Where the World Turns Wild Page 8

  “We’ll need to eat,” I say.

  “Take all the supplies you’ve got. Whatever you can carry.” He’s rifling through a cupboard and I think he’s about to give me protein balls or vitamin sticks or some other bogus city food, but he brings out a rusty metal box and places it on the table, triumphantly.

  I frown. “What is it?”

  “From the days of the rats, seeing as you seem to think this is Hamelin. It’s a trap.”

  “You think we should eat rats?”

  “I think you should eat whatever you can catch. If you want to survive.”

  “Does it work?”

  Silvan shrugs and snatches the notes from my hand. Did I just exchange all our savings for a rusty box?

  “I’m not sure about this,” I start to say, but Silvan’s rummaging through the cupboard again. Finally he brings out these little blister packs. “You should take these too. I’ve no use for them.”

  “What are they?”

  “Antibiotics.”

  “We’re resistant,” I say, confused.

  “Look, kid, I don’t know who you are and I don’t want to know, but there are degrees of resistance. Sometimes the immune system needs a kick-start. If you get bitten, which you will—”

  I nod, though I feel sick inside.

  “Take three tablets a day. They might help.”

  “Thanks,” I say, not even trying to hide my disappointment as I look at the blister packs. Even if we took one tablet a day each, there wouldn’t be enough for the whole journey. Not for both of us.

  “I wish you luck. You and your brother. But then maybe you’ve already got all the luck you need, being able to escape this place.”

  “Did you know?” I can’t help asking. “Back then. When the disease was released. Did you know you’d be shut in here too?”

  Silvan nods.

  “But you did it anyway?”

  “Sometimes I think it was just a protest that got out of hand. I mean, we were trying to save the planet. We couldn’t actually have wanted people to die, could we?” Silvan gives a long sigh. “But maybe we did. We were angry enough. One thing I do know, we never imagined it would spread so fast. It’s like the disease did something to those ticks. Made them invincible. There was no stopping them. And everywhere they went the disease went with them. Across England, and then Europe, and then the world. In the end they stopped counting the dead.”

  He’s looking at the floor and there’s water in his eyes. I can hear all the crying from that old film reel back at school and I know just what he’s seeing.

  “You saved the Wild,” I say quietly.

  Silvan looks up at me. “But for how long?”

  Etienne’s there when I walk into our road. He’s sat down against the wall, drumming his fingers on the pavement. He jumps up the moment he sees me. “I need to talk to you!”

  “I can’t. I don’t have time.” The trap’s in my school bag, clanking on my back. I’m sure Etienne must be able to hear it.

  “Please, Juniper.”

  “I don’t have time,” I repeat. “Annie Rose—”

  “You have to hear this.”

  There’s something in his voice that makes me nod. “OK. I’m listening.”

  Etienne looks around. “Not here. Come upstairs.”

  We go through the main door of our apartment block. Once there was still the old front door – painted wood with shards of multi-coloured glass spilling out from one central circular pane like sunshine. Then some kids smashed it in one night and it was replaced with this piece of PVC with no transparent bit at all.

  “Where’ve you been anyway?” Etienne asks.

  “You don’t want to know,” I mutter, striding up the stairs after him.

  Etienne’s apartment is at the top. It’s the same size as ours, only his mum’s study is in the small space where Bear’s bedroom would be. The walls are covered in fractals, spiralling out infinitely, or lines branching out again and again hypnotically, all in shades of green. Etienne’s mum says most of her fractals come from nature. “That’s the real reason they’re good for us. Portia Steel’s never worked that out,” she said once to me.

  “Ms Endo’s gone,” Etienne says, the moment we get to his room.

  “What?”

  “I was at the climbing centre first thing. Mamiko was there. From school. She said they came in the night. Everyone in their block saw.”

  “Saw who?”

  “Secret Police.”

  “Ms Endo? They took her away?” I gasp. The floor starts to tilt around me and there’s that hand on my chest again. That iron fist.

  Etienne nods. “There’s more. Mamiko overheard Ms Endo talking to her mum about you and Bear. About how she was trying to stop something happening. You’re in some kind of trouble.”

  I stare at him. “Ms Endo was trying to help us! She was just trying to help us, Etienne!” The fist’s clenching tighter, the cold fingers of steel, and I can’t get enough oxygen. There’s never enough oxygen in this place. No wonder, when they took away all the trees.

  “Juniper!” Etienne’s looking at me alarmed. “Why?”

  “Because of Steel! Because she wants to take our blood. For transfusions.”

  “Transfusions? I don’t understand!”

  “So her people get our immunity. So they can go out into the Wild. Strip it all over again. That’s why I needed to see Sam. That’s why I had to make you take me back there.” I laugh coldly. “I thought Sam could help.”

  “Help with what, Juniper?”

  I walk over to the window. You can see right into the Palm House where a small figure is zigzagging over the tiles. Bear.

  “You’re leaving, aren’t you,” Etienne says, coming to stand next to me.

  “We have to, Etienne. We’re going across tonight.”

  “Across?”

  “The Buffer,” I say, not looking at him because I don’t want to see the horror on his face.

  “Juniper!” Etienne gasps. “Do you hear the shots at night? Do you hear the gunfire?”

  “Yes,” I say in almost a whisper.

  “They say it’s to scare off birds and animals. To stop them coming across. But I don’t think they’d discriminate, and I don’t think they’d care which way you were travelling.”

  I stare at the stilted metal cages that fringe the Buffer Zone at regular intervals. Each cage with its own sniper. Border Patrol.

  “They don’t ever stop watching. And they shoot to kill.” Etienne’s voice is desperate. And scared. He’s scared for us.

  “I’ll figure it out,” I say boldly, dismissive. Right now I just want him to shut up. I don’t want to be told it’s impossible and I definitely don’t want him to use Bear against me. “Mum did it. She got across.”

  “It was different then.”

  “We don’t have a choice, Etienne!” I snap. “Not if they’ve taken Ms Endo. Don’t you see? Abbott’s out to get us. Bear and I will be next. Only it won’t be the Institute, it’ll be worse.”

  Etienne nods slowly. “I’m not saying it’s impossible. Nothing’s impossible, but you need to know what you’re doing.”

  “Yeah?” I say, trying to get the right tone. Like I know that already, but if he has information to share he should tell us.

  “So you have a plan worked out?”

  “No,” I say, deciding to be honest with him. “We have some old camping gear and we have a map, but that’s it.”

  “The map takes you to your parents?”

  “Allegedly.”

  “And you have the resistance.”

  “Yeah, allegedly we have that too. The ticks won’t get us. Something else can have that pleasure.”

  “You don’t have a plan for the Buffer though?”

  “We run, right? I guess we wait for dark first.”

  Etienne rolls his eyes. “Seriously, Juniper, you’ve got to do better than that.”

  Ever since Abbott threatened him with the Institute, Etienne’s be
en planning his escape. If they ever try and send him, he’ll be ready to leave. “I can’t go there, Juniper, I swear. I’ll run. I’ll run into the Wild. I’d rather get the disease.”

  He gets out some papers from a drawer. White sheets scrawled over with pencil sketches.

  “You never told me you drew,” I say, surprised.

  Etienne blushes. “I don’t. Not like you, Juniper. They’re just diagrams.” He angles them away from me and starts rifling through them. “This is the one. Here.”

  It’s a plan. It takes a while to work out what it is, but the Palm House is on it and from that you can work out pretty much everything else. The boundary of our city either side of our block, with all the buildings marked and the lookout stations too. Each one has a series of numbers next to it. Times. Schedules.

  “Wow,” I say, reeling at the detail. It’s all pencil except for the lookout posts. Some are red, some are yellow, some blue. “What are the colours for?”

  “They’re zones,” Etienne says. “It’s a network. You have to understand the network.” He takes me through all of it – the results of his meticulous thinking, his locked-up, clever brain, keeping itself sane.

  The lookout posts are always manned, but the pool of border officials this falls to is small. Sometimes, if someone is sick, they don’t bother covering their post. Or if something happens in another part of town, border officers are the first people to be called in to help. Etienne takes a clean sheet of paper and I watch his fingers sketch it out. Which alarm needs to go off, which guards this will alert and for how long. Everything that needs to happen in order to leave a stretch of Buffer unmonitored for the time it should take to cross it.

  Etienne’s not got the resistance but he’s planned his escape anyway. That’s how bad this place has become.

  “How would I get the alarm to go off?”

  Etienne frowns. “That’s the tricky part. Sometimes there’s trouble at the Warren – they pull in every guard for a mile for that, but you can’t make that happen. Well, not easily. Sometimes someone breaks away on another part of the grid, but unless you’ve got someone willing to make a bid for freedom—”

  “No,” I say, terrified that that’s what he’s about to suggest. Some crazed sacrifice – giving himself up for us.

  “But I could do something, couldn’t I? Create a distraction. Get one of the security alarms to go off in one of the regime’s buildings. That’d do it.”

  “Yeah, and I’d leave knowing you were being packed off to the Institute.”

  “I’m just trying to help,” he says, frowning again.

  “What about a fire?”

  Etienne looks at me curiously. “Yeah, that would do it. If you knew how to start one.”

  I smile. “Well, it just so happens our camping gear contains a box of matches!”

  “I’ll help, Ju.” Bear looks up at me, a deep assurance in his eyes.

  “I know you will, Bear.”

  I’m in Bear’s room, working out which of his clothes to take – the lightest and warmest. Annie Rose is in the kitchen, muttering about city rations and finding all the food we can carry.

  “Are you taking Emily?” Bear asks.

  I shake my head. “No, Bear. We have other stuff to carry.” She could be another blanket. She could be more food.

  “You’re leaving her?” Bear sounds shocked.

  “She’s just a doll. People my age don’t play with dolls.”

  “You do.”

  I roll my eyes at him. It’s not playing. It isn’t like that with Emily. She’s my link with Mum. “There’s no room for toys. It’s essentials only.”

  “What about my Jungle?”

  “Bear, you can’t…” I start, but his face is breaking up. We can’t leave the Jungle behind. Bear needs his toys, they’re part of him. “Maybe you could bring a few,” I say. “Your favourites. Lion and Tiger and Giraffe.”

  “And Brown Bear,” he says, taking the animal down from the shelf.

  “Yeah, of course. We can’t leave Brown Bear, can we?”

  Barney gave me that one just in time for Bear’s third birthday. His namesake. The bear’s the best of all the animals. The most lifelike. It’s made by this old German toymaker that used to do all kinds of animals and paint them by hand.

  He moves the bear along the map that’s spread out on his bed, over the pale blue lines that coil round the paper like snakes.

  “Bears can swim you know,” he says.

  “He’ll love all the lakes then, see.” I point to the top left of the map, where Ennerdale is. I look at the names of the blue pools now. The lagoons, the lochs, the lakes. Windermere and Elterwater and Grasmere and Wastwater. I read them out.

  “Mere?” Bear asks. “Does that mean water?”

  “Yes,” I say. “Like the sea.” It’s a story word. An underwater girl who made a pact with an evil sea witch because she had fallen in love with a human boy and wanted a human soul and legs to dance with. Though I always imagined I’d do the opposite – wish for a fish tail and an ocean to swim away in.

  “Was our dad a ReWilder, Ju?”

  “He can’t be that old, Bear! The ReWild was almost fifty years ago.”

  “Maybe his dad was a ReWilder then?”

  I smile. “Yeah. Or his mum. Or his grandmother. I guess we’ll find out all about him, when we get there.”

  “I bet he’s a hero, Ju. Like Robin Hood. I bet everyone knows him, except us. I can’t believe you forgot him.”

  I shrug. Bear’s right, I did forget him. Just sometimes in a dream, right in the middle of it, there is someone. Someone tall with a head full of curly hair, just like Bear’s, and I have to climb my way to the top of him to touch it. But if I freeze-frame or focus in on the face then he vanishes, like he was never there at all.

  “What if they’re not there, Ju?” Bear asks as though he’s reading my mind.

  “Then we’d know,” I say fast.

  Bear nods. The brown bear’s floating down the rivers, galloping over the hills, like it’s that easy.

  Our parents have got to be at Ennerdale. If anything happened, Mum promised someone would send word to Annie Rose. Even if she couldn’t come herself, someone would. And we’ve never heard anything, so they must still be there. They have to be.

  There’s a tap on Bear’s door. I glance up, surprised. It’s Etienne. “Annie Rose said I could come in. I brought something for you.”

  “A present for me?” Bear asks, excited, staring at this thing in Etienne’s hands. A kind of box.

  “For Juniper too.” Etienne’s eyes flick across to me.

  “What is it?” Bear trills.

  “It’s a kind of map. For when you don’t have space to spread yours out.”

  I laugh. Bear’s bed’s entirely taken up with the map and I start to fold it so Etienne can sit down. The thing he’s carrying is small and circular. Etienne flicks a button on the side and it’s like it wakes up. It’s got a screen on it, displaying a map with a little green flashing dot.

  “Where did you get it?” I ask, suspicious.

  “I found it once. In the Emporium, in Miscellaneous. I don’t think Barney knew what it was, and I wasn’t sure, but I figured it out from some old science books. It’s a GPS.”

  Bear and I look at him blankly.

  “Global Positioning System,” Etienne recites. “It shows you where you are, exactly where you are, and when you put your destination in, it shows you which direction to take to get there and how far away you are.”

  “How’s that even possible?” Bear asks, his eyes wide.

  Etienne starts explaining satellites – these orbiting bits of metal out in space, pinging back signals at the speed of light.

  I frown. “I didn’t think satellites worked any more? They’ve gone off course, surely?”

  Etienne scoffs. “That’s what Steel says. She doesn’t want us believing any of that technology works. And it’s true, most of the satellites are useless now, but there
are a few you can rely on. Those are the signals the GPS looks for.”

  “Someone’s maintaining them?” I ask, dubious.

  “Somewhere,” Etienne says. “I guess that means some countries are doing better than us.”

  I nod, slowly. I don’t believe the tick disease is everywhere, despite what Silvan said and what Steel tells us in her bulletins. Surely some places have recovered by now. But I’m not bothered about anywhere else right now. My question’s much simpler. “Is it easy to use?”

  “I’ve tried it out, with the obvious limitations of course. It works here OK. Once I walked all the way to the North Edge. It got me there. It’s a long time since it had an update, but it has the other cities programmed in, I checked that. So you can steer clear of them.”

  “Can we put in Ennerdale?” Bear asks eagerly.

  “You should do it, Bear,” Etienne says, pushing the GPS across to him. “It works best when you put in numbers. Two coordinates. Latitude—”

  “And longitude,” Bear finishes. “I know from our Campcraft book. We can get the numbers from the map. I’ve already seen them.”

  I watch as Etienne helps Bear type in a string of digits and even though it’s like being handed a golden key there are tears pricking at my eyes. Because it’s not our key, it’s Etienne’s and he’s never going to get a chance to use it.

  “Learn the way for me, Bear,” I say, managing a smile. “I’m going to do the plant check. One last time.”

  Etienne comes out to find me. I’m in the central bit of the dome where you can only see plants and sky. The sun’s already starting to fall.

  “So are you ready?” he asks.

  We came up with the plan together. I’ll start the fire in that old warehouse. It’s just an empty shell, no one’s going to get hurt, but it’s close to a twelve-storey residential block, so the Priority One emergency alarm will sound. Every officer in a two-mile radius will get the call to come and help evacuate the block and fight the blaze. This will include our two nearest Border Patrol officers.

  Our rucksacks will be packed and ready in the Palm House. The wailing siren will drown out the noise as we smash our way through the glass. Bear and I will go where we’ve never been before, where no one is meant to ever set foot. We’ll go across the Buffer. All the way across until we reach the Wild.