Paradigm (9781909490406) (24 page)

‘It's okay,' she said, her voice breaking and silent tears wetting the inside of her hood. ‘We can get you back and help you.' She leaned forward and held out her hand again, for the last time.

The lunge took her by surprise and, as Alice crouched on the balls of her feet, Jonah came flying towards her, knocking her closer towards the edge. Stone chips and gravel scudded under her feet, and fragments flew into the river below. He pinned her to the edge of the roof.

‘You are not taking me anywhere. I'm staying here with Scarlett in her ship and we're going to dance and listen to jazz and watch the sun come up.' His voice was whining, childlike. Then there was the sound of the hawk overhead and, with Jonah on top of her rolling them closer to the edge, Alice froze. He had a jagged piece of glass in his hand and waved it over the front of her helmet, his soft, flopping hair falling out in chunks. The beauty and madness of his eyes gleamed in the sunlight as they straddled the edge like lovers on the brink of climax.

‘Do it, Filip,' she whispered.

The desperate call of the hawk made them both look upwards.

From the street below came the crack of a gunshot and, what seemed like minutes rather than a second later, the side of Jonah's skull took the impact of the bullet. A fragment of bone leaked onto the fabric of Alice's suit. For a moment, she thought he hadn't noticed the groove that had been cut in his head.

‘Alice,' he said in a whisper, ‘I love you.'

‘I know,' she said. ‘I know.'

Then he lifted the weight of his body, off and away from her. He pushed himself upwards and sideways with one arm, as carefully as if he were disposing of a bomb, not one hair of his body touching Alice's. Then he felt the side of his head where the blood was beginning to leak from his skull. Finally, with a sad, silent push, he levered himself gently off the edge of the building.

Alice looked over and watched his body sail through the sunlight and land with a dull thud. There was the sound of the shattering of glass on the littered pavement below. Jonah's arms and legs were dislocated in an awkward spider shape, back curved and head to one side, surrounded by smashed and broken bricks. The blood spread quickly across the road, trickling outwards like an uneven crimson map until it reached the river and became black.

F
ilip sat crouched
on the road on her side of the river, shoulders heaving but with the gun still pointed upwards and a thin trail of smoke blending into the afternoon sun. The sound of the gun still rang with a zing in Alice's ears but the two words,
I'm sorry
, were clearly audible above the soft sobbing of the usually cocky voice of Filip that echoed through the communicator suit.

A
s the tired
flames licked slowly around the edges of the log torch, Carter sat with his palms against Lucia's and his damp eyes closed. Her body wasn't yet completely cold, but the wound was deep and final. In the dirt on the floor, three words were carved.

‘
S
he killed herself
,' said Lily, putting a hand over the white-blue eyes of Lucia and closing them shut. ‘She thought no one was coming to save her and she gave up. It's sad. Carter, I am sorry.'

Carter fingered the words in the dirt and formed the pile of coins into columns in a distracted malaise.

‘She wouldn't do that,' he said. ‘She wouldn't.'

Lily put her arm around his shoulders. ‘People can't survive out here,' she said. ‘Without the security and the structure of the Community, they lose all sense of what to do.'

Carter shrugged her arm away and kneeled down beside Lucia. ‘I've never seen a dead body before,' he said. ‘I don't even know anyone who has—not directly, anyway.' The girl looked asleep. ‘Do you think there's anything the Industry can do for her?' he added.

Lily shook her head. ‘No,' she said quietly. ‘No, there isn't.'

He flicked through the book by her side. It was full of old temples, ruins and stories of the old world. There in the pages were the words she had said to him:

Veritas liberabit vos
—the truth shall set you free.

‘She said that to me,' he said finally. ‘At the Transporter stop. She came to find me. She wanted me to join the rebels.' He stood up and rubbed the traces of blood from her palms onto his trousers.

Lily pulled him close to her. ‘What did you say?' she said. ‘Why didn't you tell me this? Are you planning to lead the revolution?'

‘If I am to lead anything,' said Carter, ‘first I have to follow. We have to go into the Deadlands. The truth is more important than anything now.'

Lily looked at the body.

‘And what do we do with her?'

Carter's answer was firm and definite. ‘She wanted to be outside. She comes with us.'

T
hey squeezed
through the space in the wall: Lily first, next the body of Lucia, and then Carter. They placed the girl on a chair as they sorted through what they found next. Inside the brick wall was an old cellar, full of empty glass bottles, barrels and crates. As the torch burned down to nothing, Lily lit another and held it high enough that they could see the whole of the inside of the room. It was a low, rectangular space with walls that were regular old red brick but painted a faded white around the inside. The ceiling was made of long straight planks of wood with a small square door in one corner that led upwards.

The room was packed full of oddments: shapes and items that Carter had never even seen before—a whole plethora of beautiful junk. Bottles, crates, dried-out papers and the skeleton of some kind of animal with a long tail that lay curled in a corner. Everything inside the underground room had been whipped up and knocked from the surfaces and strewn across the room. Between them they picked through it carefully, marvelling at the weirdness of the abandoned entrails of the old life.

‘What happened to you, Lucia?' said Carter, looking around at the destruction.

‘I think,' Lily gritted her teeth, ‘I think she got as far as this room and then she ran out of energy, she ran out of light and she had no idea where she was.'

Carter shook his head and climbed onto a table. He tried to push open the small door cut into the ceiling. Even with his full weight it only moved slightly. ‘If that's true then she had absolutely no chance trying to move that alone,' he said, climbing down. ‘She couldn't get out; she was injured and scared. She was waiting for me to come.'

He imagined Lucia, with no burn left in her torch, running from the Industry officials she thought were chasing her. Climbing through the hole in the wall and stumbling around in the pitch blackness, smashing and crashing into things, broken and wasted until all she could do was wait. His heart sank as he picked out the scissors and rubbed them clean of blood.

Lily rubbed her hand across his shoulder. ‘None of this was your fault,' she said.

Carter scanned around at the mess of the cellar and then back to the outline of Lucia's face, running a finger down her jawline and across the thin, bony edges of her throat. There were features of his there; she looked even more like him than his Ariel did.

‘All of this was my fault,' he said. Bring me that piece of wood from the other side of the wall,' he said. ‘We're going to need it to get out of here.'

L
ily walked
around the propped-up body of Lucia and through the crawl space, leaning away from the hand that pointed outwards. She came back with the stump of wood, flattened at one end, and handed it to Carter who was balanced on a chair he fixed on top of the table. He banged on the hatch and, with a few attempts, blasted through it easily. A cloud of dust caught his throat and his eyes and he staggered down from the chair, coughing. Through the dust, the shards of light from above shot through the darkness, illuminating the particles of dirt that hung in the air like stars.

When the air cleared, there was a hole. A square hole of light that spilled down through the grey emptiness that led upwards into the house in the Deadlands. Carter brushed the splinters of wood from his shoulder and looked up.

‘What's there?' said Lily, climbing onto the table.

‘I don't know; I can't see very much.' Carter brushed away the sticky dust from the edges of the hole and peered into the greyness. He hauled his body upwards, inching his shoulders through the small square door and then up into the room of a farm cottage on the western side of the Black River.

T
hrough the smashed
-out windows of the old house streamed the first white beams of a new sun. Any coverings that had once blocked out the day were long gone, but inside the house, some traces of the old life remained. He'd emerged into what looked like a kitchen; there were two signs still fixed to the wall that read:

T
hrough an archway to an adjoining room
, Carter found a pair of long, curved resters, rotten through to the springs, and on one wall a glass-covered printed picture. He ran his fingers over the surface—it wasn't part of a FreeScreen but was static. The faded outline was a picture of two young children dressed in strange clothes and smiling blankly out at him. He wondered why they were smiling.

There was a FreeScreen too, but it wasn't fixed to the wall. It was lying pregnant on its side, its innards—wires and cables—spewing out onto the floor. And, with the exception of the kitchen, there was a thick mud-infused material covering the floors that created dust explosions each time Carter stamped his feet in it.

‘Carpet,' he said to himself quietly. He'd seen some once on an old FreeScreen broadcast.

B
ut if the
rooms downstairs had a mythical quality—something he couldn't quite comprehend—it was the magic of the upstairs quarters that gave him the idea for his Contribution. The wooden stairs were creaky; some cracked under his weight. Inside the first room he went into, there were books lining the walls, hundreds of them, and shelves full of things that he had never seen before. Even now, out in the Deadlands, he felt a shiver of dangerous excitement at the sight of ornaments of the old world. Slowly, he reached out and picked up a book, pages flattened tight against the weight of the others in the stack.

His fingers trembled as he ran them down the black lettering on the spine. He mouthed the words to himself a few times before he opened the pages, the door to the old world and to the new world. Colour flooded from the pages. Things Carter had never seen in his life before. The tips of his fingers started to sweat as he leafed very slowly through the pages. He knew that what he had stumbled upon would transform the Community forever. He tore open book after book, drowning in the words.

‘Carter, where are you? Don't leave me here. It's dark!' The scream from downstairs sounded urgent, desperate even. He edged himself down the stairs carefully and back into the kitchen to the hole in the cellar. He leaned inside and held out his hand.

‘It's incredible up here,' he said.

Lily frowned at him. ‘Help me up. Now,'

‘Pass Lucia to me first,' he said. ‘And then I have something amazing to show you.'

W
hen they went outside
, the new day had already begun. The sun crept over the horizon and shot spurs of red light into the farmhouse in the dark corner of the Deadlands. The house itself was strangled by brambles that extended thorny fingers across the cracked guttering and wound its tentacles inside the rooms through broken windows. But even so, it seemed to breathe with life—with at least the idea of a new beginning.

Lily and Carter stood in the doorway as they watched the first sunrise outside the Barricades of the Community. In the far distance, they could see the twisted metal spurs glinting in the light, reflecting pearls of different colour across the surface of the Black River towards them. To the far north-west there were hillocks that broke the horizon and a brightness that Carter had never seen before.

‘This is more illuminating than any training,' he said. ‘Imagine what it would be like to share this with everyone. It's… beautiful.'

Through the peppering of trees and grassland that had grown up between them and the river, there was a circling of birds that filled one corner of the clean stretch of sky. In the warmth of the late morning sun, they buried Lucia underneath a tree that bloomed with a heavy purple fruit that squashed easily underfoot scattering tiny black seeds into the earth. Lily recited the names of the first Scouts and then they watched the rays of the sun settle high in the sky in a mark of respect. Something about the solemnity of the occasion shook him to the core. When the burial was complete, Carter took Lily back inside the house.

‘What's missing from our world?' he said as they climbed the stairs.

‘What do you mean?'

‘What is here that is not there?'

Lily frowned at Carter. ‘Nothing; we have food and shelter. It's more than the old world could claim. Remember the famine, the homelessness, the…'

Carter held up his hand to stop her. ‘But people had something more than that. What did the old world have that holds so much appeal to the rebels?'

Lily lay on her back on the floor. There were tiny cracks in the ceiling that let the light through. ‘I don't know,' she said, tiredly. ‘I'm not a rebel.'

‘You don't need to be a rebel to understand.'

‘You won't make Controller General if you think like this.'

Carter sat next to her. ‘Look around you, Lily. Look at this place and look at all this stuff. My grandfather told me that all of this was designed to make people's lives more complicated. Musical instruments, books, games, hobbies, interests. The Industry tells us that it tore people's lives apart and that's why it's all forbidden. But look at all these pictures. It wasn't that at all. The Industry got it wrong.'

He picked up a book and opened it midway through. ‘See these people here, they're playing a game. Football I think it is. Look how they're doing it together.' He flicked through the pages. ‘And here, this is an orchestra, making music. This is what the rebels have been trying to create—not something that tears us apart but something that brings us together: something that makes us whole again.'

‘Bringing people together is dangerous,' said Lily. ‘It's like romance; it has no direct function. All the evidence the Industry has from the past has shown us how these things wasted time. These
activities
are dangerous—they detract people from what they should be doing.'

Carter shook his head. ‘Romance isn't dangerous. Love is what keeps us alive. What do you think people
should
be doing? This is
living
Lily—and what's more important than living? Nothing. Don't you get it—what we know about the past isn't true. Well, not entirely, anyway.'

Lily looked confused. ‘But we
are
living, Carter. We're living in the way that the Industry has designed.'

‘We're not living,' said Carter. ‘We're
existing
.'

Lily looked around at the room—the ripped pictures on the walls and the shelves and cupboards full of things that she'd never seen in the Community. ‘So how does this help you become Controller General? The Industry would reject it straight away. You'd be sent to the Catacombs for sure.'

‘Then I'll have to convince them when I present it as my Contribution,' said Carter, his eyes lighting up. ‘I'm going to use what we've found to bind the Community—the Industry included.'

Lily opened a cupboard door and pulled out a stack of magazines. She leafed through the pictures of people that looked so different.

‘You mean you're going to take all
this
back to the Community and you think that'll change things? All these made-up stories and books about sounds and pictures that didn't even ever exist and bring them back with you to the Community?'

Carter nodded his head vigorously. ‘It's a start,' he said. ‘But it's more than that. These things… they're not evil or wrong in themselves. The rebels were right. The Industry might have made the right choice to change things back then, but that was over eighty years ago. Things are different now. Maybe we've evolved enough to make up our own minds again.'