The Territory, Escape Read online

  Contents

  Praise for The Territory

  About Sarah Govett

  Title Page

  Dedication

  THE TERRITORY, ESCAPE

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

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  Praise for The Territory, Book One

  ‘Gripping dystopia with a keen political edge’

  Imogen Russell Williams, Metro

  ‘A pacy dystopian fantasy thriller’

  Martin Chilton, The Telegraph, best YA books of 2015

  ‘This is a truly exceptional novel, exciting, gripping and intense, with relatable protagonists whose agonies become the reader’s own. It deals with complex moral dilemmas regarding loyalty, self-preservation and family, forcing the reader to answer the uncomfortable question: who deserves to live when spaces are limited? This is the first of a trilogy and the final cliff-hanger will leave you clamouring for more.’

  Book Trust

  ‘Truly heart-wrenching! Govett raises issues about our education system, the environment and decisions governments around the world are making. I’d go so far as to call this the 1984 of our time and recommend this as a great read, with a fantastic political context.’

  The Guardian children’s books site

  ‘Govett has created a powerful and shocking novel that makes the reader wonder how societies would deal with the environmental consequences of climate change and if there could ever be any ‘right’ course of action … an excellent, thought-provoking book.’

  Children’s Books Ireland

  ‘…an enjoyable, fast-paced read, and raises some interesting questions about how you would behave in difficult situations, as well as being a clear indictment of the UK education system…’

  Books for Keeps

  ‘The Territory is a terrific book. It simply is.’

  Bookwitch

  ‘I loved every second of this book; it was phenomenal.’

  Yourbestbookpal

  Sarah Govett graduated with a First in Law from Oxford University. After qualifying as a solicitor, she set up her own tutoring agency, Govett Tutors, which specialises in helping children from all backgrounds prepare for exams. Sarah has also written for children’s television.

  The first instalment of her award-winning debut trilogy, The Territory, launched in May 2015 and was followed by the second book, The Territory, Escape, in October 2016.

  The critically acclaimed The Territory was shortlisted for The Times Chicken House Children’s Fiction Prize, won the Gateshead YA Book Prize in January 2017 and has been shortlisted for the Trinity Schools Book Award 2018. Both books are included in Book Trust’s recommended reads.

  In addition to speaking at schools across the UK, Sarah has appeared at the Southbank Literature Festival, the Barnes Children’s Literature Festival, The Edinburgh International Book Festival, the Bradford Literature Festival and the Godolphin Literary Festival. She is also a regular contributor to The Huffington Post.

  Sarah lives in London with her husband and two young children.

  THE TERRITORY, ESCAPE

  SARAH GOVETT

  For Earl

  For the first few days I couldn’t stop looking at my hands. Well, my right hand to be exact. The hand Raf had squeezed when we’d promised to get Jack back. I’d wanted his fingers to have branded mine, like a tattoo or something, but they hadn’t. They’d just left faint bruises that faded and even when I kept pinching the same patches at night like some kind of weird OCD ritual they wouldn’t come back. Turns out it’s pretty hard to bruise yourself. Others though…

  Memories fade too. Maybe it’s the brain’s way of protecting yourself. All you’re left with is snapshots.

  FLASH

  Jack being dragged off with the others in his cage to become Fish. He was the only one not crying. Like he was resigned to it and that was somehow worse. He even smiled at me – this slow calm smile – cheeks bunching freckles – as if he was trying to cheer me up. Like I was the one who’d been hurt. He couldn’t stop protecting me even at the end.

  FLASH

  Sitting in silence on the bus on the way back home. Not that it felt like proper home anymore. Not without Jack. A little part of him, a little part of us, was in everything I did and everywhere I went and that made his not being there even more real.

  FLASH

  Mum and Dad’s reaction when I told them. Dad was angry. The sort of angry that tenses every muscle in your body and even changes your build, your height.

  ‘Bastards,’ he hissed. Dad’s never angry and he NEVER says bastards. Mum wasn’t angry. She wasn’t even doing her super straight back thing. She was scared and couldn’t keep her eyes off me, scanning my face – like she was trying to do some sort of retinal lie-detector. ‘You’re not thinking of doing anything stupid are you, Noa?’ she asked eventually. I shook my head. I didn’t want to lie to her and not saying the words seemed to make it less of a lie.

  But I couldn’t lie to myself. It was my fault that Jack had failed and been shipped off to the Wetlands. I knew it, felt it, with every cell of my body. Every time I looked in the mirror, an executioner’s face stared back at me. He’d got the pass mark. He’d be here with us now, if only he hadn’t run. If only he’d hadn’t been standing there in the corridor. If only I hadn’t said I didn’t want him. I was drowning in a sea of ‘if onlys’. I had to make it right.

  Raf and I had originally agreed to wait for two weeks before going after Jack. We reckoned it’d give us time to plan, get supplies, spend some time with our families – well, in Raf’s case, his mum. His horrific dad worked such long hours it would be easy enough to avoid him. This meant going through the motions of ‘normal’ post-TAA, which basically meant filling in forms for Further Education Schools. It also usually meant going to celebration parties.

  The parties we could avoid. Very few other Norms had passed and we didn’t feel like hanging out with the Childes. I couldn’t be around them, couldn’t see the Nodes at the back of their necks without picturing them uploading, shaking gently as information shot from their terminals into their brains. Success for them had been guaranteed. Smugness seemed pretty much guaranteed too. I tried not to hate them. Tried to remember that their personalities were being warped by whatever poisonous thoughts the Ministry was hiding in the uploads. Tried to remember that if Raf hadn’t made the decision not to upload, he would’ve been exactly like them – another Norm-hating freakoid.

  The FES forms couldn’t be escaped as easily though. Mum had gone on and on at me to apply as students were supposed to do this within a week of passing, as if she was looking for any sign that I wasn’t committing to life here. To life after Jack.

  ‘Noa-bean, you just have to pick a school and choose three subjects. Don’t think any further than that. One step at a time.’

  Raf and I put the same school and the same subject combination: Biology, Chemistry and Physics. We could have chosen Maths or History (or rather lies about The Territory according to the Ministry), but neither appealed. I’d really wanted to do English but that wasn’t an option at any of the ‘good’ schools. No surprise there.

  ‘A scientist like your mum,’ Dad said proudly.

  I don’t know what expression I pulled, I wasn’t trying to make a point or anything, at least not consciously, but it was enough to make Dad wince. Mum wasn’t there. Scientists in Mum’s department were working late at the moment. Lots of work now after the exams – those kids who’d failed the TAA and had been abandoned by their parents weren’t going to experiment on themselves. No, someone had to inject them with hideous viruses and then muck about with finding cures.

  Mum’s not sleeping well at the moment. She’s got dark hollows under h
er eyes and new creases in her forehead. We don’t talk about it. There’s nothing to say. I understand it now. The choice she made. That she had to make. The only time she came close to mentioning it was one night when she thought I was asleep. She sat at the end of my bed and hugged my old teddy, Winston, who still sits there. Lame I know, but if you’ve given something a name and talked to it most of your life, it seems somehow wrong, kind of cruel, to then go and shut it up in a box somewhere.

  ‘This’ll be the last year, Winston. The last year,’ Mum murmured into his mangy fur and the bed shook a bit so she was probably crying.

  Dad said he’d check over my FES form before I sent it in – cast his legal eagle eye over it in case I’d malced something up. He was smiling all the way through the first couple of paragraphs. I’d clearly managed to format and spell everything right. Noa Blake – not a total denser. Then he got to the ‘Choice of College’ section and his face visibly drooped. He called Mum over with one of their psychic gazes. This one must have been a distress signal.

  ‘Did you know Noa’s applying to Greenhaven?’

  Mum didn’t and her face drooped too – like they were both plants in a dried-up flowerbed. She clearly wasn’t a fan of me going to a boarding school in the Third City either.

  ‘I need some distance. I see him … everywhere.’

  They nodded. They got it and didn’t need to ask who he was. And Greenhaven was one of the ‘best’ schools.

  I think what hurt Mum and Dad more was that Raf and I’d applied for the ‘Early Start Programme’ (for losers who wanted to study pre-term courses for a month before normal lessons started.)

  Mum had difficulty getting the words out. ‘Your dad and me had thought we could spend some time together. All together. As a family. Now that it’s over.’ Her face was an abstract canvas of panic. ‘If it’s something we’ve done… I’ve done, we can change things. They might let me sever my contract before the year’s up.’

  But that wasn’t an option. We all knew that. No one left a Ministry funded position mid-year. Mum’d be under suspicion. On a list.

  ‘It’s not that, Mum. It’s … I need to unscramble my head. And I can’t do it here.’

  It was true even if it wasn’t the exact truth behind what we were doing. Raf and I had decided it’d be easier to leave this way. To tell our parents we’d applied for the Early Start Programme when we’d actually applied to start at the normal time in August. This meant we’d have a month before anyone official would know we were AWOL. Mum and Dad wouldn’t know either. Visits weren’t allowed until half-term and there weren’t any shared phones or anything. By the time you’re at an FES, ‘everyone’s family’ say the ads. Cue massive picture of smug, smiling teenager who looks likes he’s had extra teeth crammed into his mouth. But what they’re basically saying is that the Ministry’s going to take over the role of parent from now on thank you very much. Step up the indoctrination a notch.

  The Early Start Programme began on 7 July. This meant we’d be leaving four weeks after the TAA instead of two, but that was still OK we told ourselves. It meant we’d be more ready. Better able to help Jack when we got there. And we’d have a chance at getting back before we were missed, which was crucial if we wanted to protect our families from investigation. Parents of defectors weren’t treated so well. How exactly we were going to do that, get back, with Jack miraculously concealed, hadn’t come to us yet. But we didn’t have time to wait until a plan was formed. We had to just hope it did.

  The acceptance from Greenhaven came three days later and then it was like we were on some conveyor belt. Uniforms and initial reading arrived. We were sent our timetable, allocated a dorm. Raf and me spent every minute we could together – at one or other of our houses – never in public – and kept on going through the motions. Before we knew it we were even reading some of the material, first to distract ourselves and then because it was actually kind of interesting.

  Like the stuff on genetic engineering. It’s amazing what scientists can do, what people are working on. Splicing a gene from a species of seaweed into a potato plant to produce salt tolerant varieties; adapting a species of Mucor so that it produces Vitamins A and C to make it more nutritious.

  I was all, ‘This is incredible, we could engineer anything – Mucor that actually tastes good.’

  ‘Don’t set your sights so low,’ Raf replied, his eyes sparkling stones. ‘We could bring back pets. Think about it. If they could work out how to engineer some that photosynthesise… Come on – you’ve got to admit it – green dogs would be awesome.’

  I started to crack up then stopped mid-laugh. It felt wrong. The action. The movement of my ribcage. The smile plastered across my face. And ‘dogs’ brought back too many memories. Memories of Rex. Me, Jack and Rex. Jack’s drawing of a dog, and of his dad. His real dad, who’d joined the Opposition and been ‘eliminated’. The rest of my laugh coagulated in my throat.

  Raf, almost as if reading my mind, whispered, ‘Sorry, Noa. I know things are hard. Horribly hard at the moment. But it’s OK to laugh. Don’t see it as a betrayal. See it as a way of fighting back.’

  I nodded, but the laughter didn’t return.

  We read on and there was this chapter all about ‘exercising caution’. About how scientists had tried to eliminate malaria entirely thirty-five years ago by engineering and breeding a larger species of mosquito that couldn’t carry the malarial plasmodium. This larger mosquito was then supposed to outcompete the malarial mosquitoes thereby depriving the plasmodium of a host and destroying the disease in the process. It didn’t work. The plasmodium evolved. It could use the bigger mosquito after all. Malaria went massive.

  ‘No wonder they didn’t teach us this stuff earlier,’ I said slowly, anger growing. ‘Imagine knowing you were going to fail and be a Fish and be sent to die from something that THEY made much worse than it should have been.’

  ‘They messed with mosquitoes long before the Ministry’s time,’ Raf countered.

  ‘I know. But it’s the same, don’t you see? It’s all the same. People playing God.’

  This morning I was curled into Raf’s shoulder, comforted by the warmth of his body and the smell of the dip of skin by his collarbone where sweat collects when he’s hot or nervous. Even his sweat smells nice – musky and smoky. Well it smells nice there anyway – once he kicked off his trainers to sit on the floor and his socks or trainers, whichever, really stank. Maybe feet produce a different type of sweat. But back to his collarbone – lying there I felt safe. For the first time in a long time. It was like I was drugged or something. I was so used to feeling super stressed that feeling relaxed was weird. Like my body had lost half its bones and a plastic insert had been removed from my jaw.

  Raf was reading The Biology of Plants. ‘In case any of it helped us survive in the Wetlands.’ He’d read a page then summarise it for me. Partly because I was feeling lazy and partly because it meant I’d get to watch him read. See the way his forehead crinkled when he got to a difficult bit and his mouth twitched when he got to something pretentious or amusing. Pretentious I guess. Biology, particularly the biology of plants, isn’t exactly hilarious. Then he’d finish and gaze blue and green down at me and it was like I was watching Earth from space. And I relearnt how to laugh. The guilt didn’t go exactly, but it sort of lost its density – became a thin veil of mist instead of a thick layer of fog. We laughed about the most stupid things. Apparently the mole above my belly button is the shape of a moonwort fern spore, which might not sound funny, but was, massively so. Then Raf pretended he had super powers by taking off his jumper and rubbing it on my arm to make all the hairs stand on end, wiggling his fingers at the same time to look like he was somehow magnetising the hairs up or something. I hope they’re an acceptable level of hairy. I’d never really looked at them that closely before, but Raf didn’t look grimmed out or anything.

  This evening at dinner I also actually chatted properly with Mum and Dad. And every now and then they
’d just grin, grin like little kids, just because they were so pleased I’d made it and their girl had finally come home.

  And part of me, God I hate to admit it, but part of me, wanted this to be it. Our life. Not pretending. Studying and living with Raf, seeing Mum and Dad in the holidays. In the Third City no one would know our past – Raf wouldn’t have to pretend he hated me. Norms who’d passed were treated OK. I wouldn’t get a top job but I could have a life. A real life.

  Dad interrupted my thoughts. ‘When do you leave, baby?’

  ‘The seventh,’ I replied. And it was only when I lay down in bed that I realised quite how involved I’d become in my cover-story. Like a spy in too deep. In my head I wasn’t leaving for the Wetlands on the seventh, I was leaving to study, I was leaving for Greenhaven.

  A piece of yellow paper changed everything.

  I knew something was wrong as soon as I walked through the door. Mum had red eyes and was doing her super-straight-back thing. Seeing me looking at her, she pointed at the paper, struggling to get the words out.

  ‘It’s a forced sale notice,’ she explained. ‘For Aunty Vicki’s house… A courtesy from the Ministry.’ She semi-spat the last words.

  The forced sale in itself wasn’t odd – houses of criminals, dissidents, parents of kids who’d run away before the TAA were all automatically repossessed by the Ministry and sold, the money going straight into the Ministry coffers. The thing was, normally other family members weren’t even informed. The notice was just tacked to the outside of the property before the clearance team stripped it out. They wouldn’t have rushed to get round to Aunty Vicki’s house as they always focused on the most valuable first. A run-down place right by the Fence was hardly prime real estate.