by Patrick Ness
Then she closed the tab on her browser and called up a search engine. She wondered if anyone had posted any more photos of cats on the Information Superhighway.
TWENTY-SEVEN
SOMEONE’S REIMAGINED DISNEY PRINCESSES AS ALIEN WARRIORS AND, TRUST US, IT’S AWESOME
‘Hi,’ said Seraphin. ‘How you doing?’
April lay on the floor and boggled up at him. While also lying on top of him. Suddenly she knew exactly how large the room was. In theory she should also have been able to work out where the walls were and where the way out was, but in practise all she could do was lie there stunned.
‘Hope you slept well.’ Seraphin did a little winky shrug and flicked back his hair. ‘I slept like a baby. Hence my skin. Smooooth.’ He ran a giant hand across the skin, and she heard the magnified prickle of the tiny layer of stubble.
Her entire world shook as he tilted the phone he was holding. She could see, over the pitching nausea, that he was standing, as he often did, shirtless and wandering around his flat. Seen like this it was all so very odd.
The stripped-wood flooring. The packets of cereal. The blankets on the sofa. A sock.
‘We woke you up before the others. ’Cos it’s your first day (hooray!). Just so you could get used to it.’ His voice was purring. ‘And so that you could enjoy this room on your own. Isn’t it great? They call it the Big White Room, which isn’t very original but has a good feel to it. You know, #bigwhiteroom. Works, doesn’t it? It’s an amazing space. If it was up to me, I’d show cartoons in there. We should do something about that.’
He crossed, dizzyingly, to a blackboard and chalked the word ‘CARTOONS?’ up after the words ‘CLOTHING LINE?’ and ‘NOT POETRY SLAM BUT RHYME CRIME?’
‘Anyway, I’d like to welcome you personally, but, as you’ve probably guessed, this is a recorded message. Click. Fizz. A Recorded Message. Brrr. Click. Please speak after the tone. Beeeep.’ He laughed, and it was such a good-natured, warm laugh that April tried to forget how terrifyingly loud it was.
‘First off. Well done. You’ve won Truth or Dare. You’ve got our attention, and you’ve made it into the Void. Wait, let me say that again with a spooky tone. THE VOID!
‘Bwahahaha. Actually, seriously, nothing to be scared of.
‘Not with what you’ve done. You’ve shown outstanding skills. Everything you’ve done has been voted to the top . . .’ He started ticking off his fingers. ‘Let’s see, you’ve been brave, courageous, you’ve risked upsetting your friends, you’ve not been afraid to put your life out there. You’ve done some pretty remarkable things and you’re going to do more.
‘And everything you’ve done so far, you’ve done for Skandis. You’ve already been fighting Skandis, but (big secret, just between you, me, and everyone else), I’m going to tell you what Skandis really is. It’s not, strictly, a disease. Well, it is. But it’s a disease grown very large and very out of control. I’m going to show you what Skandis is. In a second. Just for a second. Be brave. Because you’re not going to like it. Ready for it? Three . . . two . . . one . . .’
The screen filled with a terrible screaming face, a snarling reptile, the head entirely composed of ravenous snarling suckers, dripping with a thick, bubbling juice. It whipped and pushed itself howling into the camera, seeming to burst through the walls.
And then it went. Leaving April wondering if her heart was still, in any way, working.
‘Nasty, eh?’ Seraphin was back, his face a bit more muted. ‘Sorry about that. Really I am. They’re not nice.
‘That’s a Skandis. It’s an alien. And they’re going to invade Earth. Not in a BOOM way. Not in an abduct-lonely-American-motorists-and-do-sexy-metal-things-to-them way. No, they’re going to come to Earth and they’re going to devour it.’ Seraphin paused.
‘We need to stop them. We’ve a chance. They’ve established a bridgehead (military term) where they’re gathering their forces (again, military term) and, if we can beat them there then they may, just may, decide not to come any closer. It’s tough, but it’s doable. Believe me.
‘This is where you come in. We Need You to Fight Skandis. We needed to find some way of gathering a force to fight them. And, you know what, so far it’s worked well. On paper, the scheme sounds crap—gather up a load of teenagers and make them fight a space war? What are millennials for? But guess what? Forget how it looks like on paper. Who uses paper anymore? Turns out, you’re amazing. You’re braver than anyone else in human history, you think faster, and you can process several different screens of information simultaneously, AND you’ve spent more time in immersive combat training than anyone else. Plus, plus, plus, well, we’ve all seen Ender’s Game, and this is like that but without the sulking and netball.
‘Oh, and we’ve a way better playlist.’ Seraphin laughed again, and even that giant laugh was somehow reassuring.
He reached out and some music started to play. It managed to be quite backgroundy, little bit ambient, tiny bit floor-filler. ‘Everyone’s brought their phones here and the music on them is INCREDIBLE. Yes. Sorry’—he pulled a sad face—‘we’ve confiscated your phone. But don’t worry—you won’t be here forever. And we’ve got them ALL on charge so they’ll be ready for you once you’re finished and want to go home.
‘Here’s how it works. Every day the Void will send you into a room to do the fighting. It’s a spacey spacey gateway. You’ll be both INSIDE the Void AND YET ALSO on an alien planet. Take a deep breath. That’s right. An Alien Planet! Don’t worry about the fighting—we’ll start you off easy and then ramp it up. You’ll have helmet cameras so that everyone back here can see how well you’re doing. It’s awesome. Seriously, the technology in this place is top. The food’s a bit meh, but hey, nothing’s perfect.’
As he paused for breath, April used the opportunity to do some shouting. Shouting about how she had to get out, to get home, that coming here had been a terrible mistake and he really needed to listen to her and put her right back in London now.
‘I know what you’re thinking,’ said Seraphin. ‘You’re worried about the folks back home. Meh—don’t be. Nothing to worry about. It’ll all be fine in the end, you’ll see. You’re saving the Earth, so forget about eating your mum’s cooking and feeding your cat and so on—’
April screamed at him—he didn’t understand. She needed to get back, to look after her mum, but he just carried on talking, his blandly pretty face telling her that this was perfectly normal.
‘Anyway’—Seraphin yawned and stretched—‘I’ll be on hand with lots of life hacks for battle. The usual. Everyone’s getting up now, so you’ll get to meet your fellow soldiers and get to it.’ He held a fist in the air. ‘Together we’re fighting Skandis! Woo yah.’ He smirked. ‘Woo and yah.’
Then he winked and held something up, close but so close she couldn’t see it. ‘Oh, and you forgot something.’ He vanished.
With a tiny ping, a button landed next to April.
TWENTY-EIGHT
THIS HOT TAKE ON SMASHED AVOCADO TOAST WILL HAVE YOU REELING
Was she still in the Big White Room?
She didn’t know if it was the same chamber she’d been in or a different one. The whole Void had that feeling. Spotless, antiseptic, impersonal, like hospitals should be but never were. In real life, buildings always had scuffs or stains, and someone always put some flowers somewhere. But not here. The whole space was perfectly null.
She’d been worried about meeting her fellow—what? Victims? Captives? Combatants? Soldiers?
She wondered what she’d say to them. Turned out she needn’t have worried.
At first she thought they were ignoring her. Then it turned out they were ignoring the world.
She had walked into the Big White Room and they were all at benches, hundreds of people, eating bowls of something. She sat down at a vacant spot and grabbed a bowl. It looked like cereal or stew. She tasted it. Still no idea. But that was a way of breaking the ice with the people around her.
&nb
sp; ‘What is this stuff?’ she asked. No one replied.
‘Hi,’ she said. ‘Should have introduced myself. I’m April.’ Nothing.
She looked closely at the other people. They were all wearing white helmets, with little visors that went over the eyes. They were all staring at their plates. Odd.
The walls of the Big White Room glowed and jumped, playing footage from battle like it was an FPS. There was even an insert of Seraphin, wearing a headset and shouting an amusing commentary. Only this wasn’t a play-through. This was real. With screaming. That made the jokes weird.
‘Oh, missed the kill shot, dude! Missed it! That’ll cost you—look at that, three shots down and that is like nearly dead and you’ve got to pick it up because whoa, that is bad and you have got to— The teeth, fella, watch out for them teeth! How many times do I have to warn you all about the teeth? Yeah, yeah, and FINALLY you blow its head off. Like what took you so long? And it’s dead and bravo and now, here comes the screaming. Still, not bad for a Level One.’
The play-through continued.
Right, thought April, spooning down her stewpops, this is weird. There’s all that battle going on. Like a sports channel. Only it’s on the walls, the ceiling, the floor.
Occasionally, artefacts would appear. Small squares that would flicker over a bit of the screen and then vanish. They’d show a picture of a bowl of cereal. Or a view of the other people. Or, just once, of her. But mostly the picture was solid. The battles of the day.
April’s foot kicked something. There was a helmet under her bench. Waiting for her. She reached down and picked it up. If she was going to fight, she figured she’d need one. Was she going to fight? She didn’t know.
She put it on. It had that new-helmet smell of plastic and wet wipes. The visor was smoked plastic. There were two small displays at the side of it. One was a thumbnail of what was on the screen—the battle footage. The other display was a small picture of what she was looking at. She looked up and peered around the room. The thumbnail went red. ‘ABNORMAL’ it said. She looked down at her bowl. The thumbnail went green. ‘NORMAL’ it said. She experimented, looking at whatever there was to look at in the Big White Room. The only things that turned the thumbnail green were looking at the big screens or at her food. NORMAL. Everything else? ABNORMAL.
She thought about that for a bit, chewing it over more than her food. Then, having had more than enough, she stood up and walked out. She looked at the door. ‘ABNORMAL’ read the display. She noticed that, as she went, a few squares on the big screen showed her retreating back. They flickered and went out. But they’d been there for a bit. She’d made an impression.
As she walked out of the room, she smiled. So that was how it worked, was it?
Before she’d started eating, April had been wondering about how to escape. By the time she’d finished her bowl of whatever, she felt keener on staying and fighting. She wasn’t quite sure why. Was it the food? Well, it had a really weird aftertaste to go with its really weird taste. Some kind of drug?
No, she dismissed the thought. She walked on through the corridors of pure white. Maybe there’d be a door back to her room, or a door home, or a door somewhere interesting. Just a door. That was what she really wanted.
She turned a white corridor and found a lot of doors.
‘COMBAT CHAMBER EMPTY. BATTLE READY TO COMMENCE SMILING EYE.’
She stood in the combat bay. This was where the corridors of the Void had led her. So. This was it. Her first mission.
Am I going to fight, she thought?
Well, why not? She’d already encountered several lethal alien races. But her actions then had been a mixture of defence, panic, and sheer fury. This was different. There was even a countdown.
‘Dimensions balancing in ten . . . nine . . . ’
The Combat Chambers were clearly different to the other spaces in the Void. The doors were obviously doors. They even had little windows in them. At the moment, that was a moot point, as the window in the white door just showed more whiteness beyond. But that was about to change.
There’d been a prerecorded safety demonstration from Seraphin. He’d explained (with a little song) that this was just Level One combat. ‘Almost a training level. There’s a safe word and everything.’ She’d step through the door and she’d neither be entirely in this dimension nor on the alien planet. She and the enemy combatant would interface and be dimensionally in sync with each other, while also being not entirely there.
‘It saves having to send you all the way to the battlefront. We can just project you there temporarily. As I said, call out the safe word, you can come home. Otherwise you’re only there until you win. So it’s good to win.’
‘Six . . . five . . . four . . .’
The window flickered. It reached peak white and then faded into a pearly greyness.
‘You won’t see much. Not at first. Level One is learning about the Skandis, getting the measure of how to fight them. Once you’ve got the hang of that, then you’ll start seeing a bit more of the world around you. But first, there’ll be no distractions, as you need to really, really, learn about the Skandis. Not go looking at alien trees. No matter how cool they are.’
April took a big breath. Is this what I am now? Am I a fighter? Am I really going to go up against an alien? She thought about it.
‘Three . . . two . . . one . . . ’
The door unsealed and April went to defend the Earth.
TWENTY-NINE
THINK OF THE WORST JOB IN THE WORLD? YOU’RE NOT EVEN CLOSE
The Coal Hill headmaster’s secretary was always ‘new in the job’. The longest had managed about four months. The school got through headmasters at a fairly rapid rate (they’d long ago given up painting them, or even hanging photographs of them in a corridor), and, although it was never noticed, went through headmasters’ secretaries at an even more rapid rate.
The school was blacklisted by most local temping agencies, and whatever secretaries they managed to hire generally took one (or, at the most, two) looks around before fleeing.
All schools have bizarre, soul-crushing amounts of paperwork and staffing rotas seemingly designed by Ouija board. Coal Hill added to that burden. No one ever knew how many teachers there were supposed to be, or how many had gone off sick, vanished mysteriously, or simply quit. It made scheduling the timetable impossible.
Even something as simple as the cleaning rota was impossible. The school employed an outside contractor but also seemed to occasionally employ a caretaker called Smith. No one could quite remember ever having met the man, or explain exactly what he did. He’d never supplied a bank account so he’d never been paid, which could have caused quite a problem for the school finances—if he ever did ask for pay, they’d have to sell off the furniture.
Then, of course, there were the pupils. In order to last any time at all, a headmaster’s secretary had to develop a thick skin. Most headmasters’ secretaries spent their days ringing round parents, politely enquiring if their children were sick, truant, or had gone on a bargain package holiday to Crete. At Coal Hill it was quite the reverse. You had to get used to parents ringing up demanding to know where their children were—a question that was sometimes difficult to answer.
For Ms Tey (the current headmaster’s secretary), it was proving to be a baptism of fire. As her predecessor had hastily handed over to her, she’d told her what to expect (apparently she’d been offered an exciting opportunity doing admin for a portable toilet company). ‘You may, every now and then, just occasionally, find the odd child is missing,’ her predecessor had said as she’d thrown things into a cardboard box. ‘Try not to take it personally. Sometimes they turn up. You never know, eh?’
Ms Tey had thought it a curious remark but she’d filed it away as gallows humour. What kind of school would it be if people really did go missing all the time? Surely someone would shut it down?
And then the phone had started to ring. The first day it had just been a couple of
parents. Now it was a flood. Ms Tey had been shocked, worried, and was now horrified to find herself bored. She’d run out of things to say to crying, terrified parents.
Her phone rang again. She unplugged it, dropped it into a bin, and went back to browsing job sites.
THIRTY
YOU ARE BEING LIED TO ABOUT VOTER REGISTRATION AND THIS SHORT CHAPTER TELLS YOU HOW
The monster.
That was all that April could see. The calmer, rational parts of her brain tried to give it the name Skandis. Tried to apply functions to the various limbs and appendages. Tried to envision an environment that demanded that evolution answered back with quite so many teeth.
The problem was that the calmer, rational parts of her brain were completely drowned out by the rest of her body screaming. She fell back, the thing reared over her, those terrible tentacles whipping down towards her, their jaws snapping at her.
Then time went weird.
As her head smacked into the floor, her eyes rolled up. She saw the white walls of the combat chamber. She’d already stopped noticing the walls but she could see them clearly now. They were that same uniform, glowing white. But there was something about them. Seen from the floor, she could see how they’d been cleaned, and not very well. They were streaked with grime and little dark red trails of dried blood.
The monster pushed down towards her. The smell was repugnant, catching in her throat. She retched, trying to roll away from the tentacles. Then she was up and running, still doubled over and gagging, her eyes streaming from the smell. The monster swept around, tentacles hissing as they tried to locate her. She was trying to work out where the door was, but the room was just stretching away. She kept running until she bumped up against a wall and stopped, catching her breath, rubbing the water out of her eyes.
This had been a terrible mistake.
I am not a soldier. I am not a soldier.
