What She Does Next Will Astound You

by Patrick Ness

  Matteusz was shouting. He’d not stopped shouting, only sometimes he ran out of English and did some Polish shouting, which sounded even angrier.

  ‘You took a picture of me like that?’ he roared at Charlie. It was not the first time he’d said that.

  ‘Yes,’ said Charlie in a quiet mumble.

  ‘How? I didn’t even see the phone and—’

  ‘I was quick.’

  ‘Oh, never mind, never mind.’ Matteusz waved it away.

  ‘This looks—this looks like I walk around like that all the time. I do not. I had just got out of the shower and I could not find pants.’ He turned to April. ‘That is really all. Believe me, I do not wander around as though I’m preening sex god.’ He narrowed his eyes at Charlie. ‘And I never will again.’

  ‘Sorry,’ said Charlie. ‘I did not know it was wrong. I did not even really think about the clothes. You seemed happy. I liked that. I wanted to share it.’

  ‘I was happy,’ said Matteusz. ‘The shower was warm and Miss Quill had not come to the bathroom door to yell insults at me. And you were waiting for me in bedroom. It was a nice, quiet, private moment.’ He glowered some more. ‘Which you put on the internet for the whole world.’

  ‘But you look nice in the picture. What is the problem?’

  ‘The problem? The problem!’ Matteusz kicked Charlie’s chair. ‘You are an alien, yes, but do you always have to be so alien?’

  ‘I can’t help it,’ mumbled Charlie.

  ‘Try harder!’

  ‘I am! I am!’ Charlie started to shout, utterly miserable. ‘I am trying every day to be more human, to be better at it, so that you . . . so that you like me more. I thought this was what would make me fit in. Showing everyone else how normal I am. I don’t know how I’ve got it so wrong. I just . . . I am sorry.’

  ‘Sorry?’ Matteusz swore some more in Polish. ‘My mother—she will see this. And what will she think? Things are bad, but I hope sometime they will be good again. I hope one day she will like you like I like you. But then you do this—she will think bad of me and the worst of you. Especially when she thinks that I posed for that picture so that you could put it online.’

  ‘But . . .’ Charlie brightened. ‘I could say that my phone was hacked.’

  ‘Ha!’ Matteusz laughed long and hard. ‘Even my mother will not believe that, and she still has landline. Nope! What you’ve done . . . What you’ve done. Jesus!’ He strode around and pointed a shaking finger at April who was trying desperately to tiptoe out of the hall and wishing it wasn’t so large.

  ‘Charlie, what if it was a picture of April?’

  ‘I don’t understand.’ Charlie frowned. ‘Why would I photograph April?’

  Matteusz spat. ‘Listen—my body is mine. It is private. If I choose to share it with you, then it is because I like you. And just you. I am walking through your bedroom to find pants. I am casual and do not feel bad about this because I like you. I am at ease with you. I AM NOT THINKING THAT YOU ARE TAKING PICTURES OF IT. Because no good boyfriend would do that. Understand?’

  ‘I understand,’ said Charlie. He cheered up a little. ‘You still called me boyfriend.’

  ‘Habit I have yet to get out of,’ Matteusz snarled. ‘I do not take pictures of you. You do not take pictures of me.’

  ‘Ever?’

  ‘For the moment, yes. But later we will work to this rule: how would you feel if I had posted a picture like this of you?’

  Charlie thought about it. ‘It would be undignified for a royal prince of Rhodia to appear like this.’

  ‘So.’ Matteusz nodded. ‘So. There we are. We do nothing to shame each other. There is a camera on your phone. Please ignore it. Until I tell you otherwise.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Charlie. ‘I am sorry.’

  ‘Yes.’ Matteusz examined Charlie’s face carefully. ‘Indeed. Yes you are.’

  For a moment, April assumed they were going to hug. Instead Matteusz turned around and walked out.

  ‘Oh.’ Charlie sighed. ‘That did not go well.’

  ‘No,’ agreed April.

  ‘Still . . .’ Charlie, hurt, and feeling very much alone, sat down on the edge of the assembly hall’s stage, swinging his legs back and forth. ‘At least I now understand why they call it oversharing.’

  ‘Stick to pictures of nice meals,’ suggested April.

  At the end of the day, there was something that they missed. As they walked home, full of their own thoughts, they failed to notice how much emptier Coal Hill School was than it should have been.

  TWENTY

  THE FIVE WORDS THAT BROKE HER HEART (SPOILER: ONE OF THEM IS ‘WANT’)

  The boy was crying. The girl went over to him. They were both a long way from home. ‘What’s the matter?’ she asked.

  He shook his head, motioning her away.

  ‘Don’t look at me,’ he pleaded, ‘they’ll see.’ This was news to her.

  ‘They can always see,’ he told her. ‘Please, look away.’ So, she did so, turning to stare away from him and into the Void.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ she asked him. She felt stupid, looking away at nothing.

  She wondered if he hadn’t heard her. Then he spoke, sounding so weary.

  ‘I’m sick of killing,’ he said. ‘I just want to go home.’

  Her breath caught in her throat.

  ‘I do too,’ she said. ‘I want to go home so much.’

  She could hear him rubbing his nose with his sleeve. Then he laughed. ‘But we’re here because we want to be. Because we deserve it.’

  She hadn’t thought about it like that. She’d been too terrified and confused.

  ‘This is our reward,’ he said to her. ‘They’re going to keep us here until we die.’

  She stared at the endless whiteness of the Void, working out what to say to that. Eventually she worked it out:

  ‘I don’t want to die.’ He didn’t reply.

  When she turned around, the boy had gone.

  TWENTY-ONE

  SHE THOUGHT SHE KNEW WHAT WAS GOING ON. THEN SHE FOUND OUT THE REMARKABLE TRUTH AND TURNED THINGS AROUND

  The next day the school was louder and simultaneously very quiet.

  ‘What’s causing that?’ Tanya asked as she walked in. Suddenly there were no fights, no screaming, but the place looked like it had been torn apart. Shredded scraps of posters fluttered along the empty corridors. People were no longer fighting openly or riding bikes down stairs. No ambulances were waiting outside. And yet the air felt tense. That dreadful, unshakable feeling that, at any moment, you were going to be in trouble, but you had no idea why.

  Something’s up, Ram thought as he limped, very slightly limped, out of his car. There were more parking spaces than he’d been expecting.

  Charlie wandered in slowly, looking for Matteusz. He had spent the walk in working out exactly what his apology would say. Apologies on Rhodia were ritualistic and ran to a formula, with appropriate foods carefully chosen to match the thing being apologised for. Unable to convince Quill to bake some rote breads, he’d had to stop off at a corner shop and buy a Twix. He walked through the hallways and couldn’t see Matteusz, but felt a kind of relief at that. He completely failed to notice that he couldn’t see anyone else either.

  When the new wing had been opened, space had been put aside for Thought Pods. April liked the idea of them immediately—small booths where she could work on a tune, or just doodle while staring out of a window. In practise, they’d swiftly been commandeered for surreptitious mobile phone conversations, and were usually crammed with students yelling at ex-friends in whispers. Teachers had also adopted the practise of moving on the people they found in them—if they weren’t in class or in the library then they were clearly Up to No Good.

  Today, however, April found the pods were unoccupied and slumped gratefully down in one, genuinely meaning to finish off that history assignment, but quickly distracted by sketching the really miserable-looking tree outside. It took her a while to real
ise that she was working undisturbed. No teachers moving her along. No one in the booth next to her whispering, ‘If you do that again, Duncan, I swear I’ll tell everyone.’ None of that. She looked out at the tree. There was a gap in the hedge behind it, and normally someone sneaking off through it. No. No one in sight. Odd.

  Tanya stood in the empty assembly hall, Ram by her side. She enjoyed the way her feet echoed. ‘It’s quiet here,’ she announced. ‘Too quiet.’ Then she smiled to herself. ‘I’ve always wanted to say that.’

  ‘So, what do we do?’ asked Ram.

  They turned at the sound of footsteps. Charlie and April.

  ‘We tell Quill,’ Charlie had decided.

  Miss Quill had enjoyed her morning. Well, by her standards of enjoyment. She’d not really noticed the quiet, or found the reduced numbers in her classes worrying—people normally found any excuse to avoid her lessons, and she considered this a smart move.

  She glanced up from her book. She’d been reading Captain Corelli’s Mandolin and was dismayed to discover that a mandolin was not some kind of weapon. She folded down the page slowly and shut the book with a clap. She regarded the four standing in front of her wearily.

  ‘So, it’s the . . . You really are going to have to come up with a group name, you know.’

  ‘We’re not a group,’ Ram insisted.

  ‘We’re just . . .’ Tanya sometimes found finishing sentences near Miss Quill really hard.

  ‘Quill, there is a threat to the school,’ said Charlie firmly.

  ‘The Four Lions!’ blurted out April, and then went quiet. Quill surveyed the four. A slight itch in her head told her that she should pay more attention to Charlie, but she’d risk a mild increase in pain so long as she didn’t have to, and the others were actually more worthy of her notice, albeit a very tiny amount.

  Matteusz was missing from the group, which was something. He’d clearly had some kind of a quarrel with Charlie, which was marvellous news. She found sharing a house with the despised prince bad enough, but the other one was just too much, especially as they were so boringly involved with each other. She had toyed with the idea of bursting into their room and yelling, ‘I heard your cries, my Lord, and—my God—what are you doing to His Majesty?’ before claiming to be preventing an assassination attempt. She smiled a little. Would she be able to justify killing the youth? It would certainly be fun trying.

  Oh. They were still talking. Pity.

  Ram was loudly explaining that it was all his fault because of some soup and it had all got out of hand and that there had to be a way of stopping it, surely. Quill frowned. He wanted her to stop soup?

  Tanya was currently explaining the whole situation, whatever the situation was, she wasn’t quite sure, but the whole thing that was going on which was definitely a thing was being caused by a website, and there were some curious things about the website’s data structure, which she started to explain in a rather tiresomely detailed way. That girl was worth listening to, but her problem was that she was too clever by half.

  ‘Are the cats behind it?’ Quill asked.

  ‘No,’ said Tanya.

  ‘Pity,’ said Quill.

  April, little steely fawn April, tried making a few contributions to the discussion and then fell silent. It was something to do with hidden messages in the Information Superhighway, which seemed ridiculous. Everyone else was shouting and April at first waited her turn then kept saying, ‘The thing about Seraphin, you see, is—’ and getting talked over. She tried this four times until it was obvious to her that a fifth attempt would seem really unnatural. What she’d do next could go either way. Quill was hoping for a sullen sulk. But the alternative could be interesting. She’d watch that one.

  And finally, reluctantly, Charlie. The prince. He was learning to listen like a ruler. That air of firm, noble noncommittal before coming down on whichever side allowed him to unleash his army (i.e., her). He would seem fair, he would seem just, but most of all, he’d learned that a ruler who did not use his weapons was no ruler.

  Charlie raised a hand. It was an odd, commanding little motion, and everyone stopped talking, even Ram (a promising rebel leader if ever there was one). Waiting for him to seize the moment and speak words of blood and action.

  He was clearly considering what to say. The right words that would stir armies. And then he said, ‘Tanya, can we have a look at the metadata?’

  Quill honestly thought it wasn’t possible to hate Charlie more. But no, here he was. Doing this. Whatever it was. You could call it investigating, but by those standards accountancy was investigation. Yet there they all were, clustered around a laptop.

  Quill observed the body language of the group. Charlie was intent on what he was seeing. Perhaps too intent, as though there was something else preying on his mind. Tanya was proud, proud of what she’d found out, proud of the awkward, carefully casual cross-legged way she was sitting on the floor. Ram stood off to one side, April to another. Ram was just itching to find a violent way of resolving this. One that allowed him to take revenge. Revenge for what was going on now and what had been done to him in the past—yes, that was it. One day he really would make an excellent leader. April stood, leaning against a desk, peering at the screen, but with a sad look. She had clearly been hoping to see something brilliant there that the others had overlooked, but she had nothing. She was utterly dejected. That pretty much made Quill’s morning.

  Charlie reached over to a point on the screen and tapped it.

  ‘Not touch-sensitive,’ said Tanya. ‘Not a tablet.’

  ‘Oh.’ Charlie was still getting used to the limits of Earth technology. It was surprising to Quill too. For instance, they had holograms but only appeared to use them for dead singers.

  Charlie settled for scrolling up and down the page a bit.

  ‘Can we put this through your projector?’ he asked Quill, which amused her. He was happy to order her to defend his life, but he was very polite about the oddest things. She hooked the laptop up, watched as nothing happened, and then waggled the plug a couple more times. Finally Tanya’s screen flowed over the wall.

  ‘Here’s what we have,’ announced Charlie. ‘Well, our best guess.’ Oh, dead goddesses, thought Quill, imagine him trying to lead an army with these words. ‘Tanya’s gone through the site, finding people from Coal Hill posting content. She’s found out who has authored the most popular stuff. And we now need to find out if they’re currently in school.’

  ‘They’re probably at home,’ suggested Quill. ‘Either skiving or with their limbs in plaster. Yesterday they started a fight club in my class. This was after I knocked out a fifth year. They’re either dreaming up more lunatic ways of killing themselves or they’re learning how to use crutches.’

  ‘But what if they aren’t?’ argued Charlie. ‘What if this truthordare site is, in some way, a testing ground?’

  ‘Really? For what?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘It’s for charity!’ Quill said, and laughed. ‘That’s what humans are always saying. There’s always a mountain falling on a village or something. Humans love a starving baby and an unhappy puppy.’

  ‘And disease,’ said April. ‘Skandis is a disease. Isn’t it?’

  Tanya shook her head, and the whiteboard filled with search results. ‘It apparently is. But all these results’—page after page of technical data, of smiling sick teenagers in hospital beds, of people doing fun runs—‘they’re very recent and very vague as to what the disease actually, definitely is. Even Wikipedia just uses these as source material. And some new sites use Wikipedia, so it just repeats itself. Whatever Skandis is . . .’

  ‘Is it attacking the school?’ asked Ram. ‘Is that what it is? Some kind of alien plague?’

  ‘Interesting,’ mused Quill. ‘So you think it may be selecting its victims based on how stupid they are. How they go against evolutionary principles. Intriguing. But really, you don’t need to go to any effort to find a stupid human.’ She rega
rded them all and smiled.

  ‘What about if it’s a brain disease of some sort?’ suggested Tanya. ‘Does that explain what’s going on?’

  ‘You can’t catch stupid!’ protested Ram, and Miss Quill burst out laughing.

  ‘Bless you,’ she said eventually. Then she looked at them all placidly. ‘What would you like me to do here, Prince? I can hardly . . . Well, I can hardly defend you from the Information Superhighway, can I? What is curious is that both you and Ram have made appearances on this site and yet, somehow, both of you are still here breathing my oxygen.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Ram said, ‘but what about whoever posted that—’

  ‘What about Matteusz?’ cried Charlie and rushed from the room before Quill could call after him. ‘I’m sure he got lots of offers.’

  ‘Well, there goes your glorious leader,’ she said, amused at the twist this caused in Ram’s mouth. ‘Isn’t that nice?’

  ‘We’ve got to do something,’ said April.

  Quill nodded. ‘I love your sort. You’re always the people saying “something must be done”. I can’t wait until you’re old enough to vote. Have you any concrete ideas?’

  ‘We could go and find Seraphin,’ suggested Tanya. ‘Find out what he knows. Make sure he’s alright.’ She paused. ‘Maybe get a selfie.’

  ‘We should find out who’s gone missing from the school,’ suggested Ram. ‘Well, who is really missing and who is at home. Find out how many people this has affected.’

  Quill nodded again. ‘That’s a lovely idea. They’re both lovely ideas. Do them both.’ She dismissed them with a nod and opened her book.

  Oh. They were still there.

  ‘Go on. Don’t let me stop you.’ She pointed to the door. ‘Shoo.’

  ‘But isn’t there something more?’ said April. Her voice was firm. She crossed over to the projected screen and looked at the page. ‘There’s got to be a way of finding out how this site is working directly.’

  ‘But Seraphin—’ protested Tanya.

  ‘Hasn’t been seen for weeks; has probably got a team of PRs protecting him; and won’t return your calls—bet you.’ April ticked off the reasons on her fingers. ‘But, you know, you’re welcome to try and find him. Get an autograph.’