sits down, as well as Andrew and, finally, in the direction of Steen, though I avoid his eye.

  ‘Vienna is a favourite of yours?’ Marcus asks.

  ‘Yes. Vienna and Prague,’ I tell him. ‘Especially in winter.’

  ‘Prague is at its most beautiful in winter, I think,’ Lauren adds, though I notice that she doesn’t say this to anyone in particular. She looks paler than she did this morning. It seems like all those hours of paperwork took its toll on more than just me.

  There’s silence as we read our menus. After we order, the mood changes and I can feel the pull of business settling over us once more.

  ‘Can we ask?’ Lauren turns to Marcus. ‘About the research? What everyone will study? And where everyone comes from?’

  Marcus looks at the four of us in turn. ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘But only as much as you’re comfortable with sharing.’

  Lauren nods and twists in her seat to focus on Steen, sitting next to her. ‘You are … Swedish, maybe?’ she loses no time in asking.

  ‘Danish,’ he says. ‘I go to school in America though.’

  ‘And your research?’

  I know what it will be before he even says it. I knew the moment I saw him in the café this morning. And, despite the fact that we’re no longer together, I’ve been worried since that moment for him.

  ‘Using artificial lymph cells to fight infection,’ he replies.

  ‘Interesting.’ Andrew leans forward to rest his elbows on the table.

  ‘And you?’ Lauren takes this as his cue.

  ‘Er, I’m from Hong Kong,’ he replies. ‘Studying in America also. My research looks at direct stimulation of the visual cortex of the brain to simulate vision.’

  My eyes widen. I mean, I know he’ll be in the most capable hands he could ever want to be in, but self-experimentation on your own brain … the phrase ‘hard core’ comes to mind.

  ‘And you?’ Lauren doesn’t miss a beat, her eyes on me now, unblinking. ‘Your accent is strange.’

  ‘That’s because I’m from everywhere and nowhere,’ I tell her. She sits back in her chair, looking unimpressed with my answer.

  I try again. �
�Well, I was born in Switzerland, but I went to high school in the States. You know, “go Bears!” and all that.’

  Still not enough.

  ‘Anyway, now I’m at school in the UK.’

  Another unimpressed look.

  ‘Oh. My research involves a new combination of specially timed drugs that could mean you never need to sleep again. I mean, just think of all the extra study we could do.’ I’m joking, but again it falls f lat. I really need to stop doing that. I f lick Lauren’s question back at her. ‘And you? We’ve established you’re Czech.’

  ‘That’s correct. I am also studying in the UK. My research is into nerve manipulation via implants.’

  ‘An arm?’ Andrew guesses. ‘Anaesthetised?’

  Lauren nods.

  I imagine her deadened limb moving at someone else’s will. ‘We’ll have our own Frankenstein’s monster!’ Oh, boy … before I can stop myself the words are out of my mouth. I might not usually be clumsy, but I have a long and distinguished history of verbal diarrhoea.

  Lauren looks at me witheringly. ‘Yes, I’m far more interested in creating Frankenstein’s monster than helping people with spinal cord injuries to walk again.’

  Okay. Really need to shut the hell up now.

  But Lauren doesn’t stop for a second. That gaze of hers moves quickly around the table once more. Oh, yes. She’s definitely the one to watch out for, I can tell—she has that lethal combination of book smarts and ruthlessness. She’s intent on taking this thing out and pretty much nothing is going to stop her. I force myself not to look at Steen, who I’m sure is thinking the same thing. I remind myself that I have to pretend he’s another Andrew. Someone unknown to me. Someone whose gestures are foreign and unreadable. Someone I can’t get an insight from by simply seeing a flicker of an eyebrow or a wrinkling of a nose.

  Her eyes come to rest on the empty chair beside her. I see something in the look she gives it. A look of … if not disbelief, of hesitation. So, it’s not just me who’d thought it was strange in the café—that there’s no fifth student. I wasn’t the only one who didn’t entirely believe Marcus.

  As if sensing my interest, her gaze lifts and we’re staring at one another. It’s only for a moment, but it’s long enough to establish that we’re both thinking the same thing. Trying to figure out what’s really going on here.

  ‘Miri?’ Marcus says beside me, and I jump. A waiter hovers on my left, waiting to put my appetiser on the table.

  ‘Sorry.’ I move my arm. As he puts the plate down, Marcus watches me closely. I tense, waiting for him to say something. But if he’s seen that look pass between Lauren and me he doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t say anything at all.

  Steen manages not to say another word to me as the group flies off home to our various parts of the world. We have three weeks to finish the school year and to sort out our lives.

  At my next allocated mailbox time, my travel details are waiting for me. It looks like I’m flying back in the same direction again. This time to Frankfurt. There are no ongoing flights, which I guess means we’ll be experimenting somewhere close by, or flying privately to … well, it could be anywhere, I suppose. I note that we’re only allowed carry-on—the notes saying that scrubs will be provided each day. It seems like a small amount of luggage to take for two weeks, but this is no shopping trip.

  The time either drags or whizzes by so fast I think I’ll never be ready in time. But it’s good to keep busy. It stops me from overthinking everything. My dad’s warning. The lack of a fifth student. Steen.

  I leave it to the last minute to call my dad, that scene at the Dorchester replaying over and over in my mind.

  Before my application to experiment was accepted, I’d actually planned to spend two weeks with Emily at the start of the summer break at her family’s apartment in Manhattan. This meant that I had to call her as well and tell her there’d been a change of plan. I’d been worried. I wasn’t good at lying when it came to Emily. The thing about Emily was you never quite knew when she’d turn on you. She loved nothing more than a game of cat and mouse, lulling you into a sense of security and then hooking you with a razor-sharp claw of insight when she finally felt like it. I knew she could catch me out at any moment.

  ‘I’ve been asked to this very boring symposium in Frankfurt.’ I’d chosen my words carefully.

  ‘So don’t go, then.’

  ‘I have to. I promised the organisers I would. I’ll still come and see you though. There’ll be plenty of time over the summer.’

  ‘Is Steen going?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Pity,’ she’d finally said. ‘But okay.’ I could tell she was wondering if something was up. This was how I knew for sure that Emily hadn’t been invited to join the Society—at least not yet. She would have been on to me in a second had she known about it. She would have guessed I’d been asked to experiment. ‘You’ll call me if you need anything, won’t you?’

  ‘Always,’ I’d answered her.

  ‘And don’t get into any trouble. Without me, I mean.’

  I’d laughed.

  ‘But if you do happen to get into trouble without me, don’t forget our code word.’

  ‘How could I forget?’ I think Emily had thought she’d failed me when I’d run away without telling her what was going on. She’d hounded me about having a code word in case we needed one in the future. We’d decided (one of us reluctantly—which would have been me) on ‘gingerbread’. We were supposed to use the code word when we desperately needed help of some description but couldn’t explain why.

  After Vienna and seeing Steen, suddenly that code word hadn’t seemed like such a bad idea. In the weeks that followed, I’d so wanted to believe I could call Emily up, say ‘gingerbread’ and she would immediately rush in and make everything better. Come with me to Frankfurt. Fix everything with Steen. Call my dad for me while she was at it.

  She couldn’t, of course.

  ‘Dad?’ I finally pluck up the courage to make that second call.

  ‘Hello, sweetheart. How are you?’

  ‘Good,’ I say hesitantly, my throat immediately closing up. I cough. ‘I just wanted to let you know I’ll be away for two weeks over the summer. I’ll … be out of contact for a while.’

  I don’t lie. I don’t give an excuse. I don’t need to say anything else at all.

  Because the long silence that follows on the other end of the line and the way his voice cracks when he tells me to have a good time tells me he knows exactly where I’m going and what I’ll be doing there.

  When I disembark from my plane in Frankfurt, Marcus is waiting for me. He looks a little more put together this time around, freshly shaven with an ironed shirt. ‘Good to see you again, Miri.’ He shakes my hand and takes my bag from me. ‘This way.’ He starts across the wide floor, avoiding trailing carry-on as he goes, weaving smoothly in and out of the people surrounding us. ‘Our plane leaves in an hour.’

  Ah, so we are flying onwards.

  ‘So everyone else is here already?’

  ‘Lauren arrived an hour ago, the others flew in last night.’

  We walk for some distance before Marcus stops in front of a glass door and presses the buzzer. Someone answers and the door opens. It’s a lounge, I see, as I follow Marcus inside. Armchairs and double-seated sofas are dotted about and there’s a bar and a small buffet. Lauren sits in one of the armchairs, as does Steen, across the room from her. He’s reading a newspaper. Off to the side, facing the windows that give a view of a runway, Andrew has his head back and his eyes closed, resting on one of the sofas.

  Lauren nods at me coldly. Andrew’s eyes flicker open for a moment and he gives me a small wave. Steen lowers his newspaper and raises his eyebrows halfheartedly.

  Someone comes and takes my bag from Marcus. ‘I’ll need your passport for just a moment,’ Marcus says to me. ‘And I’ll need to take your phone now, if you don’t mind. It will be monitored for emergency calls, texts and em
ails, of course.’

  I fish both my passport and my phone out of the front pocket of my backpack and hand them over to him. ‘Please, make yourself at home,’ he says. ‘Have something to eat if you’re hungry. I’ll be right back.’

  I’m so nervous I can barely swallow, let alone think about eating.

  There’s no more room to spread out on my own, so I decide to take a seat with Lauren in a set of four armchairs. I choose the one diagonally across from her.

  ‘Ready for this?’ I ask her.

  She looks up from the notebook she has in front of her. ‘Yes.’

  Hmmm. I’d figured as much, but now I know for sure—we won’t be having pillow fights and braiding each other’s hair at the bunker.

  Just as I think she’s not going to say anything else, she adds to the conversation. ‘Are you ready for this?’

  I don’t know. ‘Yes. No. Maybe,’ I answer her. ‘I’m just nervous, I guess.’

  ‘You should be.’ She doesn’t blink. ‘I heard that one of the youth experimenters died once.’

  ‘What? What do you mean? How did you hear that?’ I babble.

  But Lauren only returns to her notebook.

  A noise from behind us—laughter—makes us both look up. I turn my head to see where it’s coming from and realise there’s another room beyond this one. A room with a closed door and what sounds like several people behind it.

  ‘The support staff,’ Lauren says.

  It must be. Behind that door are all the people who’ve come to help us experiment. Surgeons, physicians, physiologists, psychologists and so on. I have two—a general physician and a psychiatrist. I don’t need a surgeon, unlike everyone else. All of these established support staff will be kept separate from us for the entirety of our experimentation. It’s one of the rules. I can see why it’s best that this happens. For a start, it’s quite possible that one of my teachers is back there, which would be awkward come exam time. Also, if something went wrong with a student’s experiment … well, self-experimentation is a choice. Although you can ask for assistance and people might kindly offer it, it’s still your choice. What you decide to do with your body shouldn’t affect others’ lives if it somehow goes badly. If I were them, I’d want to hide behind a mask too.