Shades of Grey (49 page)

“So,” I said to Tommo as we walked past the crawler and around a bramble thicket to rejoin the track of the old road, “what’s going on?”

“Yes, I suppose I should explain.”

“Would you?” I asked. “I’d be really very grateful.”

“No need to be like that.”

“So what are you doing out here? I thought most Cinnabars were cowards.”

“Not most, all,” he replied with disarming honesty.

“I’m still listening.”

“Right. Well, we were talking about your insane mission, and blow me down if Lucy doesn’t go all gooey and say how brave and manly you are. And Courtland and I got to thinking that instead of making it a trip of almost certain death and unspeakable horrors, we could invest in a few safeguards to make the trip work to everyone’s advantage. We had a brief chat, and here we are: Courtland, Violet, me and yourself.”

“And where do the safeguards come into it?”

“You’ll see.”

We had arrived at a stone house by the side of the road. The interior was a sea of brambles, and there was a beech growing in the corner. Next to the building were the remnants of an outhouse that had collapsed long ago, and beneath the carpet of roof tiles, leaf litter and moss were the remnants of a vehicle. Although anything metallic had rusted or corroded away long ago, the plastic still remained, along with four perished rubber tires and a pair of glass headlights, which looked as though they might have been cast yesterday. A flash of white on the ground caught my eye, and I picked up a sun-bleached molar. It was definitely human, although it looked as though someone had stuck some metal neatly onto the worn surface. I tapped the tooth on my palm, and the metal section dropped out. It was heavy and shiny, so I put it in my pocket.

“Okay,” said Courtland, “here will do.”

The three of them dispensed with their knapsacks. Violet and Courtland sat down, while Tommo poked in a grassy mound with a stick. Scavenging for color was one of those pursuits that followed you into adulthood.

“We should give it another half hour before a break,” I said. “We don’t know how long it’s going to take to get there.”

“We’re not resting,” said Courtland with a sense of finality. “We’ve stopped.”

Tommo and Violet looked at me, then at Courtland. Tommo had outdone himself again.

“That’s the safeguard?” I asked. “Not going to High Saffron at all?”

“The best plans are always the simplest,” observed Tommo with a smile. “Let me explain. We’re going to rest up for the day, discard all our gear and a shoe or two, rip our clothes and then stagger back into town whimpering incoherently about swans and Riffraff. Everyone’s a hero, we get excused from Useful Work for a month, receive seven hundred merits each and clean up on the sweep I’ve got going back home. There’s no risk, we don’t have to do squiddly and no one has to walk their feet off—or come back dead.”

He found something in the mound of dirt he had been prodding, and held it up. “Guys?”

Courtland shook his head, but Violet nodded.

“Blue,” she said in a grumpy tone.

“And what about the report?” I asked. “We don’t get a bean unless we actually reach the town.”

He shrugged. “We’ll claim we reached the outskirts. You can make up something suitably vague: ‘pre-Epiphanic ruins, entwined with the roots of mature oaks,’ then add a bit about ‘vibrant color lying half buried in the leaf mold.’ That will do it.”

“We could do the same thing next month,” said Violet, “and the month after that.”

“And without prefects to check up on us,” added Courtland, “there’s no risk.”

“So you’re with us on this, right?” said Tommo. “No sense in risking certain death when you can make good money with a little harmless subterfuge.”

I stared at them all. Ordinarily I
might
have entertained such an action, especially with two prefects-in-waiting already signed up. With me onboard, there would be three-quarters of East Carmine’s future Council in agreement, which would be enough to keep it hidden forever. But it didn’t bode well. If this was the level of corruption
before
they were in power, I dreaded to think what it might be like when they took office. Besides, I didn’t like being pushed. Not one little bit.

“Why don’t you guys just stay here?” I suggested. “I’ll walk over there on—”

“We really have to be together on this,” said Violet. “We’ll be debriefed. They’ll see through it.”

Courtland got up and walked toward me. I dearly wanted to take a step back, but I thought I’d fare better with him knowing I wasn’t frightened of him, so I stood my ground.

“Listen,” he said once he was uncomfortably close, “we’re not expected back, so if we lose a member no one will be surprised. We can do this with you or without you. Do it our way, and it’s a heap of cash and certain life. Do it your way, and it’s certain death and no cash.”

“Kill me and Violet’s dynasty goes all to Blue.”

“I think I’m okay in that respect,” said Violet, patting her stomach. “If I marry Doug on Sunday night no one will look too carefully at the calendar.”

I could feel my heart sink. “Two grand up front,” I murmured, suddenly realizing what was going on.

“I’m afraid you’re right,” said Tommo. “As your father will no doubt attest, I am a fine negotiator. With the High Saffron excursions sporting a one hundred percent fatality rate, he was wise to at least make
something
from you. And he gets a grandson—even if he can’t ever tell anyone. Don’t judge him too harshly. It was his best option. And he got deMauve to agree in writing that the boy would be called Eddie.”

I didn’t know what annoyed me more, being threatened with death or having my own father sell our Chromatic heritage without my knowledge. Dad must have shown Violet the ovulating shade, too. DeMauve had gotten a lot for his money.

“He didn’t know about the not-going-to-High-Saffron plan, did he?” I asked.

“No,” said Tommo, mustering a shred of decency. “As far as he was concerned, it was simply the deMauves hedging their bets against your disappearance.”

It was consolation of sorts. At least I knew my father’s actions had been fiscal rather than personal. There was a long pause in which we all stared at one another.

“So what’s the deal?” asked Violet, who was growing impatient.

Courtland was bluffing. He wouldn’t kill me in front of Violet. She’d have leverage over him at every single future Council meeting and would never keep something this serious under her hat.

“There’s no deal. I’m going on.”

“You Russetts!” screamed Violet. “So
nauseatingly
self-righteous!” She folded her arms and glared, not at me but at Courtland and Tommo. “Honestly, boys, I thought you said you’d gotten this all sorted out. If I get into trouble over this, I’m going to really make you burn when I’m head prefect.”

“We
had
sorted it out,” explained Tommo meekly. “We just hadn’t thought Russett here would be such a party-pooper-prefect’s-pet.”

“Then I’m bailing on this monumental farrago,” remarked Violet as she came rapidly to a decision. “I think I’ve just twisted my ankle and am unable to proceed.” She looked daggers at me. “And if you commit the discourtesy of surviving so I have to marry you, I will strive to make you unhappy for the rest of my life.”

Violet got to her feet and shouldered her bag before turning to face us. “What’s our story?”

“Simple,” said Courtland, still staring at me. “We stopped here for a break, and you stumbled on the way out on some rubble, then headed back.”

“What if Russett blabs that this was all a merit scam?”

“Don’t worry,” replied Courtland, “he’ll come around. Won’t you, Eddie?”

“All I want to do is to complete the expedition,” I said, staring back at Courtland. “Other than that, I don’t give a ratfink’s bottom.”

“There,” said Courtland, “he agrees.”

And Violet walked off at a brisk pace without another word.

“This is all very well,” said Tommo once we had gathered up our belongings, “but this means
we actually have to go to High Saffron
!”

“What’s the matter?” asked Courtland. “Frightened?”

“Too bloody right. I think I might have twisted my ankle, too—or something.”

“You’re coming with us,” said Courtland in a voice that didn’t invite contradiction. “You got us into this stupid mess, so you can certainly see it through.”

“Right you are,” said Tommo without enthusiasm, “overjoyed.”

“We’re moving out,” I said. “The next rest break is in an hour.”

I saw Tommo and Courtland exchange glances. If Tommo had gone with Violet, I would have felt disagreeably ill at ease. Courtland was capable of almost anything, but not, I reasoned, with Tommo about. Toady that he was, Tommo could stand to earn serious merits for snitching on Courtland if he tried anything stupid. Even so, I knew I would have to be careful.

Before leaving, I wrote on a sheet of paper torn from my exercise book that Violet had turned back, added the time, signed it and laid it in the middle of the road with four stones stacked in a pyramid on top of it.

We walked out, and I mused to myself that this expedition was much like any other I had been on—full of arguments, and running anything but smoothly.

T
he going was harder and the road less distinct as we trudged on. It didn’t look as though vehicular traffic had moved down this way since the Perpetulite spalled. Much of our time was spent wending our way through thick rhododendron to avoid the occasional yateveo, and trying to keep to the track as best we could. At times the heavy canopy made the forest so dark that it was almost impossible to see. At one point I lost the path of the old road entirely, and only picked it up again once the forest had thinned out and been replaced by open grassy moorland.

I walked with a sense of heightened nervousness, but relaxed as soon as I heard Courtland and Tommo talk about mundanities. Tommo asked him if grass looked yellow to him, and Courtland responded by saying that
all
green looked yellow, since it was the only component of green a Yellow could see. After about half a mile of open ground and a slight incline, we came across the lumpy remnants of a village, the only aboveground feature a stone meetinghouse that was almost consumed by two yew trees. I checked the time and sketched a plan of the village in my notebook. On one side of the crossroads was another deeply rusted land crawler swathed in brambles and coarsened by a heavy overcoat of lichen, its tracks now choked with a profusion of primroses, celandines and meadowsweet. Although similar to the Farmall crawler we had seen earlier, in that they shared the commonality of tracked locomotion, this was considerably larger and more heavily built—the outer shell was fully four inches thick in places. It was also badly damaged. The vehicle looked as though someone had attempted to turn it inside out; the steel was jagged and split like a shattered pot.

“Can we take a break?” asked Courtland.

“Five minutes, then.”

I walked across to examine an old mailbox, almost consumed by a mature beech that had grown around it. The small door had split with the force. I opened it easily, and amid the abandoned birds’ nests and dry leaf mold I found the remnants of things that had been posted but never collected. A glass pendant, a few coins and a wireless telephone in remarkably good condition.

“Whoah!” said Tommo, pointing in the direction we had just come. “I just saw someone!”

“Claptrap,” replied Courtland, with slightly less confidence in his voice than he might have liked. “There’s no one out here but us.”

“They were just next to that tree over there, peeking over the wall.” He pointed at a dilapidated section of wall about thirty yards away, back in the direction from which we had come.

“Are you sure?” I asked.

“Clear as day. Do you think it might be . . .
Riffraff
?”

We all looked at one another. Even Courtland appeared ill at ease, despite his usually brash exterior.

“Only one way to find out,” I murmured and sprinted up the road toward the wall and looked over. In the field beyond I saw a couple of alpacas, which stared at me with a bored expression and went back to their grazing. There was no one visible, but the gorse-pecked hill offered an abundance of good hiding places. There might have been a hundred Riffraff for all I knew, and my stomach turned uneasily. I stood there for several minutes listening and staring, and after hearing and seeing nothing, returned to the crossroads.

“Nothing but a couple of alpacas,” I reported. “Couldn’t it have been them? I mean, no one has reported Riffraff in this area for, what? Twenty years?”

“Thirty,” said Tommo, “but then most people who have come this far never came back. And they eat the brains of—”

“Just button it, Tommo, you’re not helping,” said Courtland.

“I second that,” I said. “Shut up, Tommo.”

“What do we do?” asked Courtland, once we had been standing there doing nothing for a few moments. “The Rules state that if we encounter even a
hint
of Riffraff, we abort.”

“I didn’t see anything,” I said, trying to be positive.

“You and your stupid ideas,” Courtland said to Tommo. “And speaking personally, I’m too valuable to the community to be lost on some dumb expedition.”

“You agreed to it readily enough last night,” replied Tommo defiantly.

“Then why don’t you just go home?” I suggested. “No one’s stopping you.”

But Courtland, arrogant as he was, was no idiot. If he sneaked home early and I returned later on, everyone would know he had chickened out. He wanted the village to know that he was not just the next Yellow prefect, but a selfless resident, willing to risk his life for the good of the village.