Читать книгу New Keepers - Jayne Bauling - Страница 6

“They weren’t put down?”

I don’t get how Silver can give a single thought to Ricochet Thelezi and Leoli Leopara at a moment like this.

I can’t think about anything except how stunning this tall, quiet girl is. She’s a sepia, so the pure white robe suits her; it marks her as a Prayer, although she isn’t carrying the book some of them do.

“I can take you to them,” the girl says, pushing her masses of long, bright red braids back over one shoulder. “I’m Halo, by the way.”

I think it fits her. Maybe it’s the serenity in her amber eyes, or just a vibe, but she comes across as a good person, which is weird, because goodness isn’t really something I believe in.

Good, and totally sexy.

We all introduce ourselves. When it’s my turn to say my name, it comes out sounding thick and awkward.

So of course I have to try again and repair that first impression.

I say, “Ricochet and Leoli? Where are they?”

I like the way she doesn’t look at my Stain.

“They are drawers at one of the Breeding Control Centres.”

“I’ve never seen them,” I object.

“Only some of the draws are screened live,” Halo reminds me. “They just read out the results for the rest.”

“Those places.” Lizwi’s voice is flat.

She and Halo share a look, and Ril sighs, while Orpa looks extra angry.

“How do you know about them? Ricochet and Leoli?” I worry that my question makes it sound like I don’t trust Halo.

“Oh … There was this Minder, someone important, and he was trying to impress me, you know?” Halo is hesitant. “So he was telling me stuff, and that was one of the things he mentioned.”

“I suppose you get a lot of people trying to impress you?” Orpa is insolent.

“Ignore her,” I tell Halo because she looks upset, and she smiles at me.

“I suppose Ricochet and Leoli really could give us some useful tips about the Wildlands,” Silver says. “But it’s your expedition, Jabz. You’re our leader. What do you think?”

“It can’t hurt to stop and ask them.” Halo isn’t insistent, and it hits me how miraculous it is that such beauty hasn’t turned her arrogant.

“You’re right,” I agree with her, and run my eyes over everyone standing or sitting around the blue table. “Eight of us now, and most of you are kids. I wasn’t counting on this much responsibility. Wait, seven. Orpa is only with us until we reach the Margins.”

“You say, Jabz,” Orpa jeers.

“Maybe if I tell Ricochet and Leoli about Meyi believing we have to go in a certain direction, they’ll be able to tell us what’s there,” Lizwi says.

It’s starting to feel like the whole enterprise is slipping out of my control. It was my idea, they’re my clients, but that’s not how it feels. I was so impatient to get company for my search for the mountain, I didn’t really think the thing through properly before sending out my text ads.

“I’m sure they will,” Halo tells Lizwi, and I realise how gentle her voice is.

“We need to get going then, if we’re going to see them,” I say, trying to take back my role as leader. “I want to reach the Margins tonight.”

“Listen to the big man giving us orders,” Orpa taunts.

“Well, he’s the oldest, or do you just look like you are, Mr Jabz?” Ril chimes in, all pert, with her head on one side as she looks at me.

“I’m eighteen.” I sound gruff, with no idea how to talk naturally to most of these Sprawllers, the girls especially.

“Me too,” Lizwi says.

“And me,” Halo joins in.

“I don’t see that freakin’ eighteen is so much more adult than seventeen or sixteen,” Orpa snaps.

“Well, I’m seventeen, but I don’t feel very adult,” Ril says. “That’s from being a Pet.”

“What’s age got to do with anything?” Boa speaks for the first time. “Like if we’re going into the Wildlands? We’ll be needing strength out there, is my idea.”

“And speed and brains,” I suggest, because it doesn’t seem like he has either, the slow way he moves and speaks, though that thing about needing strength makes some sort of sense.

“And a thousand other things.” Ril looks at me. “Please don’t judge my brother, Jabz.”

It makes me feel bad, because that’s exactly what I was doing. There are plenty in the Margins like Boa, who’ve proved their worth in numbers of ways, so who am I to think he won’t be an asset on either a crawl through the Sprawll or a breakout into the Wildlands?

We start comparing ages. Meyi is youngest at fourteen, then Boa, then Silver.

“Shouldn’t we be going?” Silver comes out of whatever dream he disappeared into.

He and Lizwi both fish out a whole lot of tokens and have a polite little argument about who’s paying for the blue fizz. Silver wins. Lizwi pulls Meyi out of his chair and whispers into his ear when he starts rocking backwards and forwards. He lifts his left arm so he can bury his face in his fake feathers. Lizwi gets a cap out of one of their backpacks and settles it on his head, pulling the peak down so his face is mostly hidden. That seems to soothe Meyi.

I have a moment of thinking I understand him.

We go out into the Sprawll’s unchanging twilight. Halo, Lizwi and Meyi walk in front, slowly because of Meyi. Every so often he tries to go off in a different direction, but Lizwi keeps her right hand round his stick-thin arm and hauls him back.

Silver and I come next, with Orpa, Ril and Boa behind us. I can hear Ril chattering to Orpa, her voice light and fast, always with a laugh underneath it. Orpa isn’t exactly friendly in response. I catch a few snippy remarks.

The conversation up ahead isn’t any easier to listen to. Halo and Lizwi are talking about the Breeding Control Centres.

“I’ve heard of girls who don’t even wait for the draw,” Lizwi is saying. “Because of the forced sterilisation of the losers immediately afterwards. They disappear into the Wildlands, and sometimes their boyfriends go with them. I suppose some of them are already pregnant and avoiding a forced termination, but I think most of them are just scared of the draw in the first place. I’m due in soon.”

“Me too,” Halo says.

“I keep thinking – what if I’m not drawn? If I have to go for sterilisation? I know it’s wrong to say this, but I hate that the lucky ones get to have two kids each. But the Minders say only children will become a social problem.”

“Except that they’re forever contradicting themselves, creating one-child families with all their Parkings, and taking kids away to be Pets, and all the other stuff,” Silver mutters to me.

“I know,” Halo is answering Lizwi. “One child each, and more of us could be mothers.”

“Never mind that it’s only women put into the draw, and our boys and men can end up fathering a whole pack of kids with different women, or none at all, depending.”

“At least the draw is democratic.” Halo is so tolerant.

“I know, girls in the Margins, Stains, the lot, they all go in. My father, he’s a Minder, he says they let the Stains have the same chance to breed as everyone else so there’ll always be reminders of the Disobedience, only he doesn’t know what that was.” Lizwi lifts up her shoulders, then lets them fall.

I make a sound through my nose. Even I don’t know what my forebears’ Disobedience was, but it must have been something extreme for the Minders of those days to infect them with our hereditary Stain.

“I’ll never be a father,” I mutter to Silver.

“Me neither,” he says in an absent way.

“Even if I’m drawn, I’ll still be so scared,” Halo tells Lizwi. “Yes, all right, we’re living in the Prosperity, but Repairs are getting seriously expensive if my children turn out to need them.”

“My father keeps dropping hints about the ingredients for some special muti running out.” Lizwi blows out a big breath. “It’s making them stricter about Parking damaged kids.”

“Parking or putting down?” Halo’s voice is very low.

“Whatever. Removing. I’ll tell you something.” Lizwi moves closer to Halo. “If I’m lucky enough to get drawn, I’m hiding my children until they’re too old to be disappeared. Then, if they turn out to be damaged or flawed, they’ll just have to let them go for Repairs. Like Meyi and Silver.”

People stare at us passing, stare at me especially, it feels like.

I envy Meyi his cap.

“What are you looking at, freaks?” I glower at a pair of Bleeders.

“It’s because we’re a mixed group,” Silver says. “A Skin and Feathers and all the rest. Hey, maybe we’ll set a new trend.”

“So fashion is everything in here, is it?”

“Because of the Prosperity.” Silver’s eyes drift all over the place, and he sounds vague, but he’s kind of making sense. “It’s made everything too easy. People haven’t got enough to do. Like my parents. Every new thing, they have to be it or have it. I think it stops them thinking too much about their disappointment.”

“Disappointment?”

“Me being flawed.” He doesn’t come across embarrassed, saying it. “And my baby brother being Parked or whatever, because after I was diagnosed when I was already too old for Parking, there was always some Minder checking on us and they caught him early enough to take away.”

“Parked or whatever?” I’m curious. “Don’t you know?”

“We’ve never seen him again.”

“So maybe us Stains aren’t so cursed.” I’m surprised to hear myself saying it. “I mean, we’re the most flawed of all, but we get left alone to get on with our lives as well as we can in the Margins.”

“What’s it like there?” Silver asks, and I hear a harsh yap of laughter from behind us, letting me know Orpa is listening to us. “I was surprised someone from there could text and read.”

“Only some of us, from people who’ve kept reading alive and passed it on. You’ll see for yourself what it’s like,” I say. “I mean, the only way out to the Wildlands is through the Margins. We can spend some time there, getting supplies, deciding things.”

“Unless Ricochet and Leoli have a better idea.”

“How come we’ve never heard they’re still around?”

“Like she said, not all the draws are screened.” Silver lifts his eyes to Halo’s bright head.

“Another thing I’d like to know is why this Meyi boy is so desperate to go to the Wildlands,” I continue, and I’m thinking how weird it would be if Meyi has somehow seen or heard the same things I have.

“I don’t know.” He stops, and I get the impression he’s really struggling to order his thoughts, or maybe just to make sense of things. “I’ve heard that in the old times, long before the Drowning, people like him were sometimes believed to have special senses or abilities.”

“To make up for being flawed,” I suggest.

“Or maybe our flaws are really talents,” he says.

“What’s yours?”

“Attention deficit disorder.”

“If you and Meyi both regularly have to go for Repairs, and I’m Stained … Hey, wouldn’t it be crazy if it turns out we’re all flawed?” I say.

Halo looks back at us, twisting her lovely long neck to see over her shoulder. She looks disturbed, or uneasy.

“You and Ril –” I start to say to her.

“Flaws are personal.”

I get a glimpse of her mouth, such a sad curve to it suddenly, before she turns her face forward again. Her braids swing gently.

“That’s all right, Halo, I bet lots of people feel like that,” I say to her back.

“I don’t know why,” Silver says. “We are all what we are.”

“Hey!” Ril pipes up behind us. “Which Breeding Control Centre are we heading for, Halo? Shouldn’t we jump on a tram?”

“It’s just through here.”

I can understand how people with nothing to gain or lose might enjoy attending a live draw. I even get that some men, yearning to be regular family men, might have an interest in identifying possible mothers for their offspring.

What I don’t get is how the women and girls in each draw can bear to learn their fate in front of a live audience, not to mention the thousands more watching on screens in their homes in the Sprawll’s residential districts. The draws are even popular in the Margins, where people watch on communal screens, but the Margins girls in the draws hardly ever attend them, mostly because the Centres are all here in the Sprawll and no one from the Margins really likes coming here. And then if they lose out, Minders come immediately and take them away for sterilisation.

The draws mostly happen in the early evenings on ordinary days. It looks like today’s is over. A Skins couple, about my age, rush through the crowds coming out of the mustard-and-brown Centre, hugging each other. The young man is laughing.

So is the girl, but she’s also crying. It’s happy crying.

“Someone got lucky,” I say.

“Someone didn’t, a few thousand draws ago,” Lizwi says, and I see her nudge Halo to make her notice another couple, slowly walking past the Centre.

They’re older, maybe in their thirties or forties, and as they see the young couple, both of them, the woman especially, get expressions you’d think only something deadly serious could put on their faces – like news of the seas rising again, and a second Drowning coming to swallow up or Salt what’s left of the land.

“Poor things,” Halo says.

They have a female Pet with them, about twelve, as tiny and cute as Ril. She’s dressed up in a sparkly leotard, leggings and flat satin shoes, with a jewelled collar round her neck and matching wristbands. There’s something desperate about the way she’s performing the usual Pet tricks, bouncing, somersaulting and cartwheeling. It’s as if she’s trying to distract her owners, get them to notice her and remind them that they’ve still got her.

You can see they don’t want to be entertained right now, walking past maybe the same Centre where hope stopped for them. They’re ignoring her, and she’s not getting any of the little treats you usually see owners tossing to their Pets, pretty sweets and shiny novelty toys mostly.

“Right, feel sorry for them.” Ril’s voice rises from behind me. “What about their Pet?”

“She can run away, same as you did,” Orpa says. “Did you wear one of those collars?”

“’Course. Well, are we going in or not?” It’s as if Ril is wishing she hadn’t mentioned the Pet.

I discover I’m excited about seeing Ricochet and Leoli.

Two BCC security officers stop us in the massive foyer, maybe because we’re going in the opposite direction to everyone else, or it could be because we’re such a strange group. Their uniforms are ugly, repeating the building’s colours.

“Draw’s over for tonight, you kids,” the man says.

“We’re here to see Ricochet and Leoli.” I feel aggressive, less to do with their uniforms, more their patronising manner.

“If you’d tell them it’s a party going out to the Wildlands?” Halo comes in quickly as they stiffen, hands going to their shiny brown belts from which hang an assortment of deterrents, mostly sprays from the look of them. “Oh, please? I know they’ll agree to see us. It’s so important.”

She’s smiling at the man, and it’s obvious he can’t resist her. He speaks in an undertone to his colleague. She is less impressed.

“But this Wildlands story? That can’t be –” she starts to object, and he jerks his head so she knows to move away with him, out of our hearing.

We are watching them. The man keeps looking back at Halo all the time he’s talking to the woman. She tries to interrupt him, then puffs out a theatrical sigh, clicks her tongue and marches off with her flat-soled brown shoes thudding down on the gleaming mustard floor.

“The Wildlands, remember,” Halo calls to remind her.

The male officer returns to us and starts flirting with Halo. She keeps smiling and saying things like he’s being silly, or he’s so funny, and that he should stop making her laugh, all in such a gentle way that you can see he loves it and starts coming onto her even stronger.

I want to hit him.

“I wonder what Ricochet and Leoli will be able to tell us?” Ril is excited.

“Maybe they’ll want to come with us,” Boa says.

“I don’t know.” Silver looks at me. “It’s your expedition, Jabz. How would you feel if they wanted to tag along? Or take over as our guides? Maybe coming here is a mistake.”

“Maybe.” I wrench my eyes away from Halo and the security officer. “Let’s just wait and see what they say.”

“Ja, I’m not clear why Halo thinks it’s so important to see them.”

“I’m sure she has a good reason,” I defend Halo.

Silver’s light greeny-grey eyes slide Halo’s way, then flicker back to me. He grins, and just for that moment, he’s like any regular guy, maybe even one from the Margins. “Go for it, brother.”

Heat rushes to the surface of my skin. I want to give him a shove, but at the same time I like that he gives me a chance there, Stain and all.

The foyer has emptied completely now, except for us. All this time I’ve been aware of the sound Meyi is making, a sort of rising wailing, as if he is in some sort of distress, worsening all the time. Now I see him totter towards the foyer’s side wall, towing Lizwi with him, because she’s still hanging on to his arm.

“No, Meyi, not now,” she’s urging. “Please, be good for your Ses’ Lizwi. We’re here to see some beautiful people. They can help us find our way.”

“Maybe that’s his problem,” Orpa snipes. “Doesn’t he think he knows the way all by himself?”

Meyi breaks out of Lizwi’s hold and throws himself at the wall, his hands raised so his palms connect with the brown surface. Then he totters backwards a metre or so, and forwards again, seeking the wall. He does it again and again, all the time with those shouting sounds coming out of his mouth. I see that he’s on tiptoe the whole time he’s doing it.

“Can’t you stop him?” I ask Lizwi.

She doesn’t answer me.

I see the security officer throw a look at Meyi, but he’s too into Halo to do or say anything.

Then his colleague returns.

“They say you can come.” No smile, and a sour look for Meyi. “I don’t know what you’re going to do about him. What’s his case?”

“Come, Meyi, come.” Lizwi gets her arms round him and turns him in the direction we have to go. “We’re going to see Ricochet and Leoli now. They’re heroes, Meyi. Good, lovely, brave people.”

I take a quick look at the officers to see what their reaction is. I mean, Ricochet and Leoli nearly led a popular uprising. I don’t think we’re supposed to hero-worship them. Having to do the draws at a BCC is probably their punishment.

Either they haven’t heard because of Meyi’s racket, or they haven’t registered what Lizwi said.

Or maybe she can get away with saying what she likes because her clothes and speech mark her as Minder-class.

Security he-and-she lead us through a side door, out into the dim contrast of the Sprawll’s general twilight. It’s only now I realise how bright it was in the foyer.

Now in again, through a long mustard tunnel.

“Is there a toilet anywhere here?”

I know Orpa is saying it for effect. We’re from the Margins. Plumbing is non-existent, so we don’t bother with actual toilets.

Or maybe she’s curious. I’ve heard about this flush-foam they have in the Sprawll, that eats whatever you do.

No one answers her. We’ve reached a room that I think must be specially for the BCC drawers to relax in before and after they do their stuff. There are soft seats, with screens all around, plus drinks machines and bowls full of mostly blue food and more bowls piled with sachets of different protein powders for those who don’t trouble themselves with food.

I told the others I’ve never seen Ricochet and Leoli doing any of the screened draws. Now I think maybe I have, only I didn’t recognise them.

They’re the same, but different, if that makes sense.

“You’re going to the Wildlands?” Leoli speaks first. “What has been … vouchsafed to you?”

“I remember the mountain,” Ricochet says, and my insides give a great jump of fright.

How does he know about the mountain? Does he mean my mountain?

And how does he get his dark hair to be both sheeny and glittery at the same time? That and the smoothness of his deep brown skin haven’t changed. It’s his voice that’s different. His words sound as if they’re a recording.

“What do you mean vouchsafed?” I answer Leoli’s question with my own, and I’m thinking how vouchsafed isn’t a word you hear in the Margins.

“We’re so glad you’re still around,” Halo says, like she hasn’t heard what they and I have been saying.

“Not Parked or put down,” Orpa adds, and I see Halo flinch.

“Shut up, Orpa,” I say.

Ricochet and Leoli don’t pay any attention.

“We were Keepers,” Leoli is saying, and she sounds less like a recording, more like someone talking in her sleep.

“Keepers?” Silver asks.

They ignore him.

“Following other Keepers.” Ricochet’s turn.

“We went out.” Leoli.

“We came back.”

I listen and I look, remembering how they used to be, both of them. So tough and alive; heroic or even iconic figures. When they returned from the Wildlands – Ricochet’s came back? – care and suffering had added themselves to their faces, but there was joy too, in the existence of their baby or maybe the start of an uprising.

Leoli. I was just a little kid when they came back, but I think I was in love with her, in the way of stupid small boys.

She was a rebel, full of character and utterly unafraid, it seemed to me. She’d speak out, make fun of anything, our Minders and even serious things from the past, like the Drowning and Salting and the lost continents.

I look at Lizwi to see if she’s also remembering, but she’s giving all her attention to Meyi. He’s stopped his shouting, but he’s not silent. Sounds still come from his mouth, difficult sounds, trying to be words. It looks like it’s taking a massive effort for him to force them out. Lizwi is listening as if he’s making sense.

“And Tata,” Leoli is saying. “The First Keeper. We brought his message. And then, Ricochet?”

She still has her famous forearm graft, golden fur spotted with beautiful rosettes.

Halo is also old enough to remember. I look at her. She’s watching Leoli, waiting for more.

“I’m not sure,” Ricochet says.

They’re words that should make him frown, or chew his lip, trying to remember. Those things don’t happen.

It’s as if something has wiped away everything real from his face – expression, personality, the lot. I have this thought that it’s like something rough has worked away at his features, softening edges, blunting what used to be sharply defined and handsome.

It’s the same with Leoli, I realise. She is smiling now, at Ricochet, but it’s bland, with nothing real behind it. A doll’s smile.

The security officers have stayed in the room, standing near the wide doorway, but they move in closer as Ril darts forward.

“We don’t understand you.” She’s impatient. “We came to see if you could tell us anything useful for when we go out. Safe places and things like that.”

“No. You said something about a mountain,” I growl. “What did you mean?”

“I’m sure they’ll explain if we just give them a chance.” Halo’s voice is too kind for it to be a reprimand.

“The mountain.” Leoli is dreamy.

“Yes, the mountain.” Ricochet is her echo.

“And what will be vouchsafed.”

“You really seem to like that word,” I say to Leoli to see if a bit of rudeness won’t jerk them out of their stupor or whatever it is.

She smiles at me. Nothing. I remember how the green fire of her eyes once dominated her face, how Ricochet’s black eyes gleamed and darted, noticing everything.

Now I’m seeing the eyes and faces of dead or dreaming people. It makes me uneasy, with a feeling of starting to understand something.

“The mountain,” Ricochet is saying. “You understand we can’t go with you? But we will give you directions as you travel. How will we keep in touch?”

“How did such different young people get together and decide to go to the Wildlands?” Leoli asks. “You didn’t use Controlled Communications Centres, did you?”

“Two of us, Jabz and me, we have these, our own texters –” Silver pulls out his black-and-silver texter to offer to Leoli. “But what’s all this about a mountain?”

“You should leave one for us to use when you go,” Ricochet says, taking it from Leoli and examining it. “Yes, I see how this works. And this is your conversation with the other one in your group who has his own texter? So we have the number. Yes.”

I watch him starting to slide it into one of the breast pockets of his brown-and-mustard one-piece. That’s when my uneasiness hardens into knowledge.

“No. Give it back.” I start forward, aware of people’s surprise. “We can’t trust these people.”

“What do you mean?” Silver objects. “They’re just –”

“Jabz is right.” The only one not surprised is Lizwi, and she speaks urgently. “Meyi knows it too. That’s what he’s been trying to tell me –”

“Wait,” Leoli starts.

“They’ve been Rinsed!” I’m shouting, I don’t know why, and it’s stupid, because it brings the security pair rushing forward.

“They can’t have,” Halo protests. “I mean, these are Ricochet and –”

“They have.” Lizwi is pushing Meyi towards the door. “Watch them. Hey, Ricochet and Leoli, how’s little Ricleo? Where’s your child?”

No response from either that I can see, but I’m not paying too much attention.

“We need to go,” I’m telling everyone. “The texter, can we have it back –”

“That’s enough.”

The security officers are coming at me and Lizwi.

The man isn’t expecting my fist. The Sprawll’s inhabitants have been docile since that last attempted uprising. Probably his uniform is enough to make people behave. He wouldn’t last long in the Margins.

“Go, go, go!” I’m yelling at everyone as he goes down, because the woman is raising her hands, with something in each, probably sprays to calm or immobilise us.

I catch a last glimpse of Ricochet and Leoli. They’re watching us stampede towards the door.