When We Wake (10 page)

Bethari began to laugh again. “I think I can guess your specialty.”

“Music is universal,” I said. “And thank god. Um… about the journalism…”

“Don’t worry. Mami told me you’re under a lock clause. She made me sign one, too. I won’t ’cast a thing.” She sighed mockingly, her face suddenly alive with self-deprecation. “Kept away from the biggest scoop of my career. It’s so facebreaking.”

“Oooh,” I said. “New word.”

“Right! Let’s see. You don’t want to break your face—um, do something embarrassing or humiliating. If you break someone else’s face and they deserve it, that’s cool, but they’ll probably be angry, like, ‘That bazza broke my face. I’ll get him.’ And if people know something embarrassing about you, that’s facebreaking.”

“Like you not being able to scoop everyone with the Living
Dead Girl because your mum said so,” I said, filing
bazza
away for later.

“Is that really what you call yourself?”

“God, no. I’m Tegan. Teeg.”

“Teeg,” Bethari said. “Okay. Tell me more about these Beatles, Teeg, and then I’ll give you the ontedy on everyone at Elisa M.”

“Ontedy?”

“Oh-en-tee-dee. News. Gossip.” She frowned. “And I think you could do with some education. Not
everything
has changed for the better.”

I rolled off the bed and snapped Koko open. “Sounds like a plan. Prepare yourself for a musical awakening.”

When Marie came in with a tray of sliced apples and carrot sticks, I was showing Bethari pictures of my family while we worked our way through the Red Album.

For the first time in a lifetime, I was truly happy.

We gave Bethari a ride to school the next day.

“I was thinking,” she said, even before she scrambled into the car. “You should try out for stunt squad! I bet you’d make a great flyer.”

“For what?”

“The cheerleading team! I’m a flyer, too, but I’m a bit tall. You’d love it! It’s like your free running thing, only you do the tumbles in the air.”

I made a face. The tumbles she was talking about were the tricks everyone associated with parkour: big, flashy movements that I, unfortunately, didn’t have the strength or conditioning to pull off. I could fit through tiny gaps like no one’s business, but I wasn’t going to be doing spinning fan kicks anytime soon. “I’m a free runner mostly, not a tricker. Elisa M has cheerleading?”

“Elisa M has nearly everything,” Bethari said. “Except amazing
boys and girls who want to experience all that I have to offer. For that, I go extracurricular.”

“Don’t screw the crew?” I asked.

“Good phrase! Yeah. You’re going to get lots of offers, you know. Have you seen the stuff about you on the tubes?”

Hurfest’s interview had turned me off tubecasts for a couple of days, but I’d peeked afterward. It had gone past politics now. There were people judging my fashion sense, rating my hotness level, and wondering if dating me would be necrophilia. “A little bit,” I admitted.

“Everyone
loves
you. Watch out for the famers.” She saw my expression and went on before I could ask. “People who sort of harvest celebrity by hanging out with people who are famous. Famous plus farmers, famers, see?”

“Got it. Not everyone loves me, though. There’s Australia for Australians, and—”

“Ugh, those drongles! Actually, that might be even a good thing, you know? Them ranting at someone coming back from the
dead
might just wake people up to how stupid the No Migrant policy is.”

She’d told me a little bit about the policy last night, among her other efforts to fill me in on some of today’s politics, but I hadn’t gotten it all straight in my head yet.

“So, it’s no migrants at all, right?”

“That’s right. Short-term visas only—study visas, or for, you know, holidays and stuff, if you’re rich enough to afford the air-fuel tax. No one gets residency, no one gets citizenship.”

“But people try to come anyway?” I asked. It seemed like in
my time, every third story on the news was about the refugee crises and illegal immigration. Every second story had been about the climate. Bethari had shown me some of that stuff on the ’casts here, too, but it was quieter.

I’d assumed that was because the problems weren’t so bad.

“Oh, they try,” Bethari said. “Usually they get caught and stuck in one of the refugee camps in the North.”

“Like a detention center?”

“Like a camp,” Bethari said patiently. “Tents, shared toilet blocks, no unsupervised access to food or water. Surrounded by barbed wire and fully armed soldiers. They’re breaking Australian law by coming. So they end up in huge prisons.”

“I didn’t see anything about that on the tubes!”

Bethari shot a wary look at Zaneisha, who was impassively navigating behind a laden tram. “It’s on the media lockout list,” she said quietly. “A few years ago, a guard smuggled some footage out that showed the conditions in the camps, interviews with the residents, that kind of thing. Every ’caster who played it—and some of the ones who even
linked
to it—was subject to massive fines or voluntary shutdown for three months.” Her fingers made quote marks around
voluntary
.

It was hard to believe. “If it’s so bad, why do people still come?”

“Because Australia’s a land of opportunity,” she said flatly, and then sighed. “Because what they’re leaving is worse. The oceans are rising, and there’s less land to live on. Freshwater’s drying up, and people are fighting over it. It’s not great.”

“Oh,” I said. This wasn’t what I’d expected, not with the special
toilets and timed showers. Surely people had done their best to prevent that kind of thing. I must have looked depressed, because Bethari nudged me.

“Don’t worry about that right now, though. Worry about the famers.”

“Gosh,” I said. “Thanks.”

Army secrecy must have worked, because no reporters were waiting for us outside Elisa M’s door. Elisa M’s honor code strictly prohibited recording or ’casting students without their permission, but it would be impossible to stop my fellow students from letting the world know that the Living Dead Girl was now one of their classmates, even if they couldn’t record me directly. Bethari had said the process would probably start about ten seconds after I walked in the door.

She was wrong. With Zaneisha in front of me, it took a whole twelve seconds after we entered the building before Bethari’s computer beeped at her.

“And we’re off,” she said, waving to a passing friend.

“I hate you,” I moaned, and tried not to notice the kids looking at me, looking away, and suddenly getting very interested in their computers.

It was stifling hot in the corridors, and Bethari had already warned me not to expect too much from the air-conditioning in the classrooms. Apparently schools statewide were held to a ninety-degree standard. By the time we hit the third floor, I
was sweating in my white linen skirt and black tank top. Bethari had looped a patterned scarf around my hips to provide some color, but I really needed to go shopping.

Zaneisha indicated a seat in the back corner and stood directly behind me.

She wasn’t the only bodyguard in the room. The kids at this school were obviously rich, and some of them—or their parents—were important enough for around-the-clock security. Two men and someone whose gender I couldn’t pick traded glances and shallow nods with Zaneisha. Their charges ignored the byplay.

One of them, a tall boy in a red jumpsuit, detached from his group of friends and sauntered toward us. “Heeey. Tegan, right? What’s it like to be dead?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m alive.”

He smiled at me, perfect teeth flashing. Literally—they were inset with some sort of device that was blinking colored patterns at me.

“Go away, Soren,” Bethari said.

“I missed you last night, Bethi. The party wasn’t the same without you.” He turned to the group behind him. “It was no fun without Bethari, was it?”

They assured him that it wasn’t.

“It never is,” Bethari said. “But I don’t drink, and I don’t take breathers, and your bangers get a little rowdy for me.”

“Bangers?” I said.

“Parties,” she told me.

Soren turned his glittering smile back to me. “You should definitely come to the next one, Tegan. What’s your specialty?”

“Music.”

“Well, there you are,” Soren said triumphantly. “We always have music at my bangers.” He leaned in. “My specialty is journalism, like Bethi. You won’t mind if we ’cast our little occasion, will you, Tegan?”

“Is this a famer?” I asked Bethari, voice clear.

She grinned. “Soren is our
best
famer.”

Soren’s eyes went tight. “Maybe next time, then,” he said, and drifted back to his group. They giggled and whispered to one another.

I wondered what they could possibly say about me. I wasn’t rich. I had no famous relations. I was just some weird kid with awful hair and dull clothes, a celebrity for being dead.

I stared at my computer and tried not to mind.

Okay.

I know this is shallow, but in my time, I was really good-looking.

Not, like, model-hot, ’cause I’ve always been short, but I was noticeably pretty, and I knew it. Clear skin, high cheekbones, symmetrical features, and huge, dark eyes. I had—still have—big boobs for my size, which didn’t fit the ultraslender ideal, but sure attracted attention. Conditioning for free running kept me
slim and muscled, and I had long, black hair, which was sort of my trademark. I could leave it loose or tie it up in one of those casual knots that usually took me ten minutes to get just right, or throw it into a fancy style for special occasions.

Boys like Soren used to like me because I was pretty, not because I’d been a corpse and was now a pseudocelebrity. It wasn’t until that first morning at Elisa M that I wondered if I just wasn’t attractive anymore.

And I was shocked by how uneasy that thought made me.

So, right then, when I was feeling ugly and insecure, he walked in, and the air emptied out of my lungs. My vision narrowed to that familiar form as he scanned the classroom and sat down at the front of the room, slouching a little in his seat.

Then I was standing in the aisle behind him with no memory of how I’d gotten there.

“Dalmar,” I whispered, and reached for his shoulder. My hand was shaking. “How did you get here? Dalmar?”

Zaneisha appeared at my side. “Tegan…”

“No!” I said, and ducked away from her, reaching for his arm. “Dalmar! Dalmar! Look at me!”

He did.

The face was so close: strong cheekbones and full lips with the exact curve of those that had kissed my bare skin. The perfect shape of his naked skull was the same, and the shade of his skin like rich earth. But this close I could see the differences—
the three freckles Dalmar had had under his left eye were missing, and this boy had a wider, flatter nose. His eyelashes weren’t as long, and his eyes were a different shape and much lighter, golden-brown instead of a brown so dark it was nearly black.

And the contempt in those eyes was chilling. Dalmar had never looked at me like that.