“Where am I?” I demand, forcing my voice to be steely—cold.
“Safe,” he answers. Gentle, careful.
I doubt that. “Why am I locked up?”
“You passed out in the car on the way here. You’ve been asleep ever since. This is an infirmary room.”
I replay my sweep of the room, accepting this. Not a cell—a ward. A fraction of fear eases but not by much. “Where is my friend? What have you done with her?”
He’s hesitant. “Your friend is…”
Everything goes black and bright red all at once. The world is red. “Where is she?” I growl. I ready myself to hurt him, destroy him if need be, but he answers easily when he sees the threats in my eyes.
“She’s in isolation.” He takes a timid step backwards.
I hold myself back, waiting, waiting for the right moment to kill this man. I remember the gunman in the library, remember following him to a car, Miya’s hand in mine, but I can’t recall anything after that. I must have been drugged. And this kind-faced doctor is working with our kidnappers. I grab him by his shirt and throw him against the wall—but don’t kill him. “What did you do to her?”
“She’s fine, she’s fine,” he speaks. Not used to confrontation, clearly. “She attacked one of our nurses. She’s in isolation so she doesn’t hurt anyone else.”
A flicker of relief in my clash of emotions—that sounds like Miya alright, and if she’s herself enough to attack a nurse, she’s okay. She’s okay. I release the doctor but not the menacing expression from my face. “Take me to her. Now.”
A quiet laugh startles me and I spin to face the sound, energy surging in me as I raise my fists. I stumble at the sight of a woman in her mid-thirties, dark hair cut in a jagged edge around her chin and an amused smirk on her face. She has a metal bar through her nose and a tattoo of a dove on the side of her neck. A memory drags me out of the moment, a gold bird on my sister’s face as I watch her die—but I wrestle myself free of the vision as this stranger approaches me. Awareness of her thumps through me like blood, some training evident in the way she moves as she calculates what to do about me. My hand twitches.
“Calm down, Yosiah,” she says, and I’m slapped in the face by another memory—Miya saying those exact words to me the first night we met.
I’m disarmed instantly.
“Where is she?” I choke on the words. “Please.”
“We’re not your enemies,” the woman says. Her voice is sharp—offended?
“Where is she?” My voice starts to rise again, my blood boiling.
The woman sighs, relaxing her stance. “She’s in a room like this but with less furniture, and she hasn’t stopped asking for you since she arrived. She stabbed one of our nurses in the arm because he refused to tell her your whereabouts. From then on, we left her to her own devices.”
I go very still, so close to killing someone. “You haven’t fed her?”
“Of course we’ve fed her,” she snaps. The doctor edges out of the room as if I’m not marking his every move. “We’ve cared for her as we’ve cared for you.”
Why? “Who are you?” Don’t say you’re with them.
“My name is Alba. I’m what passes as a leader here.”
“Is this a … science base?”
Her eyebrows shoot up. “No. Were you expecting one?” When I don’t answer she says, “It’s a rebel base.”
I blink, struggling to process this. I know there have been pockets of rebellion—being a medic in the military, even for a short time, taught me that—but this seems … organised. They have doctors, medical rooms, isolation rooms. What the hell?
Why am I here? What do they know?
“Take me to her.” My voice cracks no matter how hard I want it to come out. “Please.” I don’t want to kill anyone—I’ve never wanted to—but now I want it even less than I want answers.
Alba nods. “Follow me.
***
Branwell
??:??. 02.10.1878? London?
I’m smothered by darkness. My arms are out at my sides, grasping for Bennet. She’s here somewhere, I just have to find her.
The blackness releases its hold on me silently and I groan as I’m thrown onto a white, tiled floor. There’s a thrum of noise around me, voices that rise all at once from murmurs to shouting. Hands grip my shoulders my stomach tips and threatens vomit as I’m pulled to my feet. Manhandled. Bennet was right—we walked right into the Olympiae stronghold and now their men have me. Us? I look around for my sister but I can’t see past the bodies grabbing me. Their hold is painful, fingers digging into my shoulders, hands restraining my own. Somehow my arms are pinned behind my back and I struggle to breathe, to think, panic blurring my mind when I realise I cannot move.
Helpless and caught by the men who murdered my father. I’m going to be killed too. My stomach clenches—I really am going to be sick. The men holding me must see it because most of them take several steps back as my gut clenches and I retch, throwing up my meagre lunch.
I wipe my hand across my mouth, my eyes finally sharpening, and now I can see past the men—and women and people my own age—around me. My eyes dart around the settees and tables of the unfamiliar room, scan every face. My tender stomach flips and I retch again but nothing comes out. Bennet’s not here. She’s not here.
My fingers begin to shake in whoever’s grasp they happen to be restrained in.
“Who the hell are you and how did you do that?” This comes from a tall, dirty-blonde man several years older than me. His face is twisted into planes of shock and suspicion, an expression altogether threatening and chilling. There’s something off about him, about all these people but I can’t place what.
“Do what?” I gasp, straining to look behind myself. She has to be here somewhere—in another room maybe.
“Appear out of nowhere like that.”
I can’t tell this stranger about the bracelets. If I do, The Olympiae Club will find out that I kept some of my father’s inventions. I don’t want to think about what they could do with this technology.
“I don’t know,” I say, and it’s not a lie. I don’t know how I’m here. I know that the bracelets brought me but not how they function.
“You don’t look military,” a short girl comments. Her hair looks like hay. A yellow cloud around her pretty face.
“I…” I look between the two of them, confusion clearing my sinking panic for a moment, scattering the one thought in my head—where is my sister?—and making room for questions upon questions. “Why would I be military?”
“What else would you be?” the man asks, gripping my hands tighter behind my back, my shoulder straining, close to pain.
“I … I am a boy.” A rapidly panicking boy who has lost his sister and fallen alone into enemy territory. “Please. Let me go.”
“Look at his eyes. They’re honest. He’s as confused as we are.” The girl smiles slightly. “I think you’re from the streets and you’ve come to join us. But … you don’t look like you’re from the streets. What are you wearing?”
That’s it—that’s what’s off about these people. Their clothes—thin material but layers, shirts over shirts under jackets under coats. I knew America would be different but not this different. My Aunt Emily’s been to America and she never mentioned they wore clothes that different to ours. And—
I’m supposed to be in America, at the Olympiae headquarters there, but these people have British accents, most close to my own even if their words have been smoothes and sawn at the edges, more common that upper class. Where the hell am I?
I take in my surroundings with new, confused—yet endlessly curious—eyes. “Why would I have come to join you? Who are you?”
I don’t need their answer, of course, just their confirmation. I know these are the members of The Olympiae Club. It must be a different, bigger building than the one I found with my sister and cousin. It has to be—there’s no other explanation. I’d expected the members to
be older, but I overlook the obvious problems—the absurd clothing, the empty décor of the room, the way these people look something … other. They have to be the Olympiae—who else could they be?
The girl says, “We’re The Guardians.”
“You’re not the only one who’s tried this.” The man glares, his eyes full of malice and something else—protectiveness maybe, over the girl. Over someone else in the crowd huddles around us, all of them angry, confused, alarmed? “You infiltrate our base and think it gives you a one-way pass to Guardianship.”
Guardianship? The Guardians? Is that another name for The Olympiae Club, a smaller sect of them perhaps? But I’m lying to myself now and I know it.
I take a stuttering breath and ask the question I least want to. “You aren’t The Olympiae Club are you?”
Their confused glances tell me everything I need to know. Panic clutches my lungs. I suddenly understand the way Bennet feels when the world gets too much for her, when she loses control of her body.
“I’m in the wrong place,” I tell them, the words wobbling. I want to fight my way out of the man’s grip and run but what’s the point? I’m in the wrong place, Bennet is gone, and it’s hopeless. “I’m not supposed to be here.” Tears prick my eyes.
The hands holding me back are suddenly gone, my body released. I want to sink to the floor, but I force my unsteady legs to hold me up. The man’s voice has lost its hard edge. “Where are you meant to be?” he asks.
I scrub my hands over my face, my shoulder barking in aching discomfort now it’s freed from the taut hold. I should lie but what’s the point? What’s the point in anything anymore? I want to curl into a ball and sleep the world away. “I was supposed to be in The Olympiae Club’s building in America.”
The girl is still looking at me sadly. “I’m going to tell Alba,” she says to the man, and then to me: “I’m Samantha Bryall. What’s your name?”
“Branwell,” I say. My mouth is dry; my cheeks are wet. “My name is Branwell Ravel, and I think that I am lost.”
***
Yosiah
10:42. 02.10.2040. Forgotten London, Edgware Zone.
Alba tells me that I’m in an underground bunker in Edgware Zone but she won’t explain why her people—the Guardians—need to be underground in a bomb shelter, since it’s obvious what this is.
I pass a clock on our journey along cold, white corridors, and discover that fourteen days have passed since I last saw Miya in the library with the gunman. Fourteen days. It’s the nightmares that stalk my sleep but in real life. Me locked in a room, tormented, Miya kept far away from me. I need to see her. I need to see her.
We walk. And walk. And walk.
“The infirmary is at the opposite end to the residential block,” Alba says, breaking a heavy silence.
Residential block? Shit, how big is this operation? “How much further?”
“Just a little.”
I get the feeling I’m being led to a firing line. I’m being leg to my death. My breath scrapes up my throat; nervous readiness pumps through my blood again,
Two turns later and I’m planning the most effective way to escape when Alba stops in front of a high wooden door. White paint is peeling in places, dark wood visible like streaks of lightning. I watch her every tiny move, aware of how quickly she could try to shove me inside and lock the door behind me. Alba removes a key from a pocket; it rattles in the lock.
“Where is he?” someone screams from inside the room.
Feral. Frightened. Miya.
The wire around my heart loosens; I can breathe properly again.
Alba swings the door open. She has no time to react as Miya launches herself towards the older woman, the spoon in her hand brandished like a dagger into Alba’s ribs.
Alba barks with pain, curses threaded through the sound.
Miya raises her hand to attack again, her features wild and bestial—
And then she sees me, her body stilling as her eyes fill with hope, disbelief, and finally settle on relief. The spoon, a ridiculous weapon, drops from her fingers, and then she’s pouncing on me and we’re falling to the floor. I bind my arms around her and swear I’ll never let anyone separate us again.
“I thought you were dead. I thought you were dead,” she whispers.
She’s shaking everywhere. Her chest is stuttering.
“I’m here,” is all I say. And it’s all I need to say. Whatever was holding her together fragments and she turns into an angry, creatively swearing, stammering mess. Her nails bite into my arms. I’m drowning in the salt of her tears and so, so happy. She’s holding me as if I’m not real, as if I’m going to disappear any time soon.
I don’t think she’ll ever let go of me again.
In the back of my mind I hear someone talking in rushed whispers to Alba about a boy needing to be detained. I think maybe they’re talking about me, but it doesn’t matter. Nothing matters now. Let them try to take me. They won’t like what happens.
***
Branwell
11:01. 02.10.2040. Forgotten London, Edgware Zone.
Samantha Bryall shows me into a sitting room scattered with white furniture and subdued grey armchairs. Everything here is clean and cold, like a hospital. She offers me food and a drink from a metal tin but I refuse both. I am not staying here long—just until I’ve spoken to this Alba person. If anyone knows why I am here, it will be her.
As I wait, I watch the open doorway and the people passing by. I notice that every person wears grey or white clothing; short sleeved shirts made of cotton and trousers made of a light fabric. It’s strange. They talk unusually too, using certain words that are foreign to me. And their devices—the things that litter some of their hallways, like the flat, coloured glass with its flickering images—are impossible to understand.
“I don’t have time for this,” a woman remarks, walking into the room and slamming the door behind her. She’s a work of art—abstract and unknowable. Her hair is shorter on one side than the other, her features are made of sharp angles but her lips are softly curved, and a metal ring hangs from her nose. She is completely new, and she’s the final piece in my realisation. I am far from home. All at once my father’s note makes sense. It said wherever and whenever I needed to go. I am sure that this is not my time. Somehow, impossibly, it is no longer 1878.
I ask Miss Bryall, “What date is it?”
“The second of October.”
I shake my head impatiently. “But what year?”
“It’s … twenty forty,” she says. I intake a sharp breath. “Why? What year did you expect it to be?”
“Eighteen seventy eight,” I whisper. “That is the year it was when I left, when my sister and I …”
“Okay,” the newcomer says sceptically. “Start talking.”
I shake my head. I have too many questions to be giving her answers. “Who are you?”
“My name is Alba.”
“The leader here?”
She shrugs her shoulders, and the tight material of her shirtsleeves moves as if it is one with her body. “If you want to call me that, yes.”
“Where am I?”
“You’re in Forgotten London. Where else would you be?”
“Why is it forgotten?”
“It just is. It’s a name. Now, enough of your questions. Tell me your name, and where you came from. And don’t lie. I can see straight through deception.”
I chew my lip. There is no point in keeping the truth from her when she is the person most likely to know where my sister is. “I am Branwell Ravel. I came from London, but it was not the year twenty forty when I left—it was eighteen seventy eight. My sister and I used these bracelets.” I pull up my sleeve to show the metal band around my wrist. “They are devices, mechanical creations, though I am beginning to wonder if a sort of magic isn’t employed in creating them. My father invented them, you see, and he said that they would take us wherever we needed to go. We thought it would take us to Americ
a, but—”
“Stop,” Alba interrupts quickly. “Did you say America?”
My brow furrows when I look at her. “Yes.”
“How do you know about that?”
“Whatever do you mean? Everybody knows about America. The States were discovered some time ago.”
She looks at me for a long time, measuring me with her stare. “And America has been dissolved for twenty five years. Nobody remembers its name, or that it ever existed. The America we know now is called States. How do you know about it?”
A cold hand seizes my heart and my mind trips over itself as it connects the crooked edges of my thoughts. “This is the new world.”
Samantha Bryall and Alba stare at me blankly.
“It is, isn’t it?” I go on. “This is that diabolical new world in all actuality.”
“What are you talking about?” Alba looks at me as if I am radiating lunacy. I suppose I am.
“You don’t understand. There was a … a despicable man. He stole a device of my father’s and—this man—he had another called The Weapon. He said that he was going to use it to destroy the Earth and create a new world for himself and his people.”
“His … people?” Alba enquires, sitting straighter. “Did these people have a name?”
“Yes,” I breathe. “They were known as The Olympiae Club.”
She inhales sharply and looks at me in a new light. “Take him to one of the interrogation cells,” she orders a man that I did not notice standing in the corner of the room.
Before I know it, my arms are being seized and pinned behind my back—yet again—and a muscular man is pushing me out of the room and down another clinical corridor. Down and down the white hallways he pushes me until at last we reach a wooden door set back in the wall. There are no bars in the door but it feels like a dungeon cell.
“Have I committed a crime?” I ask the man who urges me inside the room.
He looks at me with honest eyes. “I don’t know.”
The Forgotten Page 18
