Green Jack (8 page)

There were
secret gardens all over the City, on rooftops, in alleyways and
bedroom windows, but she liked to think hers was the safest,
despite her earlier panic. It was out of reach from rats, raccoons,
and Killian’s idiot brothers. As she crossed the rope bridge, the
wind plucked at her skirt, her braids, her hands. She kept her chin
high, just like the tightrope walker at the sideshow. She’d asked
Allegra for a few tips last year.

The balcony was
crowded with plants growing in pots, garbage cans, and broken water
jugs. She’d painted everything so that it became an art garden. She
had thyme, oregano, lettuce, carrots, and a single precious mound
of potatoes. When she pulled the leaf mask from the pot, the
delicate grape vines curled around her fingers with surprising
strength and speed. The garden responded just as quickly, oregano
scenting the humid air. Oona apparently used to eat olives rolled
in oregano leaves. An impossible luxury now, especially with every
leaf saved for medicine.

What had
happened to the Green Jack? He had to have died when he abandoned
the leaf mask. The Directorate weren’t really searching for him
after all, he was dispensable. It always came back to the leaf
masks. Saffron wasn’t even sure how to care for it. It probably
needed more water and sunlight than anyone in Elysium City was
likely to get. No one could accurately predict when the Hot months
were going to hit, or how long they’d stay; though the Oracles did
their best. Oona used to tell Saffron stories about four seasons,
always in the same order. That was long gone. So was Los Angeles,
and Vancouver, thanks to the melting ice caps. Now it was just
savage unpredictable weather and Green Jacks. And too little food
rations.

But already
this one single mask had grown enough vegetables that Saffron
wasn’t even sure how to smuggle them safely into the apartment.
She’d have to move it regularly so no one noticed a pattern to her
comings and goings, or to her baskets of greens brought to the
black market. She bit into a pea pod, the tart green juice tingling
on her tongue. The mask tightened green ivy tendrils, cutting into
her skin like ropes. It needed a host but Saffron had no intention
of become one of the Directorate’s dancing green skeletons. She’d
have to find a way to make it work. Somehow.

For now, it was
enough that her Oona wouldn’t go hungry tonight.

Chapter
10

Jane

“What is wrong
with you?” Kiri asked, exasperated. “You’ve been staring at your
food for half an hour. You’re not turning Feral, about to read
chewed up old chicken bones for omens, are you?”

Jane tore her
gaze away from her plate. Most of the other students in the Common
Room around them were trying desperately to use their magic to find
the missing Green Jack. There were rumours of instant graduation
into the Order, rewards from the Directorate, a job at the main
Cella. Blake was inhaling the smoke of burning sage and other
questionable substances. All it seemed to be doing was creating a
foul odour.

“You’re not,
are you?” Kiri pressed. “Because I don’t think you’d get extra
credit for that. You know how they feel about the Ferals.”

“It’s not that.
I’m just thinking.”

Kiri rolled her
eyes. “Your grades are better than almost anyone else’s. You don’t
need to think outside class. Or chase a Green Jack.”

“I guess.” It
was easier to let her believe that. The truth was, all Jane could
see was the Garden, the baby nurseries with their leaf-green walls,
her blood being analyzed even now deep inside the Directorate
laboratories. “I’m going to go for a run,” she told Kiri, standing
up suddenly. She caught her cup before it toppled off the table.
“This place is crazy and I need to relax.”

“Running is not
relaxing,” Kiri grimaced. “Just one of the many reasons you’re not
normal, Highgate.”

She had to
smile. “Coming from you, Solomon?”

“Takes one to
know one.” She gathered her books and her embroidered bag. “I’m
going to go study in my room. Smells like feet in here.” She let
her bag swing from her shoulder and hit Asher in the face. He
cursed and made a grab for her but she’d already danced out of the
door, laughing. The red bird someone had released to read patterns
in its flight made a panicked lunge for the window, knocking itself
out. One of the Oracles complained about her reading: the constant
and confusing taste of a spice she couldn’t place. Someone else was
painting crocuses but she didn’t know why.

Jane went to
her dorm room to change into running clothes. The top of her spine
throbbed with warning. She rolled her shoulders, trying to ignore
the pain. There were books on numen poisoning and ancient magic on
her desk, for all the good it did her. But numen had to be about
something more than growing seeds and divining crop rotations.
Before the Green Jacks came, very few people had believed in magic
and they’d mostly been dismissed as being religious, crazy, or
both. It was still such a new science. No one knew where the next
breakthrough might come from: laboratory, Collegium, or Woodwife.
There were museums of course, and stories told on Festival days,
but so much information was lost after the Cataclysms. The books
that had survived from earlier days treated Green Jacks and numen
as fiction.

She pushed her
desk chair under the vent, unscrewed the cover and slipped the
books inside. Her research material wasn’t illegal exactly, but it
would attract more attention.

And she had all
the attention she could handle.

The door
slammed open. Her essay on the symbolism of black doves in ancient
Greek divination floated off the desk to the ground. “You have to
come down to the Common Room,” Kiri demanded, dragging Jane down
the hall. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Tell you
what?” Everyone in the Common Room was excited, talking too fast,
placing bets.

“I should have
guessed,” Kiri shook her head. “Your mother must have done it.”

“Done
what?”Anxiety fluttered in her chest.

“Let me
through,” Kiri shoved through the crowd, tugging Jane behind her.
Students parted, some smiling, some sneering. They stopped in front
of the wide screen set into the wall. The usual
Directorate-approved shows played. All other feeds were blocked and
taken down with extreme prejudice. Sometimes a Greencoat video
snuck through, but never for very long. Most Oracles agreed that by
the end of the year there might not be any satellite signals at
all, even for the Directorate. Already, the signals were
weaker.

“Kiri, what are
we watching?” Jane asked.

“Just wait,”
Kiri said. “It will play again in a minute.”

The trailer was
only a few minutes long, glossy as an advertisement for protein
paste cakes. The light was hazy and romantic. There was green
grass, gardens, rows of perfect houses, soft music. Jane recognized
them with a start, dread uncurling in her stomach like a sleeping
snake woken by the sound of mice. A man spoke in a resonant voice
that oozed confidence and charm.“The Garden… where every winner has
the glory and honour of serving you. Vote for your favourite!”

The recruits
pre-marked for the Garden flashed one after the other. Personal
data followed: ages, proud family names, inoffensive hobbies. Jane
didn’t recognize most of them, until her own face stared back at
her.

A pink
moon.

“Jane Highgate
is studying at the Collegium to be an Oracle. She is proud and
excited to serve the Directorate and hopes to find true love.”

She didn’t know
where they had gotten the footage, when they’d even filmed her. She
was jogging through the Enclave, offering omens on the steps of the
Cella in the Rings, dancing in a beaded dress. Shots of the
candy-coloured tulip beds and gleaming windows of The Garden
followed. Numen burned the back of her neck.
Pink moon, church
steeple
.

Asher was next,
much to his surprise and fury. She heard him yelling in the hall,
but it seemed very far away. Her vision narrowed to the flash of
lights and colours in front of her. She couldn’t tell anyone about
the Amphitheatre, the lack of Green Jacks, Cartimandua’s cold and
calculating presence. Somehow she had to pretend this was just one
of her mother’s plots. And convince Kiri there was no slipping out
of this particular noose.

The video
looped, playing again and again.

Pink moon, red
dust, green blood.

Chapter
11

Saffron

When Saffron
got back to the apartment, the chairs were overturned and there was
a new hole in the wall. Ragged plaster slashed by a knife blistered
the fox she’d painted with a tail made of fire. She’d liked that
drawing, damn it.

“Killian’s
brothers must still be in a mood,” she said, pushing into her
bedroom. Killian was sitting next to Oona who was propped against
her bed, blood on her face and matted in her thin braided hair.
Saffron skidded to a stop, feeing exactly the same way she’d felt
the time she’d mouthed off to a Protectorate soldier and he’d
punched her in the throat. Her breath stuttered and froze.

“I’m all
right,” Oona croaked, dabbing at her split lip with the hem of her
skirt. “I just need the comfrey ointment.”

“Why would
Killian’s brothers do this to you?” Saffron asked, her voice
strange and cold.

Oona patted
Killian’s hand, as though he didn’t know exactly what kind of
brothers he had. “Wasn’t them.”

Saffron’s hands
were shaking as she struggled to open the tube of ointment. “Tell
me who I need to kill, Oona.”

Oona clicked
her tongue. “Looks worse than it is, I reckon.”

“I’ll be the
judge of that,” Saffron said. To her, it looked worse than the
bodies that gathered in the ditch around the Wall.

“Won’t need
stitches.”

“You still
haven’t told me who did this to you.” She crouched by the side of
the bed, suspicion like prickly thorns in her mouth. “Let me see
your arm.”

“It’s
fine.”

“Then let me
see it, old woman.”

Under the
sleeve of her knitted sweater, Oona’s arm was already wrapped in a
length of flowered material she’d torn from her hem. Blood seeped
through it as Saffron tugged the knot loose. Three slashes cut her
forearm and they were deep enough to show the parted flesh
underneath the hastily applied butterfly sutures. It was the same
cuts Saffron had, the same number. A warning. “Argent.”

She suddenly
felt as though she was holding the entire Kill Zone inside her
body, she was landmines and razor wire, bonechimes and warning
signs.

“This is my
fault.” She yanked a pack out from behind the water barrels under
her cot, stuffing more daggers into her boots, belt, and the wrist
holster that sat over her own burning cuts.

“You didn’t cut
me, little girl.”

“I’m the reason
Argent even knows who you are. I did this. And it ends now.” She
finally had vegetables now, enough to sell get Argent’s money.
Killian touched her arm. She glared at him. “I’m not waiting
another second.”

He turned her
towards the window, flashing red with the curfew lights. She wanted
to argue but the black market wouldn’t run during the new curfew
anyway, they’d wait until morning. She couldn’t do anything but
wait. Frustration made her feel rabid. She punched the wall,
cracking the plaster.

“I need some of
the whirligigs,” she said suddenly, pulling a jar of maple seedpods
from the cabinet in the corner. The doors were painted with
grotesque gargoyle faces, leering to discourage the casual
observer.

Oona lifted her
head slightly. “What do you need those for? We have protein paste
left. No need to resort to maple pods.”

“I might not be
able to get close enough to stab Argent in the spine like he
deserves,” she said grimly, pouring a handful of the dried pods
into a mortar and pestle and crushed them into a fine powder. “But
I can make damn sure he leaves my witch-grandmother alone.”

Saffron waited
at the window until the curfew lights finally switched off and dawn
glittered on the glass. When she left in search of the underground
markets with her pockets full of radishes and potatoes, Killian was
at her side. There were too many patrols, too many soldiers.
Finding the new entrance to the markets wasted precious time. It
was always deep in the Core, at the very heart of the worst the
City had to offer. There were no solar panels, no generators, no
batteries or sunsticks; only the stubs of old candles. Everything
around her was the colour of Oona’s bruises: the sky, wet stone,
dark stains on the pavement. Her boots were thick with mud and
substances she’d rather not examine too closely by the time they
found the mark over a broken door.

The stairs had
long since crumbled, or been hacked at with a sledgehammer. The
entrance was basically a hole in the wall to a board of old rotten
wood crossing over the runoff inside an old subway tunnel. Creaking
alarmingly, it led her to another platform of slick tiles and then
down a flight of steps into the lower tunnel.

Torches and a
few cracked lanterns dangled from the curved ceiling. Scavengers
and vendors sold everything from Green Jack charms to the candied
violets the Enclave families ate, to reclaimed iron weapons and
anarchist flyers. It had a dark, cheerful unruliness; a dangerous
secret just this side of suicide. If the Protectorate ever found
them, they’d burn it all to the ground with everyone trapped
inside. Luckily if the markets gave them no reason to be found,
they didn’t bother searching too hard.