The Other Side of the Island (24 page)
Read The Other Side of the Island Online
Authors: Allegra Goodman
Tags: #Nature & the Natural World, #Social Issues, #Families, #Family, #Juvenile Fiction, #Individuality, #Fantasy & Magic, #Fiction, #Science Fiction, #Family Life, #Weather, #Peer Pressure, #Islands, #General, #Domestic fiction
“No more talking.” Mr. Pratt’s grip on her arm tightened.
Honor lowered her blindfolded head and stumbled along after him. Could she wrench herself away? Even if she could, how far could she get with her arms tied? There was no way she could get the blindfold off. She felt they were traveling down the mountain, but Mr. Pratt took so many turns she had no idea where they were heading. She could hear insects and the distant call of owls. She smelled the damp of rotting wood and the scent of cinnamon from the cinnamon trees. Her feet and legs were covered with little cuts from the sharp rocks in the path.
The moist warm air was slightly cooler on her skin. She knew that they were walking in the dark. Where did runaways end up? How would Miss Blessing punish her? She asked herself these questions even though she knew in her heart that Mr. Pratt was not taking her back to school. She knew that after what she’d done, she would end up in a much more dangerous place.
She tried to keep up, but her legs faltered. Her cut feet hurt too much. She was afraid to stop, but she could not go on. She fell to her knees and bowed her head, expecting Mr. Pratt to hit her. She was sure he would beat her with his hands, with sticks, with anything. Nothing happened. No blows came. She heard footsteps and she felt suddenly that Mr. Pratt was leaving her there, bound and blindfolded. Terrified, she called out to him, “Wait.”
“No noise,” snapped Mr. Pratt. He had returned dragging something, a container or bucket he lifted to her lips. “Drink this.”
She took a sip. The drink was water.
“Now hold on to me,” Mr. Pratt said, and he lifted Honor onto his back and carried her. “Almost there,” he grunted, more to himself than to her. “Duck your head.”
She ducked and tried to make herself as small as possible. Even then, her head brushed thick low-lying branches.
“Here we are,” said Mr. Pratt, and he set Honor on the ground and untied her blindfold.
She trembled as Mr. Pratt untied her wrists. They were standing in a dark part of the forest, all night and shadow. Trees and vines grew so close together no moon or starlight could shine through. But Honor could make out a couple of rough shelters, tents covered with leaves and branches, and she saw someone who approached so eagerly that she shrank back, afraid.
“Do you remember me? I’m Mrs. Pratt.”
“Do you remember me?” Out of the shadows stepped her father. In the next moment she was in his arms.
“You’re bleeding.” He kissed the cuts on her face. “How did you get out? Where is Quintilian?”
But she was telling her news at the same time. “I found her. I found her. She’s in the bakery.”
“Hold on. Take a minute. Catch your breath,” said Mr. Pratt. “Let’s start at the beginning.”
And so they did. Honor and her father took turns. They began to tell each other everything.
“But aren’t you in the Neighborhood Watch?” Honor interrupted herself to ask Mr. Pratt.
“No,” said Mr. Pratt. “Not at all. I haven’t worked in the Neighborhood Watch for years. When your family moved to higher ground, Mrs. Pratt and I did too. We left our town house and moved up here.”
“No one ever told us that,” said Honor.
“Well, no, they wouldn’t, would they? Officially, we’ve Disappeared.”
“And that’s when you became Partisans?”
“We were Partisans even when we lived in the City. I was a Partisan when you first met me. I helped your parents join our band when they first arrived.”
Honor shook her head in disbelief. “How did you find me?”
“I found these first,” said Mr. Pratt, and he held up Honor’s bow and quiver. “Then these.” He held up two arrows. “Then I started tracking you.”
“Let’s see those feet,” said Mrs. Pratt. Honor sat on her father’s lap while Mrs. Pratt washed her feet and cleaned the cuts with gauze dipped in stinging alcohol.
“How long have you been hiding here?” Honor asked.
“I’ve been here since the day I disappeared,” her father told her. “Your mother and I were at a Partisan meeting.”
“Where?” asked Honor.
“In our own house,” Will said. “While you were at school.”
“At home? In our own house in the middle of the day?” Honor couldn’t help it. She was scandalized by her parents’ recklessness.
“I thought I was safe because I had an excused absence from the office. Your mother had no work. The Central Store was closed for inventory day. But the Safety Officers found us anyway.”
“How did you know?”
“We knew as soon as we heard the knock at the door. I was stupid. I panicked and tried barricading the door. Your mother ran upstairs while I was trying to block the way. They just kept knocking, louder and louder. Then they took an ax . . .”
“Who were they?”
“The Postal Service. We got taken by men driving a regular mail truck, a Corporation mail truck for packages. We scattered. I got out the back door, but they snatched your mother. They caught her by the arm and stuffed her into a canvas mail sack.”
“And you ran here?”
Her father nodded. “We’ve built a boat. We have a sailboat hidden on the beach.”
“What will you do with it?” Honor asked.
“Take the Weather Station.”
“The one on Island 364? You can’t pull it down. It’s too big!”
“We’re not going to take it down. We’re going to take over. We’re going to hack into the computers there and seize the network. Partisans on Island 323 have already seized theirs. Partisans in the North have taken a station there. If we can occupy this one, we can connect with them. We’ll join their network. From there we can deregulate the clocks. We’ll repro gram the projection booth in the City. Everyone will know we have begun.”
“Begun what?” asked Honor.
“The revolution to take Her down.”
“You’re a Reverse Engineer,” Honor whispered.
Will wrapped his arms around her and said, “Don’t look at me like that.”
“You’re trying to crack the ceiling,” Honor said.
“You’ve learned one thing in school,” her father said. “You’ve learned it over and over again until it seems true. We can’t crack the ceiling over the Polar Seas. There aren’t enough of us yet. The Corporation is too powerful.”
“Do you really want to go back to Old Weather?” Honor asked.
“Don’t you see?” Will told her. “We’ve got Old Weather.”
“But the Colonies are safe.”
“No, sweetheart,” said Will. “The Colonies are not safe. Earth Mother regulates the light and the night sky and the people in the cities. She covers the sky with her overlay. She conceals the real moon and stars—”
“To protect us!” Honor cut in. Even standing there in the tatters of her uniform, even after all she’d been through, it was hard to accept her father’s ideas. In school, the world was strict and sometimes cruel but also neat and orderly. In school, she understood the rules. She could touch the islands on the classroom globe and chart the progress of Enclosure on the map. In school, Enclosure triumphed over danger. “She wants to protect us,” Honor insisted.
“She wants to control us,” said her father. “The sun still burns; the winds still blow. Overlays and projection booths are window dressing for what Earth Mother really wants: total cooperation. No questions, no complications. Everyone doing a job, no one sticking out.”
“She saved us from Old Weather,” Honor said.
“She organized us. She played on our fears.”
“The weather stations and warning sirens keep us safe.”
“They keep us indoors. Earth Mother wants us quiet and meek, like orderlies. She wants us to accept her ideas as our own. Forget our own identities, if possible.”
Honor looked away, stung with shame. She saw herself through her father’s eyes; she saw the girl she had been, copying passages from books, swearing allegiance with the Heliotropes, even changing her name.
“In the wild places,” her father said, “the fruit is clean. There are no greenhouses with misters. There is no Planet Safe in the food or in the water. In the wild places memory is possible. Can’t you feel the difference, here in the mountains?”
“Yes,” Honor said, remembering her dreams.
“We want to crack the Corporation. We want to undermine Earth Mother’s power. Someday, we want to take the Taker. But we’re going to start with the Weather Station. The Corporation’s Weather Station monitors the region. Weather Station computers provide the weather forecast every hour; they send out storm warnings. They control the projection booth in the City. Not just that. Those computers on the Weather Station store every piece of information on the City’s inhabitants. Where we live and what we do. Who cooperates and who possibly objects. There’s a file for each one of us. If we break into those computers we take back our lives.”
“But the Weather Station’s guarded. It’s got Watchers,” Honor spluttered. “How could a sailboat get there? How could you find it, so far out to sea? Only big ships can navigate there. You have no computers or radar.”
“We’ll navigate by the stars.”
“For that,” said Mrs. Pratt, “we need your mother.”
Mr. Pratt explained, “We want to find her, either as she enters the buses or in the Barracks. The problem is that every building looks exactly the same, and every bunk is the same, and every orderly looks the same. Finding Pamela is like looking for a needle in a haystack. There are more than a thousand identical Barracks buildings on the other side of the island.”
“She gave me a clue,” Honor said. “Helix and I figured it out. She gave us a number in the bakery. Number seven in base two.”
FIVE
ALL THAT NIGHT AND THE NEXT DAY WHILE THE PRATTS
and Will made their plans, Honor rested. She ate breadfruit and mountain apples cut into slices and delicious lychees Mrs. Pratt had gathered. She wore an old shirt while Mrs. Pratt washed her ripped-up uniform. Mrs. Pratt did not have soap, only a bucket of water and a washboard. She rinsed and scrubbed Honor’s shirt and skirt as best she could and got the worst of the mud out. She hung them up to dry, but the air was so moist that they were damp when Honor put them back on.
and Will made their plans, Honor rested. She ate breadfruit and mountain apples cut into slices and delicious lychees Mrs. Pratt had gathered. She wore an old shirt while Mrs. Pratt washed her ripped-up uniform. Mrs. Pratt did not have soap, only a bucket of water and a washboard. She rinsed and scrubbed Honor’s shirt and skirt as best she could and got the worst of the mud out. She hung them up to dry, but the air was so moist that they were damp when Honor put them back on.
“You know what to do?” Honor’s father asked her.
“Yes,” she said.
“Do you think you can?”
She had no idea. “How will I know until I try?”
Will and Mr. Pratt took apart the tents and scattered the leaves. They packed up clothes and tools. Each of them strapped on a backpack and Mr. Pratt strapped a battered box to his back. Honor carried her bow and the two arrows Mr. Pratt had found, and the four of them set out into the forest. The climb was steep up the mountain and Honor’s feet were sore, but this time her father was helping her. He lifted her over rocks and took her arm when they came to steep places. When Honor was tired, they all stopped to rest. Mrs. Pratt found ripe guavas to eat.
They came to the place they were searching for by afternoon. It was a lookout post from ancient times. The place was called a pillbox and it was made of cement. There was just one bare room with narrow slits for windows. From the pillbox they had a view down the slope of the volcano into the valley where the Barracks stood.
Mr. Pratt took out a pair of binoculars and let Honor look.
“That’s the service road,” said Mr. Pratt, pointing to a dark paved road curling below them. “And those are the buildings where they house the orderlies.”
The buildings were strange. Their roofs were curved. They looked like long white cylinders half buried in the ground. The buildings were arranged in perfect rows.
“See over there.” Mr. Pratt pointed to a white structure in the quad between the buildings. “That’s the compost bin. And over there—that’s the bus depot.”
Honor gazed down at a parking lot. It was nearly empty.
“We’ve been observing them for a while now. In the evening, a hundred buses will drive in and unload the afternoon shift to sleep,” said Mr. Pratt. “Then they’ll load the night shift and drive back to the City. There are three shifts throughout the day. Morning, noon, and night.”
“There’s a special fuel station just for the orderlies’ buses,” said Mrs. Pratt.
“Look carefully at the watchtowers,” said Mr. Pratt. “One on each corner.”
“Are the Watchers orderlies?” Honor asked.
“No,” said her father. “Orderlies do other jobs. They drive the buses day and night. But there is always the chance of escape or rebellion, and so armed Watchers guard them at all times.”
“Where are the lights?”
Honor’s father pointed. There were stadium lights on tall poles. There were floodlights as well on the roofs of the Barracks. The stadium lights were huge. The floodlights were small and hung in pairs over the doorways of each building.
“There are no numbers on the doors,” said Honor’s father.
“Then how do the orderlies know where to go?” asked Honor.
“They’re trained to flock like birds,” said her father. “They don’t know anything except where to go.”
“Are there numbers inside the buildings?” Honor asked.
“I don’t know,” said her father.
Honor gazed at the white Barracks below. She watched the afternoon shift of orderlies return and file off their buses. The orderlies did not make a sound. They walked in groups into different white buildings and as they walked, they faced forward, never turning aside, never distracted. They glided along in white and never touched one another.
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