Viridian

by Susan Gates

  Then Jay ran into some Verdans, hidden behind a bank of bindweed.

  They were clustered in a tight little circle, like a mushroom fairy ring. Jay actually smashed into one. He bounced off and squirmed into the bindweed’s tangle of twisted stems and big white trumpets.

  ‘Watch out – Verdans!’ he hissed as Toni ran up.

  ‘It’s OK, you can come out,’ she told him.

  Jay crawled out of his hiding place. The Verdans were still in their little circle, as if they were rooted there. Their green faces looked blank. Their wide-open eyes reflected silver in the moonlight. Jay snapped his fingers in front of one’s face. There wasn’t a flicker.

  ‘It’s like they’re switched off,’ said Jay.

  ‘They’re dormant,’ said Toni. ‘Verdans do that sometimes. They’re conserving their energy, like plants do at night. When dawn comes, they’ll wake up.’

  ‘Do you think the Cultivars and Immune Hunters do this?’ asked Jay. ‘We could walk out with Dad and they won’t even notice.’

  ‘I don’t know if the Cultivars go dormant,’ frowned Toni. ‘They don’t behave like ordinary Verdans.’ Then she added, ‘You sure your dad is in there, by the way?’

  ‘That’s where Viridian said to take him. So that’s where I’m looking.’

  ‘And I’m looking for my mum,’ said Toni. ‘Be great, wouldn’t it, if we both found what we were looking for?’

  Jay didn’t know how to answer that.

  They left the little group of dormant Verdans and cut through the gardens of abandoned houses, heading for the Research Station.

  ‘We can’t go in from the front,’ said Jay. ‘There’ll be security.’

  ‘We’ll climb the fence, round the back.’

  Jay expected there to be sentries, patrolling the high wire fence. But there weren’t. He wondered if it might be electrified, but when he hurled a rock there was no fizzing current, no shower of sparks. He couldn’t see any CCTV either.

  It was as if Viridian was inviting people to enter.

  ‘Why is there no security?’ asked Jay, uneasily.

  ‘Because Viridian doesn’t need it,’ said Toni. ‘The Verdans aren’t going to rebel, are they?’

  Jay nodded. That made sense. And it would be just like Viridian. So arrogant, so supremely confident that he couldn’t imagine any challenge to his power.

  Toni’s gaze travelled up the fence. ‘We’ve got to climb that.’

  They clambered awkwardly up, using the mesh for footholds, handholds. The wire hurt, biting into their hands, leaving red weals.

  When they were at the top the fence started to sway dangerously. Jay hurled himself over the top and went diving towards the ground. He crash-landed in soft grass on the other side. It knocked the breath out of him. He rolled over and lay on his back, stunned, staring dizzily up at the spinning stars.

  Toni jumped down more carefully. They crept between trees, through quivering pools of moonlight and shadow, all the time watching out for guards.

  Then suddenly, the trees stopped. The curved wall of the first dome was only metres away. It soared high above them, lost in darkness.

  Toni ran over. Jay hissed, ‘Be careful.’ But she already had her nose pressed against one of the glass panes.

  She waved him over. Crouching, he stared through the glass too. The darkness inside was dotted with red and green lights, some flashing. Here and there a blue computer screen glowed.

  The Verdans were living like primeval plants. But the Cultivars seemed to have all sorts of sophisticated hi-tech equipment.

  ‘So is this where we’re going in?’ he whispered. ‘I can’t see any Cultivars.’

  Toni shook her head. ‘It’s too risky – there might be guards on night duty. This way.’

  Jay didn’t argue. She was the one who knew her way around here. He followed her to the second dome, which seemed full of huge green leaves.

  ‘When Dad worked here, they used this dome to grow experimental plants,’ whispered Toni. ‘This is the best place to get in.’

  ‘But where d’you think my dad will be?’ asked Jay. Then he added quickly, ‘And your mum?’

  ‘In the third dome,’ said Toni. ‘That’s where the labs are and the offices and living quarters – and the prisons.’

  She pushed aside some creeping vines and said, ‘Good. It’s still here.’ There was a concrete drain, like a deep open trough, coming out under the glass walls. Water, slimy with green algae, pooled in the bottom.

  Toni slid into it, head first, and wriggled through into the dome. Jay waited anxiously. Then he heard her voice, echoing through the drain. ‘Are you coming or not?’

  Jay lay down in the concrete trough, and pulled himself forward commando style. His head emerged almost immediately on the other side. He crawled out of the drain and stood up.

  The dome smelled hot and damp and boggy. Moonlight, slanting in through the glass, washed over a jungle of giant plants.

  ‘They’re carnivorous,’ said Toni, in an awe-stricken voice. ‘But these are massive.’

  Pitchers, more than two metres tall, rose in a sinister forest all around them. Some were white, like tall ghosts. Some were purple with swollen bases, like fat bellies. They had darker red veins running through them, like putrid meat. Clumps of bushy sundews, a metre across and waist-high, writhed their deep-red sticky tentacles.

  ‘Why are they all so big?’ whispered Jay.

  ‘Maybe growth hormone,’ said Toni, in a hushed, wondering voice. ‘Or genetic engineering? Look at the Venus fly traps.’

  Their double-lobed traps were different sizes, some as big as tractor wheels. One, hanging just above Toni’s head, was tightly closed. Toni could see a bulge inside. It was digesting something.

  She reached up a hand to stroke the trap. ‘What have you caught?’ she asked it.

  A green head, with an armoured crest like a stegosaurus, rose above the carnivorous plants. Viridian fixed his glowing eyes on Jay.

  ‘I knew you’d come,’ said Viridian. ‘You humans are so weak, so sentimental.’

  Without turning his head he rasped out a command. ‘Immune Hunters!’

  Figures came sliding, springing out from the green jungle.

  ‘Run!’ Jay screamed at Toni. He started to move but didn’t have a chance. Viridian reached him in two strides, crashing through the carnivorous plants.

  As he twisted in Viridian’s grasp, Jay thought Toni might escape. She was diving into the drain, already wriggling through. But the woman Immune Hunter unfurled that strangling creeper from her wrist. It shot out like a whip, wrapped itself round Toni’s ankles and dragged her back. Then it flipped her into the sundew. She sank into the monstrous plant, its gluey tentacles reacting to her struggles by closing around her skinny limbs. It drew her in, like a sea anemone does a fish. Jay could hear her stifled, terrified cries.

  For a heart-stopping second, Jay thought they were going to leave her there, for the plant to digest. But an Immune Hunter snatched her out, trembling and dripping sticky strands.

  ‘Is she an Immune?’ Viridian asked Jay, glowering down at him.

  Jay clamped his lips together.

  ‘Well, we’ll soon find out,’ said Viridian. The Immune Hunters marched Toni away. She looked frail and helpless, with those monstrous mutants towering over her. She threw one desperate, defeated glance back at Jay, then she was gone.

  Jay was left alone with Viridian.

  Suddenly, the Cultivar released his grip. Jay stared up into Viridian’s face. His rage seemed to have disappeared. He even seemed slightly amused, as if he was laughing at some private joke.

  Jay, trying to stop his voice from shaking, asked, ‘Where’s my dad?’

  Viridian said softly, ‘You didn’t think he was here, did you?’

  Of course. It had been a trap. And he and Toni had walked straight into it.

  Viridian lifted him up by the scruff of his neck.

  ‘Ow!’ shouted Jay, as his face bru
shed the cruel prickles that protected the Supreme Commander’s chlorophyll skin and stung like a swarm of angry wasps.

  Then Viridian dropped Jay into a carnivorous plant.

  For a few mystified seconds, Jay didn’t know what had happened. It was like he’d been thrown down a well.

  He was in the swollen base of a purple tube. Above him the tube narrowed, its fleshy veined walls rising to a circle of moonlight high above them. Then the light disappeared as the lid to the tube snapped shut to seal him in.

  Jay was trapped in a giant pitcher plant.

  ‘Let me out!’ he yelled, thumping the walls. They were semi-transparent: he could see blurry shapes outside. But they were really tough. His fists just bounced off them.

  ‘Let me out!’ he screamed again. But there was no sound at all from out in the dome.

  Panicking, he tried to scale the sides of his prison, but the walls were slippery and smooth, so prey couldn’t escape.

  Jay slumped down at the bottom of the tube. He was sitting in something wet, the remains of the pitcher plant’s last meal. He put his hand down, touched something slimy that felt like a small bone.

  ‘Yurgh.’ He snatched his hand back out of the stinking soup.

  More liquid was rising. He stood up, desperately punching the walls, kicking them. He knew what was happening. Toni had told him. The pitcher was filling with water. The plant was trying to drown him. When he stopped struggling, its digestive juices would flow from the pitcher walls and dissolve his body, absorbing his nutrients into itself.

  Top plant predators. Awesome killing machines. Jay moaned in terror as the liquid crept up to his chest. Toni had said no prey ever escaped. Except wasps, who sawed through the walls with their slicing jaws.

  For one frenzied moment, Jay tried to bite his way through, but his teeth just slid off. There was nowhere to get a grip.

  Then he remembered Dad’s shears. He plunged his arm down in the sticky liquid, found his pocket, felt around. Had he lost them when he fell off the fence?

  Sobbing with relief, he found them. The water was up to his armpits now. He stabbed a blade into the pitcher’s walls. It went through. Jay tore the shears through the wall, cutting a great zigzag circle.

  He dropped the shears and stuck his head out, then plunged the rest of his body through in a gush of water. For minutes he lay curled up on the ground like a soggy newborn kitten. Then his brain started to function again.

  Get out of here! it told him.

  He hadn’t even looked around yet. Maybe Viridian had stayed to watch. Jay raised his head, hardly daring to breathe. But the dome was silent, the carnivorous plants grotesque dark shapes in the moonlight.

  Jay dragged himself to the concrete drain. He was sopping wet. His muscles felt so feeble and weak that he could scarcely pull himself through. But then he was out of the dome and staggering for the shelter of the trees.

  Chapter 16

  Afterwards Jay was never sure how he climbed that fence and got back to the science block at Franklin High. But twenty minutes later he was collapsed against the basement door, weak and dizzy, trembling fingers trying to key in the code to the Immune’s hideout.

  He didn’t bother with the sleeping Immunes, but burst into the little room where Dr Moran was working. Dr Moran looked up from his microscope. There was a row of blood-filled test tubes in a rack beside him.

  Wild-eyed, sopping wet, near hysterical, Jay gasped, ‘Toni… Research Station… Immune Hunters, they’ve got her.’

  Dr Moran grasped Jay by both shoulders, stared into his eyes. ‘Take some deep breaths. Try to calm down.’ Jay dragged air into his burning lungs. ‘Now tell me again.’

  Jay dropped his gaze. ‘Toni and me went to the Research Station to rescue Dad. Viridian was there. Toni got captured. I only just got away…’

  Jay’s voice trailed into silence and he braced himself for Dr Moran’s reaction.

  But Dr Moran didn’t say anything. Finally Jay dared to look at his face. It seemed quite calm.

  Jay, his nerves already shredded, exploded into anger. ‘What’s wrong with you?’ he yelled. ‘Didn’t you hear what I said? Toni got caught! You know what they do to Immunes!’

  ‘Toni isn’t Immune,’ said Dr Moran.

  ‘What?’

  ‘She isn’t Immune.’

  Jay would have collapsed on the floor if Dr Moran hadn’t held him up. ‘Sit down,’ said Dr Moran, leading him to a chair. ‘Before you fall down.’

  Jay couldn’t believe what he’d just heard. ‘Why did you tell Toni she was Immune if she’s not?’

  Dr Moran sat down at his lab bench. He pushed his microscope aside.

  ‘I suppose I owe you some sort of explanation,’ he said. ‘Although I’m not sure why, when you got my daughter captured.’

  ‘I didn’t make her,’ muttered Jay. ‘She offered to go.’

  Dr Moran gave a weary smile, drew a hand across his forehead. ‘Sounds like my Toni,’ he said. ‘I don’t suppose she told you about her mother?’

  Jay nodded. ‘She told me her mother was – ’ And then it crashed into his brain that he had never told Toni that Teal was dead, and that Dr Moran wouldn’t know either.

  Quickly, he started again. ‘Toni told me her mum is a top Cultivar, called Teal.’

  Dr Moran nodded. ‘I didn’t want Toni to follow her mum,’ he said. ‘I wanted her to be human so she would stay with me.’

  ‘So you told Toni she was Immune?’ said Jay.

  Dr Moran nodded. ‘I knew she wanted to be Verdan. She’d have taken the virus shot.’

  ‘That’s why you were worried that she’d been scratched. And that’s why you never allowed her out,’ said Jay. ‘Not because she might get killed, but because she might become Verdan.’

  ‘Perhaps you think that was selfish,’ said Dr Moran. ‘But I was just doing what I thought was best for Toni.’

  What was best for you, you mean, thought Jay. But he didn’t want Toni to go Verdan either.

  ‘We’ve got to go and get her out,’ he said. He was sure that, this time, Dr Moran would agree to a rescue.

  So he was astonished and horrified when, once again, that steely look came into Dr Moran’s eyes and he said, ‘No.’

  Jay leapt up. ‘I can’t believe you!’

  Dr Moran said, ‘Don’t you think I want to? But I can’t risk my work. I’m so close to a cure – ’

  ‘But we’re talking about your own daughter!’ Jay interrupted.

  Dr Moran said, ‘Stop shouting. Try to think logically. The scientists at the Research Station have bred super-warriors. We don’t stand a chance against them. The Cultivars won’t kill Toni, because she’s not Immune.’

  ‘How will they find that out?’ demanded Jay, and then realised he knew the answer.

  ‘By injecting her with the plant virus, of course,’ said Dr Moran. ‘So the best thing I can do is find that cure.’

  ‘But once she’s Verdan,’ said Jay, ‘they might punish her with Etiolation.’

  Dr Moran obviously hadn’t thought of that.

  ‘It’s a horrible death,’ Jay said urgently. ‘They put them in the dark, in a cave. I saw Teal die down there, with fungus all over her and – ’

  He clamped a hand over his mouth. There was total silence in the room. Then Dr Moran said, ‘Did you say you saw Toni’s mum die?’

  Jay nodded.

  ‘Does Toni know?’

  ‘No,’ said Jay. ‘I didn’t tell her. I didn’t know how to.’

  Dr Moran got up from the bench. Jay flinched. He actually thought that Dr Moran might attack him. But Dr Moran didn’t look at Jay at all, or seem aware of him. He just turned round, without saying a word, and disappeared through a door in a far corner of the room.

  Jay sat staring at the door for a few seconds, waiting for Dr Moran to come back. Then he realized, He isn’t going to.

  Jay jumped out of his seat, went over and rattled the door handle. It was locked. He hammered at the door, then
kicked at it. It stayed shut.

  ‘You can’t just walk away!’ he yelled furiously. ‘You’ve got to come back and do something!’

  Jay thought, What am I going to do now? He couldn’t stay in this basement. It just seemed like another prison.

  He walked, sick and dizzy, through the lab where the Immunes were sleeping. The noise had woken them up. Some were asking blearily, ‘What’s going on?’

  Jay ignored them. He walked out of the basement, into the cool, fresh air and the starry night. He crossed the Franklin High playing fields, stumbling past the group of dormant Verdans, head now so painful he could hardly see, and forced his aching body on towards the motorway and the mine. It was the only refuge he could think of. He could rest there. Think how to rescue Toni and Dad. Then he realised he didn’t even know where Dad was being held.

  Suddenly he felt horribly weak and ill, as if, any second, he was going to pass out…

  Chapter 17

  Jay was aware for a long time that there was a blurry human face hovering above him. Every time he woke, there it was. He drifted back into sleep, and woke, and there it was again. But now the features were suddenly sharp, in focus.

  ‘Dad!’ said Jay, struggling to sit up. ‘Is it really you?’

  A hand pushed him down again.

  ‘Course it’s me,’ Dad said. ‘Rest. Don’t try to talk.’

  Jay gazed around him. He was in the back of their old battered van, wrapped in sleeping bags. Candles cast a cosy, yellow glow over the inside. Jay smiled, still only half conscious. Dad was here.

  He felt safe, protected, like a little kid tucked up under his duvet, after he’d been read a bedtime story. Everything was fine. Dad was here.

  Jay relaxed and just let himself drift away into sleep again.

  When Jay woke next, much later, he was more alert. He lay still in his cocoon of sleeping bags, piecing together what had happened.

  He had got sick. That was it. He had set off for the mine on foot, and as he had walked, he had felt worse and worse. The dog bite on his hand had throbbed. Everywhere the pitcher plant had touched felt sore and hot. Soon he could barely think. He’d kept staggering along somehow. Finally he must have passed out.