The Territory Truth Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Praise for The Territory

  About the Author

  Dedication

  The Terrotory Truth

  Acknowledgements

  Advertisement

  Copyright

  THE TERRITORY, TRUTH

  SARAH GOVETT

  Praise for The Territory

  ‘Gripping dystopia with a keen political edge’

  Imogen Russell Williams, Metro

  Winner of the Gateshead YA Book Prize

  Shortlisted for the Trinity Schools Book Award

  ‘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.

  For Noa and Alba

  People need things to do. A focus. They can’t just sit around, inert. Dad once said they’d done experiments on it. Psychological ones. People who were left in a room with nothing but a table, a chair and an electric-shock machine would choose to zap themselves with an electric current rather than remain seated and bored. Zap – ow! Zap – aggggghhhh! Over and over until the door opened again. At the time I didn’t understand it. I thought, well, those are probably the results you get if you experiment on the sort of freaks who volunteer to take part in psychological experiments. But now it’s starting to make sense.

  A sense of purpose, a mission, is an incredible thing. It lengthens your stride, fuels your weary muscles and irons the creases out of your forehead. Today we kept walking till the sun had disappeared below the horizon and the sky was a dark pink and indigo chromatography experiment. We’ve settled into a pattern, a rhythm. A line of us in single file, as the drier routes are often ridges projecting out of the salt marsh below like the spine of an open book. Lee’s normally at the front; me, Raf and Ella in the middle; with Nell, a ghostly white-haired fourth shadow, attached to our heels. Jack follows behind at a distance.

  Lee has sort of become our unofficial leader since Megan’s death. Partly because he’d been planning with Adnan back at the Fort to overthrow the Ministry for the longest. But mainly because he’s the only one with the computer skills, the only one who has any hope of hacking the Ministry servers and altering the uploads. Freeing the brainwashed minds of the freakoid Childes back in the Territory and awakening them to the fact that it’s A-not-OK to send tens of thousands of teens to their deaths each year just for failing to get the required 70 per cent in the TAA exam. That Norms aren’t lesser beings just because they don’t get to upload facts straight into their brains. That the Ministry doesn’t deserve unquestioning devotion and maybe, just maybe, that fighting back against a regime that’s constantly lied to you, and ending the whole TAA system could be a good thing.

  Well, that’s the idea anyway.

  Lee’s taking his new role very seriously – lots of compass-consulting and agonising over driest route versus fastest route. Occasionally though, under the shock of dark hair, his smile still breaks through – so wide it makes the gap between his front teeth seem almost normal size.

  I’ve been alternating my time between Ella and Raf. It’s so good to have Ella back in my life again – to share stuff with, to confide in. There’s no BS to her. What you see is what you get. No dancing around. Sometimes, though, you see the darkness descend – if someone mentions Raiders, even in the sense of ‘at least we don’t need to watch our backs all the time now the Raiders are gone’ – the shutters are all flipped closed and she kind of crumples in on herself. I think having Nell to look after has both helped her and also pushed the damage deeper. Ella’s had to be so strong, to screen Nell from the evil that was going on around them – the Raiders’ breeding programme. She’s had to internalise it all. But I think she’s going to get past it. Find the light again.

  Raf’s still pretty weak, but it’s easy to forget it. The glow has returned to his face. The fire. OK, sure, his eyes have always been amazing, but now it’s like they’ve got their own little green and blue LEDs planted in the irises. I can’t quite believe that only a few days ago he was lying unconscious on the floor. THUD – the sound of his skull hitting the stone as the psycho Raider knocked him down. Lee said that any serious damage, brain damage, might not be immediately obvious. Might present itself later. Doctor-speak designed to reassure but that actually makes your skin feel like you’re walking through hundreds of spiders’ webs. He said that shards of bone could conceivably still be working their way deeper inside, knifing his brain tissue. That pools of blood could be collecting inside his head, applying ‘pressure to the brain’ that could only be relieved by an operation. A proper in-a-Ministry-hospital-with-Ministry-surgeons-in-Ministry-white-coats operation. Every time I look at Raf a tiny voice in my head whispers ‘shard’ and ‘pool’ and I’m sure he can tell as then he’ll come out with, ‘Don’t look at me like that Noa. I’m Raf the strong! Raf the powerful!’ and then he’ll push his arms forward and do these exaggerated bicep flexes – which are all the more hilarious as he doesn’t have hugely bigger muscles than me – and he’ll pick me up and kiss me, really kiss me, as if to prove a point.

  The whole day Jack remained fifty or so paces behind, still lost in his thoughts and we left him to them. We didn’t need to ask what was troubling him, of course. His grief over Megan was painted on his face and written in his hunched-over gait. No amount of telling him it
was going to be OK, that we’d never forget her, or her sacrifice in leading us in battle against the Raiders, was going to change anything. When you lose someone it doesn’t matter that they were a war hero and a leader of the Opposition in the Wetlands, all that matters is they’re gone. We just have to hope that time being a ‘great healer’ is true and not some malc saying that people tell other people to fob them off and move them on. Part of me wanted to slow my step. To wait for him and hold him, to hug away his pain. But I knew I couldn’t. It’d be more for my benefit than his. I know Jack’s over me now, so I’d just be needlessly stirring things up, antagonising Raf and resurrecting old jealousies.

  We covered more distance in the afternoon than in the morning. At first we’d stopped for rests regularly, at least every hour. I’d worried about Ella and Nell’s stamina. Being held captive and chained for weeks and only seeing daylight for half an hour or so a day has got to take its toll on your body. Not to mention the stress, the mental torture. I’d imagined their muscles would have wasted, like when someone breaks their arm and has it in plaster for weeks and when the plaster finally comes off you’re like what’s that freaky skinny left arm doing hanging there like a straw? But they were surprisingly strong: resilient. And I guess that every step towards the Fence was a step away from their old prison, a step towards a future that they could control.

  Dinner was dried meat around a fire. Caveman-style. We ate in semi-silence, focusing on the flames. Night time is the hardest. Hope often sets with the sun and then doubts and memories rise up and haunt us. I think of Mum and Dad and worry. Worry about what’s happened to them as a result of me and Raf disappearing off into the Wetlands to rescue Jack. We were meant to be at Greenhaven, starting the next step in our education, not trapped on the other side of an electric fence. Were they sitting at home, worried sick about me? Or, the unthinkable alternative, were they in some Ministry prison being questioned? Questioned, like Aunty Vicki had been? An echo of Mum’s voice rang in my ears. Her guttural sobs. She didn’t survive questioning. Should I have told them where I was going? Confessed that Jack’s being shipped off was all my fault? If he hadn’t overheard me choose Raf over him then he wouldn’t have tried to escape before the results of the TAA came in. His 71 per cent would have counted and the three of us would have stayed safe and dry. It was my responsibility to bring him back. Mum and Dad would have understood, surely? Understood that I’d just lost Daisy to a botched late-upgrade – a failed attempt to turn her into a freakoid Childe that had instead reduced her to a vegetable. One they’d disposed of. Understood that I couldn’t lose my other best friend as well.

  Then I think about our plan and all the holes in it. The gaps. Like how were we going to find out when our bit of the Fence was turned off for circuit testing so we could get through it without being fried? And was Lee even right that these circuit tests happened?

  Thoughts, thoughts, thoughts.

  The kind that scramble your brain until you get lost in them. Sirens calling you into the fog, towards the rocks. I had to resist them. We all did. Force our minds back to the flames. Concentrate instead on the crackle and the spit and the way the light changed as larger flames rose and ate the smaller ones above. It probably helped that we were partially intoxicated by the extreme amounts of mosquito repellent that all of us except Nell had applied. Her Cell skin and blood, the result of the same mutation that made her hair ghostly white, was protection enough against the lethal breed of mosquitoes that haunted the Wetlands.

  Raf sat next to me and I nuzzled into him.

  ‘We’re going to do this, aren’t we?’ I asked quietly, trying to still the tremor in my voice. ‘Get through the Fence? Bring down the system?’

  He didn’t answer immediately. Just leaned closer and stared into my eyes, stared like he was gazing all the way down into my soul.

  ‘Yes, Noa. Yes, we are.’

  I used to think that shooting stars were stars dying in galaxies far away, falling out of the sky – their golden trails a kind of farewell bow. Adieu universe. Granting wishes as their departing gift.

  Then we studied them at school and found out that they weren’t actually stars at all – they were meteorites – small bits of rock burning up from friction as they entered the Earth’s atmosphere. Less romantic. More true.

  There was an incredible shooting star last night. I woke up – no idea when. It was nowhere near morning but you could still make out the contours of the land, the huddled bundles of our sleeping group and the surrounding shrubby trees as the moon was a full-on circle – a massive eco bulb in the sky. I’d been having a horrific dream, a nightmare about Mum. Someone had been drilling a hole in the back of her neck and forcing a Node in. She was going to be brainwashed into forgetting all about me, forgetting that she’d ever had a daughter at all, so being awake in the middle of the night was actually a major relief. An escape. I tried to calm my racing mind so I focused on the stars. The sparkling canopy above us. Thinking, you count sheep to relax, right? So why not stars? I began to count. One, two, three … and that’s when it hit, or rather fell. Well, not on three to be honest, because that would be far too convenient. Nothing ever happens on the count of three apart from a magic trick. Hey presto. No, it was on more like twenty-seven, not that it matters. What does matter is that suddenly, out of nowhere, there was this burning streak across the sky, ripping it apart. It was so huge and seemed so close that at one point I started freaking out that it might land right on top of us and we’d be crushed to death by a burning fireball.

  It didn’t. We weren’t. It must have crashed into the ground some miles away, or maybe hundreds of miles away. Distance can be difficult to judge, especially at night. The stars don’t exactly look like they’d take more than a lifetime of space travel to reach.

  When morning came, I didn’t tell anyone about it. I don’t know why. It’s not like I’d been planning to keep it secret. But there was something special about the moment. Watching it fall. When it seemed like it was just the star/meteorite, the moon and me.

  The three of us awake, alone in the world.

  We’ve been walking for three days now and already most of the streams are sweet. The animals are starting to drink from them. Jack was the first to notice. He’s always had a special connection to animals, an affinity if you like. Rex, my dog from back then, was normally wary of people outside the family, but he’d always roll over for Jack. Expose his vulnerable belly and then slobber all over Jack’s hand.

  We were rounding the bend of a stream when Jack suddenly held his hand up, flat, a teacher calling a class to attention, and then pressed it to his lips. The signal was clear. Stop. Silence. There, up ahead, was the most beautiful animal I’ve ever seen. A deer. A real live deer, a history book brought to life. With these huge brown eyes, soulful and sad – the sort of eyes I’ve always imagined Aslan would have as he’s telling Lucy there’s a way to get Edmund back but he knows what sacrifice it’s going to involve. The deer bent its graceful neck to drink from the stream and then, probably sensing us, took off in ballerina leaps across the marram grass.

  ‘Fresh water!’ I murmured and looked round to see other lips moving too, the discovery so wonderful it had to be vocalised. As one, we bounced towards the stream, plunging in hands, lapping from open palms. Nell started laughing and then we were all joining in. Laughing with joy at an environment that could actually sustain us. I felt like an ancient explorer – this land is good, let’s settle here (minus the let’s plant a flag and massacre all the people who look a bit different and already live here bit).

  We haven’t come across a mosquito swarm yet, touch wood. I can spot them now. We all can. There was one yesterday, to the east, a small dense, low cloud in an otherwise clear sky. We could hear it, hear their evil cry – eheheheheheheheheh – but it veered off towards the salt flats and never came close.

  There are more animals everywhere now. Not just deer, but rabbits, mice, even foxes scampering into bushes, fleeing into
the long grass as they register our approach. Raf tried to catch us a rabbit for breakfast and failed just as dismally as on our journey into the Wetlands. Back when we were looking for Jack. It seems like a lifetime ago. Once again I had to fight down the laughter that bubbled up as he face-planted into a sandy mound, empty hands stretched out in front of him, like someone miming scoring a try in rugby. He tried to shrug it off, but I can tell it bothers him, properly bothers him that he hasn’t caught anything yet.

  ‘Maybe just leave it,’ I suggested. ‘Hunting’s clearly not your thing.’

  A mistake. Never be that honest. Guys’ egos just can’t handle it. His eyes went flat.

  ‘I did catch that seagull, remember? When we were totally dehydrated and we thought we wouldn’t make it. I killed that seagull.’

  I told my face to agree, to ‘be supportive’, but my eyebrow disobeyed my brain’s command and shot up in an exaggerated gesture of ‘oh yeah?’ A split second and then Raf had the good grace to grin.

  ‘OK. I accept the seagull couldn’t fly at the time. But if you ever need someone to pick up a dead or injured bird for you, I’m your guy!’

  At least Raf doesn’t take himself too seriously for too long and I think everything would have remained all happy and jokey if then, at that exact moment, Jack hadn’t sauntered up carrying a couple of ducks that he’d caught in some snare he’d set before bed.

  Raf walked off.

  He didn’t say anything, but that’s the thing. When something bothers him he never does.

  The helicopter came in the morning.

  We were packing up after breakfast and stamping out the last embers of the fire when we heard the thuck-whop-thuck of its rotary blades slicing the air. I’d only ever seen one in a photo, only ever heard one in a sound-file clip. Freaky, menacing creatures that looked like they’d been invented by a scientist who’d managed to splice some wasp DNA into a machine.