Before I can ask another question the door has shut heavily and loudly, and I am left in isolation to contemplate everything that has gone wrong.
***
Yosiah
12:07. 02.10.2040. Forgotten London, Edgware Zone.
We are sat on a velvet sofa. Around the room are drape curtains, fur rugs, fancy cushions, ornaments, a gold chandelier, and a strange six foot statue of States’s President with his dog. A red scarf circles his neck, and the dog has a flat cap on its head. I hate this room.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Alba says with a smile. “You’re thinking how horrible we are, how disgusting we are because of all the money and luxury items we have.”
I clench my jaw.
“It’s stolen.”
I must have heard her wrong. Nobody could steal this many luxuries. “What?”
“All of it. Everything we have here is stolen. We have little to no money. It is all stolen from the privilege of States.” She grins. “We like to think of it as liberation.”
“Everything you have here is stolen?” I ask slowly. “Even the people. Is this what you do? Pick people out of their lives and make them live here?”
A deep sigh. “Nobody is making you stay here.”
“I beg to differ,” Miya remarks. The words lure a cough from her throat and she reaches for a glass of water. She takes a drink and spits it out. “What the hell is that?”
“Champagne,” Alba says blandly.
“What?”
“It’s a … expensive drink. Never mind.” She pushes a jug of clear liquid across the silver table we sit around. “This is water.”
Miya tips the jug toward her lips and swallows greedily. I am seriously worried about her. They’ve starved and dehydrated her by the looks of things. Or maybe she’s done it to herself—I know how stubborn she can be. Either way it’s a miracle she is still alive.
“I meant for you to use a glass.” Alba tuts.
I direct the full force of a glare at her and she shrinks back.
“What do you want us for?”
Alba thinks about it for a moment. Miya drains the jug.
“I want you to help us. Both of you.”
“Help?” Miya spits in outrage. “You kidnapped us! No chance. We’re leaving.” She stands abruptly.
“How would you like the chance to bring down States? To take back everything that is owed to you, everything that is kept from you—everything you deserve?”
Miya sits back down. “Talk.”
“My name is Alba. I’m going to help you, to help everyone. The reason I brought you here is because the military ordered a hit on you.”
“What?” I splutter. “Why? What do they know?”
Miya’s hand seeks my wrist and squeezes tightly.
They know who I am. They’ve found me. They’re going to kill me.
“It’s … complicated.”
“You’d better start talking, then,” Miya grinds out and I manage a smile. She sounds like the old Miya. My Miya.
“It’s to do with your involvement with Honour Frie.”
“What?” Miya and I say at the same time.
“He’s caught up in something. I can’t disclose exactly what at the moment, but I can tell you that his situation is precarious, and that he’s the core of something that goes out for miles and miles.”
“What did he do?”
“Nothing,” Alba says sadly. “He is caught in the middle of a tornado, but he’s innocent.”
I ask, “Then what do we do?” I have a growing feeling that I have known this for some time. My instincts have been telling me that something was wrong with Honour and his family, long before they died and the Officials overturned their home.
“I’m afraid … we can’t do anything. We have to wait for him to come to us. He isn’t alone, though. There are two of us keeping a close eye on him. His friends. They will ensure his safety.”
“What do you mean ‘us’?” Miya narrows her eyes to a half-glare. “Who are you?”
“We are The Guardians.” Alba smiles. I notice for the first time that the left side of her hair is longer than the right.
“Guardians of what?”
“Of the future. Of humanity.”
“O—kay. This isn’t my thing, this save the planet crap. Or Siah’s. We’re gonna leave.”
Miya hauls me up by my arm and begins towing me towards the door.
“You don’t know how to get out,” Alba remarks. She sounds amused. “And if you do get out, hundreds of military will be waiting for you.”
Miya stops but doesn’t turn around.
“We can stop this,” Alba goes on. “The destruction you live in. The Strains. The solar flares. The violence. The rationing. The containment. None of it needs to go on. It should have ended years ago. Well—it should never have started in the first place, but that’s beside the point. You hardly like living on the streets, scrounging for food, participating in bar fights to get enough money to live, do you?” I watch Miya’s eyes trail over the scar under my jaw. Her fingers twitch. “You shouldn’t have to. States has all the money, all the food, all of the things we produce, everything we should have.”
My voice is quiet. “What about Bharat?”
“Oh, them.” There’s a smile in her voice. “They agree with us. They’re our allies.”
Miya spins around so fast I swear she’s pulled my arm out of its socket. “You have Bharat as your allies? A whole City? But that’s … millions of people.”
Alba smiles smugly. “Nine hundred and sixty million at the last census. Impressive, aren’t we?”
“How?”
“Do you think nobody else has noticed how out of control States has become? They’re destroying The Forgotten Lands one by one. Last week Forgotten Cairo disappeared. A whole town—vanished. States did that. They used some kind of bomb. Our contacts in Cairo saw them put it underground. A week later the town was gone. We thought it would be some kind of new monitoring system. None of them managed to get out.”
“What about us? What about Forgotten London?”
“We’re safe. For now. Nobody has been digging underground, don’t worry.” Alba pauses, looks at us sympathetically. “Do you still want to go back out?”
Miya says nothing.
“I didn’t think so.” Alba smiles, compassion in the creases of her skin. “I’ll show you to your rooms now.”
“Rooms?” Miya whispers with wide green eyes. “Shouldn’t we be sharing a room?”
“Oh. Are you a couple? I should have guessed with you mauling each other.”
“No,” Miya rushes to correct her.
“We’re friends,” I say.
“Then what is the problem with having separate rooms?”
“It just seems …” Miya struggles for words.
“Wasteful,” I supply. Miya squeezes my wrist.
Alba shrugs. “You can share a room if you want. It makes no difference to us.”
Miya’s quiet for a moment and then she asks, “How many Guardians are there?”
“In this base? Over a thousand.”
I choke on a breath.
“In total? Almost a million. With Bharat?” She closes her eyes, calculating.
“More than States?” Miya asks in disbelief.
“No. Not more than States. They have military in every corner of every town. Even in the places most of us have forgotten about. But we have more than enough for a fair fight.” Alba smiles wryly. “I say fair, but we fight dirty.”
Miya scowls at the statue of the President. “Are we … Guardians now?”
Alba laughs. “No. If you want to join us, you’ll need to be trained and taught everything we know. It’s not a fast process, and neither is it easy. There will be days when you fall asleep in the library and others when your body is so tired you cannot sleep. But eventually … yes. I’m hoping you two will be among the best of us.”
“Why us?” I feel panic taking hold again.
“Because you are different.”
“Why?”
“Can’t you take my word for it?”
“No.” Miya stands taller, gives Alba the death glare she reserves for the lowest of all people, and runs her thumb over the veins on the inside of my wrist. I’m calm for a moment. “No, we can’t take your word for it. Now tell us why you wanted us here so badly you had to threaten us with a gun against my head.”
“We think you’re immune.”
“Immune?” Miya sneers. “Immune to what?”
“The Strains, of course. We think you and Yosiah are immune to The Sixteen Strains.”
***
Honour
12:25. 02.10.2040. Forgotten London, Edgware Zone.
I used to wonder what the Underground stations looked like inside. I thought they might be crumbling and damp, but it turns out they’re perfectly sound. The walls, up to a certain height, are tiled in red and black—suspiciously States’s official colours—and above us are great stone arches. There are so many twists and turns and weird metal stairs that lead us down mountain-like heights and place us on dubious precipices that I get a headache. More than once I’ve thought I was going to fall, that the height would overwhelm me, but Hele’s coaxing has kept me moving.
I was right, though, with what I thought when I was younger. These buildings are newer than the others—they’ve been upgraded or rebuilt, and only States has the money to do that. I don’t know what they want them for, and that worries me.
We walk along the train tracks, inside the tunnels, and the darkness is close to claustrophobic. A torch that Dalmar brought is the only thing that stops me tearing my hair out.
Tia’s gone.
I want to know why she left me, where she is, and how she knew that Official. I want to know how she could leave me. I could never leave her, no matter what.
I want to tell her about the letter from our father. I should have told her.
All the time I spent planning our escape, breaking fences and blowing up electric boxes, I should have been spending time with Horatia, telling her that I loved her and showing her the letter from our father.
I’ve wasted so much time.
It takes two hours of wandering the tunnels, every so often coming out into weakly lit stations where we’re fenced in by platforms, to get to Edgware—where Dalmar said his friend would meet us. Dalmar navigates the tunnels like he’s travelled this way his whole life. He knows where to go when the tracks branch off in two or more directions. He knows the way to Edgware without having to look at a map or go aboveground to see where we are. It makes me wonder about my friend, about what else I don’t know about him.
When we walk into the station at Edgware Zone, I have to blink three times to convince myself I’m not hallucinating. On both tracks in front of us are trains. Until I clamber onto the platform I don’t see how long they are. Each train has at least ten carriages; they run the whole length of the platform and disappear into the tunnel at the end of it.
Dalmar catches my confused stare and laughs. “The Guardians had these long before States took over.”
While walking through the tunnels, Dalmar explained to me about The Guardians and what they stood for. He said that they’re working on getting everyone away from States’s control. I think that’s an impossible thing, but I like the idea of it all the same.
I was told The Guardians are older than Forgotten London itself and that they’ve been working against the military since before I was born. That’s why here is the safest place for me: because they hate the military and the military wanting me dead makes me their ally.
I glance at the trains again. “But … why?”
Dalmar lifts a shoulder in a half shrug. “You never know when you might need something like them. I don’t know how many people they can carry, but it’s quite a few.”
“You said you were working on getting out …”
His smile is bright in the gloom. “It’s one of a few ideas. The Guardians will get us to safety when we need them to. They might use the trains, they might not, but it never hurts to have them here waiting.”
“Don’t the Officials know they’re here?”
He snorts. “No.”
“They don’t come down here at all,” Hele explains. “They do go into some of the Undergrounds, but not this one.”
“Why?”
She makes a face. “We don’t know.”
“I think it’s because of the military HQ here,” Dalmar explains. “They don’t need to check the Underground because they know everything that goes on aboveground.”
“Or maybe they don’t want to come across the monsters in the dark,” a new voice says. I strain my eyes to make out a shadow leant against the wall beside a sign that says Edgware Road.
“Timofei.” Dalmar grins. “I thought you weren’t here for a minute.”
The shadow pushes off of the wall and comes towards us. In the glow of Dalmar’s torch I can see that he’s as tall as a giant and that he has long, dark hair. There’s an indentation in his bottom lip that I think might be a scar.
“This is Honour?”
Dalmar nods. “It is.”
“Well, come on,” Timofei says, “let’s go somewhere we can see.”
14:40. 02.10.2040. Forgotten London, Edgware Zone.
Timofei disappears back into the shadows, leaving us without a guide, but Dalmar and Hele know the way. They lead me through an opening to our left and I notice that the walls here are made of the same half-brick-half-tiling that the Hammersmith station had. The slices of daylight that cut through the ceiling and onto the platform have gone, and we’re seeing, again, by Dalmar’s torch.
“These tunnels never used to be here,” Dalmar tells us as we navigate the maze. “Neither did the ones at Hammersmith. The stations closer to Underground London Zone had tunnels but these outer ones didn’t. So the military built them.” He scratches his head with his torch-hand, throwing shapes off of the overhead arch. “We haven’t found out why yet.”
“Do you think they built them for a reason?” I ask. “They must have some use for them. It doesn’t make sense otherwise.”
“Probably. That must have fallen through, though—the stations have been abandoned for twenty years.”
“I still think that some of the Officials use them to get around Forgotten London,” Hele says in her always-gentle voice.
Dalmar shakes his head, a tight look on his face. “There would be signs of use.”
There’s another high mountain of metal stairs like the one in Hammersmith, and by the time we ascend them I catch Timofei’s shadow vanishing around another corner.
When we emerge into daylight it burns my eyes and I have to snap them shut. Hesitantly, I open them again. I discover that we’ve come out in a small, open room. Directly in front of us is … I’m not even sure what they are. Stubby metal statues. Bollards with window shutters.
“Ticket barriers,” Timofei clarifies when he sees me looking. He has a bitter smile on his face. “You used to have to buy tickets to ride the trains. We don’t know what these are, though.” He taps a round circle on top of one of them. “That’s a mystery.”
“Why are they still here?” I ask, walking through the barriers.
“Maybe the Officials couldn’t be bothered to tear them down. Maybe they thought they’d deter us.” He grins savagely. “They didn’t. After a while we pried the doors open and walked right through.”
I’m stunned. “And the Officials didn’t see you, or stop you?”
He barks out a laugh. “There aren’t many Officials out here anymore. Or, at least, there aren’t many Officials allied to the military.”
“Most of the Officials here are Guardians,” Dalmar says.
“Are you a Guardian?”
He nods. “Both me and Hele are.”
I look over to where Hele is inspecting a glass window in the wall. Instead of looking out onto the street, behind it is a me
ssy office. “I guess I … kind of worked that out.”
He nods, calls to Hele, and waits for her to return to his side.
“The hell happened to you?” Timofei demands, his eyes on Dalmar’s arm.
“I got shot,” Dal says plainly.
Timofei drips sarcasm. “I can see that.”
“You’ll be able to heal him, won’t you?” Hele’s eyes are wide with worry.
“I can heal him. Don’t worry about that. Worry about going out.” He takes a deep breath. “You two—usual rules. We’re using entrance three. And you, Honour—stay close behind me, stick as near to the buildings as possible, and for the love of God don’t draw attention to yourself. I’m not having a repeat of last time.”
“Last time?” I ask.
Timofei shakes his head and shoots a withering glance at Dalmar who looks amused at first, then ashamed. “Better that you don’t know.”
Hele touches my shoulder. “It’ll be all right, Honour,” she says, and I wonder what expression I must have on my face for her to look as worried about me as she does. “We’ll be right behind you.”
Timofei doesn’t wait any longer. He leads out of the station through a small gap in the metal shutters. I follow him as closely as I can without walking on his heels. I tense as soon as I get into the open, the hairs on the back of my neck standing up in nervous agitation, and I swear that an Official is going to catch us. I wait for it.
I don’t know what illegal act we’ll be charged with doing, but I’m sure it will be bad. The military wants me dead—them shooting at us this morning was proof enough.
We walk for ten minutes, taking as many side streets as possible, but we don’t come across any Officials—Guardians or otherwise. Some of the streets we take are residential, with colourful, perfect houses, but none of them are occupied. Other routes we take are the back roads of shopping centres.
Timofei takes us around a corner and onto a main street. Two Officials are walking on the other side of the road but Timofei doesn’t seem worried so I guess that they’re Guardians.
“Our guards,” he says quietly over his shoulder. “In case you were worried.”
“Thanks.”
We walk a short way along the road, maybe a minute or so, before Timofei stops abruptly outside an old pub called The Railway. He waits for Dalmar and Hele before he shoots around the back of the building.
The Forgotten Page 19
