Paradigm (9781909490406) (27 page)

A slow wave of agreement rose up from the teams. This was something they all knew had to happen, but something that had never been discussed. Alice was relieved she wouldn't have to justify the decision any more than she'd already had to with herself.

‘What about books?' said Kelly. ‘I used to love reading fiction, anything that wasn't real.'

Quinn squeezed her hand and shook her head.

‘I'm guessing that's a no?' said Jayden. ‘We have to start again, right?'

‘Right,' said Alice. ‘What we have now is incredibly fragile. In one, maybe two years' time, the rest of our people will be coming to join us—some even before then if we can get this right. We need to provide them with the best possible chance of survival. There are some children down there on the Ship who have never seen the sun. But they've also never been force-fed television or plastic toys or the complexities of a society that almost took us to extinction. For their sake more than anyone else's, we need to get this right. However painful it is, you have to consider the contents of those houses as junk, unless it has a functional purpose. Otherwise, it's junk that will stink and rot and decay through into our bones the longer we leave it there.'

She looked around at the dusty faces of the team. The emotions ranged from stark indignation to sadness. ‘It's not that all those things were wrong—they were fun and they were interesting, but our lives are different now. We have to do something transformative, something completely alien to us so that we
really
start again and do not try to pick up where we left off. It's what we believe,' she said firmly and waited while each of them nodded in decisive agreement.

S
tarting
in that one small street in the north-west corner of the centre of the city and moving outwards in painful, slow circles, they started to burn up everything that had ever meant anything. They took it in turns to stoke the fires with books and papers, plastics and flags, furniture, mattresses and everything that was branded with time. They carried, dragged and pushed everything they could manage from homes, supermarkets and offices. In the first few days they had cleared one small street around Unity Square and hauled sixteen cars from the edges of the city onto the verge.

The front door of the first house that Jayden went crashing through on their second day above ground reminded Alice a little of the house she had shared with her mother, father and Charlie Davenport in the country in the days before Prospect House and the storms. The small front room opened out into the lounge with a tiny kitchen at the back before a proud square of garden. But it wasn't the shape or the style of the house that reminded her; it was the front door, still wooden and painted red with a small plastic sticker across the top that was the same, and made her heart beat faster in her chest.

The peeling plastic sticker with black writing with twelve swirly words:

I
t was the sticker
. The same sticker her father had brought home from work one day, just as he had brought home Charlie Davenport and sweets and a book about zebras that Alice had loved. She ripped it from the door and smashed her fist against the window until the last of the glass shattered and her fingers bled.

T
he door was warped
at the edges and hung uncomfortably on the paper-thin hinges like a sweater that had been stretched in the wash. It didn't take much more than one rhino run at the door and Jayden's bulk flew into the house. The wood splintered into pieces. Alice remembered the hours she had spent with the blue paint-flecked axe making storm windows out of a wardrobe. Things, she thought, were so much easier to break here.

Downstairs, ornamental plates patterned with sour-looking horses and dull metal ladles covered the length of one wall. Chintzy china animals, fractured into small pieces littered the thick, green carpet. A giant ceramic fox head looked up from the corner of one room. Alice wasn't sure she could distinguish the balance between mildew and the original colour. The other walls half-bowed under the weight of stocky shelves crammed with DVDs, videos, CDs and box sets. It suddenly occurred to her that she hadn't seen a feature film in over five years.

Upstairs was worse. Bedrooms stacked with unread magazines, un-played-with toys, unworn clothes. There were shoes—tens of pairs of shoes that were time-worn but almost brand new, and two pairs still in crumpled cardboard boxes. Quinn and Kelly leafed through a wardrobe, pulling out the remnants of dull faded material and measuring them against their bodies. Hats, leggings, scarves and T-shirts in all different colours reminded Alice that there had once been something other than the clean, grey uniform of the Ship but, for some reason, the idea didn't hold much appeal. Papers, crumpled and dirty, were strewn across the floor. The headlines on a magazine near the bed that caught Alice's eye read like a foreign language, something so distant and alien that she physically retched as the words streamed from her mouth.

K
elly
, who was thumbing through the pages, registered a look of disgust on her face. Alice moved to the window and took a deep breath of air.

‘Take it all down to the pyre,' she said. ‘Get rid of every single thing. Let's create some good space.'

The fires burned for most of the day.

A
s Jayden
and Grenfell carried Jonah's body on their shoulders and placed it without ceremony into the flames, the teams fell silent. Quinn brought the last trolley-load of the evening as the rest of them sat around the fire watching the embers burn to dust. Kelly and Rachel helped her sort through the junk; piles of magazines, books, a suitcase, a lamp, a cuddly toy and worn black case with peeling fabric.

Alice picked up the case and opened it; inside, the rich, glossy mahogany of a violin shone back at her, threateningly beautiful and dangerous. Before she could toss it into the flames, Quinn snatched the body and the bow out of the case, letting her hands caress the thin wooden neck. And under the silver crescent of a white moon, she positioned the instrument under her chin and began to play.

Underscored by the percussive spit of the flames, the beauty of the notes spiralled up into the night and echoed under the stars. Quinn played, eyes closed, until every perfect sound was imprinted in the hearts of each of them like the grooves of a record. She swayed into the rhythm of the music, eating up the space in between the cadences and her audience until they were all one, moving in time together until the final draw of the bow across the strings.

Nobody spoke and nobody clapped; they just sat in silence around the fire as the final vibrations seeped outwards into the night and the strains of musical brilliance hung in the air.

‘Bruch's violin concerto in G Minor, third movement,' said Quinn, tears streaming down her face, and threw the violin into the heat of the flames.

Alice watched as the bridge melted down into nothing and the strings pinged back in a painful sharp pizzicato for the final time.

‘There's something I need to do,' she whispered to Filip, slipping her arm into his, ‘Something for me. I need to bury my past, just like Quinn just has. And if you won't come with me, I at least need you to cover for me.'

F
rom outside the
entrance to the tunnel, Carter felt his face burning in anger.

‘Lily!' he called and banged on the lid. ‘I get it. It's part of the test, right?' There was a silence before she spoke: a silence that seemed to last for hours.

‘I'm not supposed to talk to you now.' Her voice was different—hard, and delivered in a cold monotone. ‘They'll be here to collect me in less than five minutes. If you want to survive—in whatever way you can—I suggest you run. You're lucky I haven't killed you already; although that might have been kinder than leaving you out there with the wolves.'

‘You think I didn't know there was something going on?'

There was a crunching on the other side of the tunnel. Lily's feet kicked gravel against the lid while she searched for something to say.

‘Carter, I was your mentor, your running mate,' she said finally, ‘brought in to test your loyalty. If you failed, I got to take your place. That's the beauty of having six contenders. Three out in the open and the other three, well, masquerading as mentors. Our
job
was to get you to break. It's the new process. The way the Industry ensures we have someone stronger than Anaya Chess in charge.'

‘She was the wrong choice—I'm not.'

‘Chess is too weak. She gave people too much freedom and showed too much sympathy with the dissidents and so the Contender rules have been changed. I was there to help you, gain your trust and reel you in, and to find out how quickly the rebels would try to recruit you. Your love and trust in Isabella let you down. It made you weak.' Her voice sounded hollow.

Carter pushed his palm on the lid firmly, feeling the heat of the sun absorbed by the trophene warming his palm. It felt safe, secure, disarming. And it made him even angrier.

‘You'll never make Controller General. If you were that good, they'd have given you a chance before this—you've been around; even you told me that.'

There was a sarcastic laugh from the tunnel.

‘You're even more self-absorbed than I'd heard. As much as you think you're the great saviour, you're just bitter. Angry that your parents left you, jealous that Isabella understood more than you, and so self-assured that you couldn't stop yourself thinking you were bigger than the Industry. I told them you would be trouble; that's why they gave you to me. But there
is
something about you. I can see what Isabella saw in you. Maybe it's just the eyes…'

Carter balled his fist and punched the ground until his shoulder ached and the sides of his fingers began to blossom with a blue bruise and the green blood of the grass.

‘Just let me in,' he said, ‘and I'll forgive you.' This time Lily's laughter was loud and emphatic.

‘Forgive me? There's nothing to forgive
me
for. It's you who should be begging for forgiveness. Do you think you're ever going to be allowed back in after what you've done? You broke the rules, Carter. Your intention was always to break the rules; you knew that when you left your card behind. You knew that you were putting our Community at risk by coming out here. It was a test; you know that. You are a rebel—you want to do things your own way. Just like your old girlfriend, just like your daughter.' She paused. ‘Just like your parents.'

Carter thought about what Isabella had said. ‘What about my parents?' he shouted. ‘What happened to them?'

The cruel laughing had stopped but Lily's voice was still hard.

‘You're the absolute double of your father, Carter. He was
fun
too. But your mother… well, she caused complications. They were what ended the missions to the Deadlands for everyone else and why the rules inside the Community had to be strengthened. They were
why
this idea of an uprising first got traction. They were the start of things, Carter. Something
you
could have put an end to.'

Carter's palms were sweating and he felt sick. ‘They were good people,' he said.

‘It was on the second day of the mission that they tried to escape. Your mother was due to be sent to the Catacombs but your father had other ideas. They had a plan to make for the west and start a new life together, to have more children and bring them into a world with no boundaries. But not with you, Carter Warren—they left you in the Community.
You
were not required.'

Carter felt the strings of blood in his veins go cold. ‘It's not true. They were in an accident...' Lily interrupted him midsentence. Her voice was like a knife.

‘Your birth was hailed as a success, but the scans showed that her next child wasn't going to be as lucky—I didn't see the pictures that the medics took but they said he had gills like a fish.'

Her accusations came out like bullets.

‘It was no accident; they planned it all. And it was no accident that I shot them. I was under orders, of course. It's what I do, Carter Warren. Your father was killed instantly, but your mother… well, it took a little longer. The other Scouts were, thankfully, already inside the Transporter so it wasn't difficult to propagate the story about wolves when we got back to the Community. But then there was your daughter.'

‘What about my daughter?' Carter thought about his parents, smiling as they'd left him that morning. Kissing him on the head. Knowing that they had no intention of seeing him again.

‘Well, as I had a connection with the family, I was brought out of the Catacombs in preparation for your return. And you were given to me as my main assignment—they only told me that the situation with your daughter had got out of hand after they'd briefed me about you. I never imagined we'd find your daughter alive. That was a shame—so young.'

‘What?' The inside of Carter's head felt cold and his arms were numb. The first of the evening mosquitoes lifted off the water and started to gnaw into his skin.

‘I'll claim self-defence but I don't think anyone in the Industry will care. After your eagerness to swig the sedative in my water, it was really easy to set up the roof fall once I'd seen there was a way out. To be truthful, I thought the girl was already dead but she was just asleep.'

A rage built up inside of Carter, like an explosion of stars. His breathing was staggered, harsh, but Lily didn't stop. Her voice was sneering, cruel.

‘She probably didn't even hear me coming; for all her warrior instincts, she didn't even stir until I twisted the scissors. Then, when I pulled down some of the struts in the tunnel, it was enough of an emergency to make you find the way out. My orders were to destroy the tunnel, destroy the revolution and retrieve the girl—preferably
with
you rather than against you, but, Carter Warren, there's a big part of you that wants this for yourself and not for the Community.'

Carter banged hard on the lid with his fists. ‘I will get you back for this,' he said, his voice low and full of rage. ‘You will regret this.'

‘It's not about you, Carter,' said Lily with cold, calm definition. ‘It's about me. After this Contribution of yours that I'm making, I wouldn't be too surprised if I even make Controller General, especially for quelling the rebellion—which I intend to do by discrediting you.'

Carter banged hard on the lid again. 'You're crazy,' he screamed. ‘Crazy.'

‘Crazy is all relative, isn't it?' said Lily. ‘Hours ago that's what you thought about Isabella. But maybe, just maybe, she wasn't that crazy after all.' Lily's voice became more muffled as she moved away from the lid that separated them.

You should leave. There's nothing for you here. You're tainted now: for me, for the Community and for yourself.' Her voice was final, echoing though the cavernous tunnel and muffled by the thickness of the lid.

For the first time since his parents had left him, Carter felt desperately alone.

‘You will pay for this. I will be back for you.'

‘You won't. Not for very long anyway. You don't have the skills to find food, to defend yourself or to be alone. You'll probably die of loneliness before you die of starvation. But that is the choice you've made. You must have known that coming out here would mean an end to your life in the Community, not just your shot at becoming Controller General. It's what you're taught at the Academy; it's how you're brought up to live. There's nothing that's more important, more sacred than the life we have recreated for ourselves within the Barricades. You clearly don't value what people went through in order to secure our life today. You have no right to lead us.'

There was a silence on the other side of the lid as Lily's words reverberated through the grass verge and out into the warmness of the setting sun. ‘When the guards come to collect me, they'll kill you—if the wolves don't first,' she added quietly, ‘because, officially, you've been declared dead already. But there's a part of me that pities you. Go now if you want to live and never, ever come anywhere near the Barricades. Goodbye, Carter Warren.'

Picking up the scissors from where they had fallen after striking his shoulder, Carter moved back towards the dark shape of the shelter cast against the horizon. Four or five paces in, he sped up until his walk became a jog and then a sprint. Breathlessness sent pains through his chest and his shoulders but he kept running until he reached the leafy cover of the trees and then he threw himself onto the piles of earthy undergrowth and screamed until his whole body ached.

W
hen Carter opened
his eyes again it was dark, but a bright, icy moon had arched itself across the sky and cast a flood of white light across the trees. Under the pale mist that gathered under the lower branches, he could hear the scuttling whisper of small animals in the dense undergrowth.

The pain in his shoulder had gathered some traction and it felt sore, and the dry, gravelly tenseness in his throat irritated his trachea, making him cough. As he did, the skittering became more intense, and in the background he could hear other, less light-footed animals moving amongst the fallen leaves and broken branches.

There had been something about his dream that had woken him. He'd been climbing, hand over foot up over a hill of broken bones glued together with moss and leaves and a covering of bright sunshine-yellow gorse that glowed as he walked. In his dream he had felt the ground underneath him shifting and breaking as he moved against it, slippery as ice, towards the top of the hill. On the hill was a row of glass shards like the one that had stuck out from the river on the west side. Above him, there was a figure, back to the sun, that cut a clear outline against the white light.

‘Isabella,' he called, ‘Isabella, is that you?'

When she turned around he could see her as she was before, in the days when he had sat behind her at the Academy desperately wanting to stroke her hair and smell the sunshine in the air she breathed. The shadow of Isabella turned around, the eyes playful and shimmering in the brightness of the dream. As she turned around, the golden haze of the gorse and the white paper-like flowers on the sides of the hillside bent and shaped themselves into bells and chimed his arrival.

‘Carter Warren,' she said softly. ‘You've missed your chance. I'm gone now.'

Then the face melted into the blackness of the sun shadow and Isabella became Lily, laughing and calling him. And the tiny white flowers became bones: knuckles and the teeth of long-dead children, nipping at his ankles and scratching him with their sharp pincer-like spikes. He tried to kick them away, to step backwards.

‘Leave me alone!' he shouted. ‘Leave me alone!' And then he turned and ran. He ran fast, away from the jumping bones and the figures of Lily and Alexis who were barking in throaty howls like wolves. In the distance, three trees loomed ahead of him, tall and dark. Carter ran to them, grabbing the trunk of one tightly in his arms, feeling the rough bark against his skin. The branches of the tree folded around him, pulling him tighter and closer until an old, familiar voice warmed his heart.

‘Carter Warren,' said the voice, ‘what a surprise to see you here. Do you remember me?' Carter hugged the tree that had become an old man.

‘Grandfather,' he muttered in his sleep, ‘why did you lie to me?' and then, as he turned over in the earthy ground of the Deadlands, the cool chill of the night dragged him out of his dream with a sharp, shocking jolt.

A
bove
, in the trees, the nightjars were making their familiar sound. Set against the alien backdrop of the other wildlife in the Deadlands, there was something reassuring about hearing a bird call he was used to. But the sound of his grandfather's voice had unsettled him, reminding him of the terrible things he had heard about the Deadlands, the lies that had kept him from asking the right questions.

‘Everything about life before was complex,' his grandfather had said. ‘Too complex and terrible to understand.'

‘Was there anything good?'

‘Nothing at all.'

The old man span tales like silk about the evils of sweatshops, weapons of mass destruction, terrifying religions, complex derivatives markets, Christian pie-eating contests, conspiracy theories, death hopscotch, fizzy acid sweets, never-ending jigsaw puzzles, mobile phones that burned the brain, beauty pageants that you had to change your face for, unicycles and pension plans. Everything that was bad and evil about the old world. Everything that was untrue.

‘My father, the man whose name you have, was called Richard Carter Warren. His parents deserted him as the Storms came in the fractured remains of a city. He raided food stores called supermarkets as the rain fell, diving into the cold grey depths of the rainwater in search of food in filthy cans that he could feast upon in the evenings. He was one of the lucky ones. He lived in a high tower above the city and was forced to watch as the world died. He lived there with his brother.'