Paradigm (9781909490406) (13 page)

‘Lucia?' he said cautiously. ‘Is that you?' The light came closer, boring directly into him. He shielded his eyes. ‘It's okay, you know. I can make this all okay.' There was the cracking of twigs as the figure stepped towards him.

‘No, it's not Lucia. It's me.'

Carter recognised the voice immediately. It was his mentor.

‘Lily, what are you doing here?' She crunched her way towards him through the leaves and pulled him along the pathway.

‘I'm saving you from yourself,' she said. ‘You shouldn't be here. We need to leave here now.'

W
hen they found her missing
, the alarm sounded loudly. With the alarm screeching in the background, Alice, looking significantly younger than her eleven years, pulled the trick that she had used so many times before. It had always worked when she'd been caught shoplifting—especially at the markets. She screwed her fingernails tightly into the palm of her hand and thought about Charlie Davenport, the Jack Russell puppy that her father had bought her before he went away. Within seconds, the tears started to fall in heavy torrents and her shoulders heaved and shook.

‘Take her to the infirmary,' said one of the men with a disappointed tone. Alice let her legs slip to the floor and she squeezed out more tears and short, breathy screeches. Two of the men did their best to comfort her and they put her onto a trolley and into a card-operated lift that shot downwards into the bowels of the Industry structures. She carried on sobbing and lurching until almost an hour after a doctor had shone lights in her eyes and certified her as needing some solitary rest.

‘She can stay for twelve hours,' said one of the men who had brought her to the infirmary. ‘And then she goes back in the Playroom.' The door clicked neatly as they left the room and in the cool, quiet darkness she let her breathing subside to a satisfyingly regular beat. Her mouth formed a tight smile. Even though she had only been gone from the Playroom for twenty-three minutes, it had, most definitely, been worth it.

S
he thought
one more time about Charlie Davenport, the Jack Russell puppy that her father had bought her before he died. That was when they had lived miles and miles away from the flat in the clouds with the map of the world and the park with bare trees. Her father had bought Charlie home from work, just a scrap of brown-white fur and a floppy pink tongue. Her mother had slanted her eyes but her father had wrapped his arms around all three of them and all the doubts about having a dog melted away into nothing. Every morning before school, Alice would take Charlie out into the garden and chase him around the cherry tree, throwing globs of blossom at his stubby brown face while he jumped and barked in his screechy puppy voice. Charlie slept under Alice's bed making a snuffling snoring noise that sang her to sleep most nights.

But then her father got sick with the cancer. Alice's mother tried to care for him but he kept getting worse, coughing up chunks of livery-coloured spit, his tongue lolling out of one side of his mouth like Charlie's, but not in a playful way. He died fifteen weeks and four long days after bringing home the puppy they all called Charlie Davenport and Alice's mother had to sell the house to pay off their debts and buy a polished onyx headstone with his name carved on it.

What was the point, thought Alice, of that headstone now? She imagined it anchored under acres of water-sky, sitting alongside supermarket trolleys and broken glass with her father flying high in his coffin, floating amongst the clouds made of buildings.

H
er mother had cried constantly
the day that they moved into the tiny flat in the clouds. She lay on the sofa watching as Alice packed up the things that they needed into thin cardboard boxes while men who were not her father carried them into the blue-and-white van to the estate. Charlie sat on her lap in the van, licking at her fingers and wagging his metronome tail in a happy love-beat.

Inside, the miserable grey walls reeked of despair and the lift had broken. As she watched the men climb up the stairs, dumping their boxes on the communal balcony, Alice placed her hand on Charlie's belly and felt his strong dog heart. A thin drizzle began to blow across the sky from slate grey clouds that hung like fog and melted through the cardboard that peeled back leaving her toys and the kitchenware and their bedding and her mother's pimpled dressing gown. Charlie licked one salty tear from her face and she smelled the hot fur on his head.

Nine floors below, she could see her mother and the men who carried things talking behind the van. One of them put his arm on her shoulder; little stick arms and dark featureless faces that were just silhouettes against the late afternoon grey blanket. She hardly recognised her pale, thin mother who had plastered on a thick red lipstick and was wrapped deep in the arms of a blob of a man. As she watched them, something whistled past her ear and flew like a condor in the sky. It was their washing-up bowl.

‘What we got ‘ere?' said a voice from behind her and she whirled around to see a group of boys kicking open the remnants of the slippery boxes, strewing their contents across the balcony. Charlie let out a tiny yapping bark, shiny teeth smiling. Alice backed herself against the wooden rail of the balcony and locked her eyes to the floor. The boy who had spoken flashed his broken gums.

‘Nothing,' she said quietly and looked across at her front door but one of the other boys had already marked the post. He stood just inside the door, arms folded and blowing gum bubbles. Alice rubbed her fingers on Charlie's ears.

‘Oh, there's no dogs allowed here,' said the boy. ‘Didn't no one tell you that, girl?' The stump-toothed boy had a long, deep scar above his eye that went all the way across into his hairline where it disappeared into a thick tuft of blackness. Alice shook her head.

‘Like I said, this is my estate and I say no dogs. ' And, without warning, the boy snatched Charlie from Alice's arms. The dog whined and called for Alice and she reached across to pet him.

‘Now you see it,' said the boy. ‘And now you don't.' With two hands he lobbed Charlie off the balcony. There was a howl as he flew through the air, clipping a tree as he fell. He landed in a sick thump and a screech on the concrete by the adventure playground. For a second there was silence, except the falling of leaves on the path and soft whip of the wind running through the clothes littered on the pathway. Alice's mother looked up and screamed at Alice who was all alone on the balcony. The boy with the wiry scar and his ugly friends had gone, disappeared into the cold grey air like apparitions as quickly and silently as they had arrived.

I
n the darkness
of the Infirmary, a single tear edged down her cheek. For the first time since she had arrived, Alice began to think about how, since the Storms, everything had changed and would never be the same again. They were all trapped here, locked inside the capsule, waiting for the world to return.

But before being taken to the Infirmary, during her twenty-three-minute expedition in the corridors and walkways of the Paradigm Industries head office, Alice had discovered many things.

The first was that there were areas of her new underground home that were not just forbidden but were secret and private, even to some of the people who worked there. When she had reached the eighth level above the residential plazas, exhausted, she had looked for somewhere to rest. A tiny grille on of the ventilation tunnels had been left ajar and, when she slid it back, she found that there was enough room inside to squeeze a little way into the steel tube without blocking it entirely. She lay there in the cool air shaft feeling the freshness blow against her legs and through her hair.

When she closed her eyes she thought she could hear the sea, shushing louder and quieter, until she realised someone else was in the reception plaza. Her heartbeat grew to a thunderous roar as she pulled the wire meshing as tightly as she could and wriggled as far into the shaft as her body would safely let her.

Through the cross-hatch of the grille she watched as two men and a woman clicked open a series of retractable doors to reveal a lift: a lift in the centre of the level that didn't appear on any of the other floors other than as a steel tube through the middle of the whole installation.

‘Going up?' said one of the men and the woman ushered them into the lift.

‘Yes,' she said. ‘Broadcast starts in five minutes and we're late already.'

‘It's carnage out there,' said the man.

‘Like it wasn't crazy before?' said the other and they all laughed in a way that made Alice shiver.

‘The government should have listened—I told Wilson that years ago, when the whole global warming thing first started, but he knew they wouldn't.

‘He's in his element now, right?'

‘For sure—I mean, they didn't cause the Storms, but him and Kunstein have this whole thing figured out. I mean, they were the only ones who had a plan.'

‘Is that plan still viable?'

‘Depends on who they choose I suppose—and hell, it won't be one of us, we're way too old.'

'Just do what they tell you,' said the woman. ‘And there's a chance we'll get out of here alive.'

T
he silver doors
to the lift closed and the three sets of outer doors folded back into the wall, creating a seamless red-and-black montage of brick-and-wood decoration. Pushing aside the grille, Alice climbed out of the shaft and ran her hands along where she had seen the doors join together and fold back in on themselves but there was nothing. It was then that the alarm sounded.

A
fter her hysteria
stopped and the doctor had agreed she was suitably sedated, Alice was allowed a visitor. Miss Kunstein had arrived at the Infirmary with a tiny piece of chocolate. She sat down on the bed and spread out the tails of her coat so that they looked like the wings of a crow in flight.

‘I hope you are feeling better,' she said quietly, placing the unwrapped chocolate on Alice's pillow. ‘And I hope you'll agree that your
adventure
was a waste of time. There's nothing of any interest to children here; it's an organisational facility—lots of machines, dangerous chemicals and very,
very
busy people.'

Alice could smell the square of chocolate so strongly that her tongue felt slippery and hungry. She wanted to ask about the museum but instead, she bit down on her lip.

‘I'm sleepy,' she said.

‘And you can sleep soon,' said Miss Kunstein. ‘I just want to check your understanding. There's nothing to be worried about, nothing to go looking for and no reason to be out of your room at night. Is that agreed?'

Alice swallowed the saliva building between her teeth and nodded.

‘Yes,' she said in a soft voice, digging her fingernails into her palms, already patterned with lines of dried blood. Miss Kunstein leaned over and kissed her on the forehead.

‘I shall come and collect you in the morning. It's a big day tomorrow—we are moving everyone into more permanent accommodation and introducing everyone to their new families. You'd like a new family, wouldn't you?'

‘I don't know,' said Alice truthfully.

‘Well, we'll see what happens next,' said Kunstein. She smiled without moving her eyes and glided out of the room with her tails swishing quietly. Then there was silence, and the sound of a thudding heartbeat. And then nothing.

A
lice Davenport's
new family came in the form of Helen and Ian Watson. Helen had been rescued first, hauled off the roof of the firm of architects where she had been clinging to a satellite dish for two days when the floor collapsed inwards on itself, and Ian had followed three days later. He had thrown himself into the water after a rescue boat when it had failed to hear his cries for help for him and his son. After exhaustion got the better of him, he tried to swim back but he ended up losing the hearing in one ear and the fingers from both hands after spending a night in the freezing water. He still shook uncontrollably almost a month later. Their son Dylan was never found. The Watsons were allocated three new daughters in total, Alice being the eldest. The other two, Jennifer and Serena, had known each other before the Storms and kept themselves quietly to themselves which, Alice thought, was for the best.

Each level had its own great hall—a low-slung round wheel of a room with a large steel pillar at its core that had electronic screens all the way around it. Circles of seats like ripples on water edged out from the middle, and eight aisles cut directly into the rows in perfect symmetry. The seats folded in on themselves and retracted into the floor when the room needed to become an exercise hall. Sometimes, during the day, the screens around the pillar showed films, usually all about the different Paradigm Industries, but every day at 4:00 p.m. there was a live broadcast from five different static cameras of the devastation and carnage in the outside world. The picture was a desolate one: grey and fuzzy pictures that were watermarked by the constant downpour above. The broadcast was shown for half an hour and most of those who could bear to watch it at all left in tears. Alice, on the other hand, had watched every single broadcast in the four weeks she had been inside the facility without sadness or regret. Even the one time she thought that she had seen her block of flats slip downwards off the screen into oblivion, she still felt the queer rub of satisfaction that she always got as she watched the weather eat through everything outside the giant capsule under the ground.

But after four weeks, the cameras malfunctioned. One by one, they stopped sending the signals back to the facility. The network of over fifteen thousand cameras that had covered the whole city stopped working and plunged Alice back into a sad darkness. Instead, the briefings would now all come from the Controller General, Wallace Wilson.

‘Today,' said Wilson, ‘we will be enhancing the living conditions within this facility beyond what any of us thought possible. Today is the first step in developing ourselves as the first fully functioning subterranean community in the world.' There was the regular low murmur of uncertainty mingled with excitement.

‘Do we have to stay in this dungeon?' called someone. Wilson ignored her.

‘For those of you who have been keeping in tune with current affairs, you will know that the detailed forecasts undertaken by our meteorological departments suggest that there will be no immediate end to current prevailing weather trends. In addition, the issues we have identified with Drakewater suggest that, even though the facility is a number of kilometres away, there is likely to be significant impact on the environment.' Alice wished that sometimes Wallace Wilson would just speak the plain truth.
Yes. We're going nowhere.