“Now, the second of those questions I believe you already know the answer to. So let me answer the first.” His movements and his speech reminded me of a snake. “I am General Heracles Woolf of the Second Infantry Division of the WAB. British Aquarian Protection Cross (First Class). Distinction in the Field of Utilities Medal, awarded with honors.” He gave an almost sarcastic little bow, and I hated him straightaway.
“Please.” My mother’s voice quivered. “What do you want from us?”
“Why don’t you ask your son that?” Woolf remarked bitterly. “I’m sure he can tell you. After all, he’s been a very busy boy.”
I didn’t understand. Why were they here now? Why hadn’t they come earlier to try to find Paragon? What had changed?
And then it dawned on me.
Treble.
Treble had contacted them and told them where Paragon was. He’d probably made a deal with the WAB, asking for some involvement in developing Paragon so that he could try to win the Geneva Prize. Vivi was right when she said that we might not be able to trust him. His academic vanity had got the better of him and he had betrayed us all. Including my uncle.
At that moment I hated him more than I hated General Woolf.
“Now, Auden.” Woolf took another sip. “There are a thousand questions that I need to ask you. And, in due course, I will ask you every single one of them. But, at this moment in time, I only really need the answer to one.” He stared straight at me. “Where is it?”
I tried to look away. “I don’t know what you mean.”
Woolf shook his head. “Come on, Auden. Credit us with some intelligence. We know it’s around here somewhere.”
I looked down at the floor and ignored him.
“Oh,” he said. “Look.” He turned back to the sink, where the tap was still trickling out water. “Silly me. I left your tap running.” He twisted the tap and the water suddenly started to gush out even faster, making the warning gauge flash. “Look at me wasting your allowance like this. How remiss of me. Be a shame if I were to use up your entire weekly allowance by being careless like this, wouldn’t it?”
He turned the tap off, folded his arms, and looked directly at me again.
“Where is it?”
My mother swiveled her head toward me. “What is he talking about, Auden? What have you done?”
My chest felt tight. The soldiers were all over the house and garden. It was only a matter of time before they pulled up the floor in the shed and found Paragon’s little hiding place, surely.
“Just so you are aware,” Woolf said, and scooped Sandwich up from the floor and started stroking her. “There is another team of WAB infantry currently tearing apart Miss Rookmini’s rooms at Trinity College.” He held Sandwich close to his face and snuggled her close to his chest. “I do love cats. Such independent creatures. Always on their own. Never trusting of anyone. Perfect.”
I watched as Sandwich wriggled in the general’s tight grip and I found myself thinking of Vivi and Immaculata. Their warm, cozy rooms being ripped to shreds like they didn’t matter. It didn’t seem fair. How could this be happening? Vivi and Immaculata didn’t deserve this.
I suddenly felt sick.
“Okay,” I said.
“What?”
“You want to know where he is?” I could barely bring myself to look at Woolf. “Then I’ll show you.”
* * *
Two of the soldiers ripped the floorboards out of the shed, tossing them into the garden like they didn’t care where they landed.
“The boy’s right,” one of them called over to General Woolf. “There’s a space beneath the shed.”
“Go down. See what’s there. But be careful. It might be booby-trapped.”
Woolf was standing next to me and Mum—both of us still handcuffed—on the hopeless lawn in front of the shed. We watched as the soldiers busied themselves, stripping apart everything they could get their hands on. At one point I saw a particularly dozy-looking soldier clamber under the overhanging trees and fiddle about with the rainbow machine that I’d shoved under there all those weeks ago. He obviously didn’t think it worth investigating because he quickly left it to go and find something more interesting to meddle with instead.
“I hope for your sake you’ve been telling us the truth,” Woolf half growled as we watched the last of the boards being thrown out onto the lawn. “I’m not exactly known for my patience.”
I didn’t say anything. I simply kept staring at the scene that was playing out in front of us.
A minute or so later, a soldier came out from the shed and held up his thumb. “We’ve found it. It’s here.”
Woolf breathed a heavy sigh of relief. “Good. Get it out.”
The soldier nodded and went back into the shed.
“Corporal.”
“Yessir.” The soldier who’d been standing at attention in the kitchen stepped up next to Woolf, his eyes keen and alert, and I suddenly remembered where I’d seen him before. He was the man in the cap who’d tried to follow me that afternoon from Trinity.
“Put these two in the van. Take the mother to one of the holding cells in the city center and the boy to the temporary camp.” Woolf nudged his head toward me. “We’ll interrogate him properly there.”
“Yessir.”
The soldier grabbed Mum and me by the shoulders and marched us around the side of the house to where a military van was sitting. He opened the rear door and we both climbed in before the door slammed shut again behind us. The engine started and, just before we started to move off, I peered out the little window.
Three soldiers were carrying Paragon’s body out of the shed. They hadn’t switched him on, so he looked limp—like he was dead. The only thing that showed he wasn’t dead was the recently restarted, constantly pulsing light that sat in the middle of his chest.
It flickered and beat just like a heart.
* * *
“What’s happening, Auden?”
“It’s all right, Mum.”
“I don’t understand what’s going on.” She looked lost, like she was trapped in a weird dream and didn’t know what was going to happen next.
“Please, Mum. It’s all going to be all right.” It was like I was the adult and she was the child. Roles were reversed. I was the one who knew all the answers and she was struggling to try to find them. I didn’t like that feeling one bit.
“What were they looking for in the shed?”
“Just … something…”
“Something?”
I took a deep breath. I couldn’t put this off any longer.
“Look, Mum. There are some things you need to know.”
So I told her everything. The clues within the Snowflake letters. The key within the attic. The messed-up rooms of Uncle Jonah. Six Six and Vivi. The metal chamber under the shed. The invisible ink. The Pisces constellation. The discovery of Paragon. The note to Uncle Jonah from the WAB. The corporal following me from Trinity. Teaching Fabius Boyle a lesson. Finding out about Dad. The journey to Milo Treble. The machine guns hidden within Paragon’s arms. During that journey from Unicorn Cottage to the WAB military camp, I gave her all the details and she sucked them up without saying a single word.
And, to be honest, it felt good to tell her. All these weeks I had held on to the secret—well, I suppose Vivi and I had held on to the secret—and it was only when I had let the secret out that I realized just how heavy it had been to carry.
Secrets are like weights. They are chains tied about your legs. If they don’t slow you down, they will trip you up.
So at that moment, I knew exactly how my mother must have felt holding on to the secret about my dad. It must have been so difficult and draining for her trying to keep up the pretense. Protecting me. It must have made her very sad.
I moved closer to her along the bench and she kissed me on the forehead.
* * *
The makeshift camp had been erected v
irtually overnight on a disused field that I knew quite well. Temporary buildings made of slatted wood sat alongside large, almost circus-size tents and long metal constructions that looked like adapted freight containers. Some of the site had not yet been completed, so a crane was lifting sections of buildings into position and swarms of soldiers were carrying supplies into and out of the camp.
The whole place looked busy.
Was this all because of us?
The corporal who’d driven us threw open the door and barked orders to get out. Mum and I stood up to go.
“Not you!” He stabbed a finger toward Mum. “Sit down. Just him.”
“What?”
“You heard.”
“No!” Mum reached over and threw her arms around me. “No! I want him to stay with me!” Her face was suddenly soaked with tears.
“Mum!” I pushed myself into her embrace and realized that my face was wet, too.
“No!” The corporal climbed into the van and peeled us apart as easily as the skin from a banana. “You’re going somewhere else.” He shoved her, hard, back into the van, then pulled me out and slammed the door closed.
“Mum!”
“Get on!” He banged the back of the truck and it revved its engine before slowly moving off.
The man grabbed me by the collar and marched me over to an open-sided tent where an officer wearing glasses was ticking items off lists. He looked over the rim of his glasses as we approached.
“Dare?” he asked the corporal behind us.
“Yessir.”
“QWERTY, please.”
The corporal yanked my QWERTY off before tossing it onto the table.
“Container B2. Make sure you remove the restraints.” He stared at my pajamas. “And give him some clothes.”
“Yessir.”
We walked over the churned-up field, past a kitchen where the smell of porridge was thick as a cloud. We stumbled past men laying out long, thick, snaking trails of electrical cable and others with large plastic watercoolers strapped to their backs.
Outside one of the more substantial and solid-looking wooden buildings, I saw a man dressed differently from everyone else. He wore a long, white jacket and the sort of thin hat that you sometimes see doctors wearing. He was smoking a cigarette and, when he finished, he tossed the end of it away before going back inside. Instinctively, I knew that that was where they were going to take Paragon. The man was a scientist. There would be others, too. Was Treble among them? Was he inside that building right now? Was he preparing to cut up Paragon? They would open him up and look inside and plug him into machines. They would check to see if he was operating correctly. They would replace the parts that were wearing out.
They would wipe his memory.
Soon Paragon wouldn’t even recognize or remember me. All the things we’d done together would be gone forever—erased in the blink of an LED eye.
We arrived at one of the adapted freight containers—a heavy corrugated metal box with a barred window cut into it. The corporal tapped on the number pad, which gave out several different-pitched bleeps, and the door swung open.
Glancing back over my shoulder, I could see another small truck. Out came Vivi, looking as scared and as dazed as I had been. She, too, was marched toward the officer with the glasses in the open tent.
“Vivi!” I called. She looked over.
“Shut up,” the corporal said, and pushed me into the cell, the door banging shut behind me.
* * *
The only light in the cell came through the window—no electric light had been strung into position—so the whole place was dim and dusky. Of course, that wasn’t a problem for me. With my condition, I could still see everything as clear as a glass of water.
In the corner was a bed, and on top of the bed were some itchy-feeling sheets and blankets and a pillow that looked as though half the stuffing had fallen out. A wobbly table was pushed against the wall, and a hard wooden chair was rammed under it. The bucket that was tucked into another corner was something I didn’t want to think too much about—the smell that came from it wasn’t very pleasant.
I moved the table to the window and climbed up. From that position I could just about see what was going on in the camp. Trucks came and went and, by my estimates, there must have been somewhere between a hundred and two hundred WAB soldiers in the compound.
Not long after I was put in there, another soldier came with a bowl of porridge and some clothes for me to change into. The porridge tasted awful and the clothes were dull and stale and at least one size too big for me.
It was just before lunchtime that I was taken away for interrogation.
In one of the wooden buildings, General Heracles Woolf was sitting behind a desk, some sheets of paper spread out across it. I was made to sit in a chair facing him. There was nothing and nobody else in the room.
“Auden.” He didn’t even look up from the papers. “I understand you have difficulty seeing color.”
“No. I don’t have difficulty seeing color,” I responded in a sour tone. “I can’t see color at all.”
“Mmm.” It was as if he didn’t pick up on the bitterness in my voice. Either that or he just batted it away like it was nothing but a fly. “So you see everything in black-and-white. That’s interesting. A little like the way your uncle always saw things in black-and-white.”
He stood up and strolled slowly around to the front of his desk.
“What do you mean?”
“Auden … some people have a very simplified view of the world. There’s left and there’s right. There’s right and there’s wrong. There’s black and there’s white.” He leaned back onto the desk. “The problem is that life is much more complicated than that. It’s not so clear-cut. In between black and white there are a million different colors.”
I frowned.
“Your uncle couldn’t see the true worth in what he was doing for us. He thought there were good guys and there were bad guys and, like I said, life isn’t always as simple as that. He got scared. He began to question which side he was on.”
“And what was he doing for you, exactly? Designing a machine that could kill hundreds of people?”
Woolf gave a sickly smile under his gray mustache. “We are living in difficult times. Our coastlines are constantly under threat from our enemies. The desalting units are precious to this country. Without them we are as dry and as dead as many other previously great nations. And I don’t know if you’ve noticed but most of our fighting-age population are abroad right now helping countries less fortunate than ourselves.” His fingers came up and stroked his mustache. “We cannot leave the protection of the desalting units to old men. We need something better than that. That was the purpose of Project Rainbow.”
Project Rainbow? Project Rainbow. I didn’t understand. So Project Rainbow wasn’t about helping me to see color, after all? It wasn’t anything to do with a rainbow machine? It was about having robot soldiers protecting the desalting units? I tried to straighten out the ideas running through my mind.
Woolf continued. “The machine called Paragon that Jonah Bloom created was originally designed to protect the coastline. That was the brief that the WAB gave your uncle. The problem was that your uncle—only seeing things in black-and-white, like you do—didn’t exactly take to the idea of a mindless machine that would do whatever it was told. He wanted to create something that could actually make decisions. Decide for itself. He filled it full of useless information and gave it the ability to think.” He snorted. “I mean, what is the point of an android—whose primary functions are to defend and to kill—what is the point of it being able to tell you the Latin name of a shrub or some such thing? Pointless.”
Aaron’s Rod. Verbascum thapsus. I don’t know why I thought of it, but at that moment it flashed through my head.
“So … soon after we’d asked for Bloom to revise his approach, he quickly destroyed his blueprints and hid the Paragon machine from us.”
Heracles Woolf.
“And that was when you killed him.”
Woolf glared at me through half-shut eyes.
“Dr. Bloom had a congenital heart condition that not even he knew about. It was just unfortunate that it decided to make itself apparent at that particular time.”
“You killed him!”
Woolf said nothing.
Instead, he got up from the desk and walked to the window.
“We tried to find the machine. He’d hidden it and we tried to find it.”
“Ha!” I laughed. “You didn’t try very hard, did you? He was buried under the garden all along.”
“According to our experts, Bloom had placed a signal-smothering device of his own design within the code boxes down there. Ingenious. It meant that our sadly outdated equipment could never pick up on the fact that there was an entire room beneath the lawn.” He watched as someone walked past the window. “Nevertheless, heads will roll for that. Heads will roll. And one of them won’t be mine, I can tell you.” Woolf gave a small sigh. “It’s a pity, really. Bloom was highly talented. If only he’d understood his position in the whole setup, he would have proved exceedingly useful to us. Such a shame.”
“Well, at least you’ve got Milo Treble on your side,” I barked. “I bet he likes to follow your orders and do as he’s told.”
Woolf looked confused. “Treble? It’s true that he’s next on our list for questioning but … to be honest, Treble has always been obstructive and difficult when it comes to doing any sort of work for the government. More so than Bloom, even.” His eyes honed in on mine. “What makes you think that Treble is ‘on our side,’ as you put it?”
It was my turn to be confused. “But … didn’t he inform you? About Paragon? After yesterday?”
Woolf gave one of his acid little laughs. “Inform? Treble would refuse to even tell us his own shoe size. No, we managed to find the machine because the tracker started to work again.”
The Extraordinary Colors of Auden Dare Page 18
