The Territory Truth Page 3

  ‘This is different.’ I wasn’t on Raf’s side and this made me uncomfortable, but I had to speak my mind. I don’t know exactly why, but using animals as circuit testers seemed very different from eating them.

  Jack opened his mouth and I thought, this is going to get ugly, everyone joining in, no agreement reached, but then I heard what he had to say.

  ‘I’m obviously not the science brain here, probably the least so, but surely animals aren’t the only things that conduct electricity? In experiments at school we weren’t exactly linking rabbits up to crocodile clips, we were using metal.’

  We were all listening. All we could hear was Jack’s voice and the gentle burble of the nearby stream.

  ‘Well,’ Jack continued, ‘all the settlements have metal things in their walls, and shacks made from corrugated iron, which they’ve clearly taken from stuff lying around, stuff from the old houses. Why can’t we just get bits of metal to throw at the Fence?’

  I felt embarrassed not to have thought of this myself. Lee and Raf, too, judging by their semi-flushed faces that the not particularly warm fire couldn’t explain.

  I smiled my thanks to Jack and Ella gave him a squeeze. He didn’t say anything but he was clearly chuffed. Pleased to make a contribution that went beyond being weirdly big and strong for his age.

  Everyone agreed. We would search for metal. Any scrap bits we could find, bits that were small enough to throw from a distance but heavy enough to travel the distance to the Fence. We were looking for projectiles.

  Tonight was my, Raf and Nell’s first turn on Fence duty. We’ve devised a rota. The day divided into two sections. Section 1: collecting metal, food and water and sleeping; section 2: hurling bits of metal at an electrified fence. I doubt a similar timetable has ever been made up anywhere in the world, but we don’t know when the Fence might be tested. We have to be ready. Ella split us into the two groups. I was surprised when she suggested that Nell went with me and Raf rather than her and when she chose Jack and Lee. But it made sense in a way. She knows Nell needs to increase her confidence, knows that with what we’re attempting, there might be a time when Ella’s not there for her. Not there full stop. And Ella doesn’t seem to want to be teamed up with Raf herself. Not in any way that she shows outright and certainly not in anything that she’s said, but she seems to engineer it that she’s never sat next to him, never doing the same task at exactly the same time. And she doesn’t laugh at his jokes in the way that she laughs with Jack and Lee. I think it’s the freakoid thing. He’s the first Childe she’s properly met and she’s still suspicious and can’t get over it. Past it. The Node is all she sees.

  As everyone else snuggled down for the night, me and Raf pulled on massively heavy backpacks – metal isn’t exactly light – and slow-footed it off to the west. We’d discussed camouflaging ourselves in case there was anyone in a tower watching but in the end we rejected the idea. It was the sight of Raf holding a branch in front of his face that sealed the deal. You could totally see all his features through the twigs and all it did was make him look like a terrible ‘Christmas Tree Number 3’ from a school play.

  Nell trotted at my side, her pack considerably lighter, her nimble leaps showing up my graceless thumps. Raf made to hold my hand, but I moved away. It didn’t seem massively appropriate with Nell there too and, as much as I craved the comfort, the lizard part of my brain knew I shouldn’t relax, that comfort was the enemy. My senses were firing on high alert and I needed to listen to them.

  The night was colder than normal and a thick fog was rolling in again, swirling round our feet, turning the landscape dreamlike and surreal. Like someone had carried out a guerrilla attack with a smoke machine as part of a performance art project. Performance art is a bit malc. It almost makes me appreciate why they introduced scale drawings instead. Almost. If the Fence hadn’t been floodlit, we wouldn’t have had a clue which way to go as the dark made reading the compass pretty impossible even when screwing up my face into weird squint eye expressions. We had reed torches we could light for the return, but they took some time to make and we didn’t want to use them when we didn’t totally have to.

  We stumbled into craters and over brambles. One particularly vicious thorn tore a chunk from my thigh, Nell stumbled over a molehill and Raf strode through a puddle that only looked about a centimetre deep but turned out to be a mini plunge pool.

  Wet and scratched, we arrived at our destination – a patch of wild, scrappy bushes – prime Fence-watching space, just this side of the floodlit zone. Beyond the bushes was a fast-flowing stream, more of a river actually, and then, about three road widths’ further, stood the Fence itself. I didn’t need to look at Nell to know that she was shaking. We all were. I was thirsty so I dipped my finger into the river. A distraction. There was that lingering taste that catches at the back of your throat. Salt. We’d have to make our water bottles last.

  The lights were bright. Even brighter than before, it seemed, but maybe it was just that my eyes hadn’t seen electricity for over a month. Had got used to the gentler illumination of fire and sun. I blinked. Blinked again. Pupils reacting and constricting.

  ‘Are you sure we won’t trigger the guns from here?’ Raf whispered.

  I nodded my response. I was as certain as I could be. When I’d seen the woman attempt to scale the Fence, the guns didn’t activate until she was on the wire itself and her little boy was standing next to it at her feet.

  Silently, seriously, we opened our backpacks and formed a pile of metal pieces in front of us. I picked one up, cradling the cold surface in my palm, and rotated my arm forward and back again – attempting a warm-up.

  I looked at Raf doing the same and started giggling. Soon Nell joined in, the tension, the sombre mood shattered. It suddenly felt like we were in a lame school PE class about to practise shot put – the most pointless of all sports. Why the Ministry still included it was beyond me. We couldn’t exactly learn to hurl the infra-red rays that caused global warming back into space again.

  ‘Right. Bet I can hit the Fence first,’ I taunted.

  ‘I’ll have you know I’m excellent at Fence attack,’ Raf rejoined. ‘It’s my specialist sport.’

  ‘Me first,’ Nell’s voice, high but with a determination that caught me off guard.

  She windmilled her skinny arm and then let go, sending a piece of roadsign off at a 45-degree angle. It landed in the river with a splash.

  We collapsed in laughter again.

  All of our first throws fell pitifully short but then we put more into it, included a run up and when my first piece hit home with a ping and a fiery burst of yellow, we broke into a manic war dance accompanied by jubilant yells and then a sudden, panicked, gulpy silence. We were densers. We weren’t supposed to be drawing attention to ourselves. What if someone saw? What if the pressure of something just hitting the Fence triggered the sensors? We hit the ground and waited. Waited for the gunfire to come.

  It didn’t. The towers here can’t be manned. The sensors can’t be that strong.

  Relief can be dizzying and it took a few minutes for us to pick ourselves up. We continued to take turns to throw, to test. After a while our arms tired, muscles we didn’t usually use becoming over-worked. We realised we were getting through the metal scraps far too fast and we had to pace ourselves if we were going to make them last the full eight hours. It also started to sink in that the yellow sparks weren’t a cause for celebration. They weren’t fireworks or trophies. The opposite in fact. We wanted no sparks. No electricity. The exuberance was gone. Not to return. This was business. Survival. And we had to remember that.

  We started to divide up our time. To throw a test piece every fifteen minutes and then talk the rest, eking out our food and water supplies to keep energy levels even.

  Raf went all quiet for a while. He didn’t say what the matter was but I could tell from the tension in his face, the slight grey of his skin, that it wasn’t just the Fence getting him down. He was getti
ng one of his headaches again. He’d had one the day before yesterday, with slightly pixilated vision, a bit like a migraine, and had to go and lie down with his eyes closed till it passed. Lee had seen my horrified expression and was quick to say it didn’t necessarily mean anything. That headaches after concussion and a knock to the skull were normal, expected. But ‘didn’t necessarily mean anything’ still meant that they might mean something. Might mean something horrific.

  Pool. Shard.

  I needed to distract myself so I talked to Nell, asking question after question to fill the quiet. And it was good, in a way, this time. I got to know Nell a bit, see her as an individual rather than just an appendage of Ella’s.

  ‘Do you miss it? Home, I mean. Your settlement?’ I asked, eloquent and concise as ever.

  ‘No.’ Nell’s response was abrupt. Definite.

  I was a bit taken aback but tried to understand. I knew both her parents had died of malaria when she was a baby, but surely the rest of her settlement would have rallied round and raised her. Unless…

  ‘Did you … were you taken really young? Before you can remember?’ I ventured.

  ‘No.’ Nell hesitated. ‘It wasn’t like that. They took me at the end of last winter. Just as the snowdrops were coming out.’ I’d heard that exact same they from Ella. She never said the word Raiders either. Just they, as if saying their name might risk summoning them back. Nell barked a laugh. ‘They commented on it, the flowers. How fitting they were. White flowers for white hair. It was horrible, obviously. Horrible. Not that they did what they did to Ella to me. I was too young, they said.’ I gave up a silent prayer at this. ‘But,’ at this point Nell’s voice cracked and tears ran down her cheeks, ‘there were moments I was almost grateful to them, you know. No, no, of course you don’t. Don’t tell Ella I said that. Please don’t tell Els. You now think I’m evil…’

  I wrapped my arms round Nell’s shoulders and squeezed.

  ‘Course I don’t. Tell me.’

  ‘Well, because of them I discovered that there were others. Like me. Cells. That I wasn’t alone. That I wasn’t … an abomination.’

  My breath caught in my throat. An abomination? Who puts thoughts like that into little girls’ heads?

  ‘There wasn’t anyone like me at my settlement. No one. No one at all.’

  Between sobs it all spilt out. Nell had been born at Ararat, a super-religious settlement over to the west. Their leader believed that the floods, the destruction of the planet, was God’s punishment for a world that turned its back on faith. His new community would follow a different path. The True Path. Everything, every part of Nell’s day had been ritual, prayer and, for her, abuse. The mental kind. With her white hair and chalk-white skin Nell was seen as an ungodly freak, an abomination. The fact that no mosquito ever so much as touched her only compounded their suspicion. She must be in league with Lucifer. No wonder she wanted to stay with Ella rather than go back. How she can still smile, still retain any scrap of innocence is incredible, way more miraculous even than her skin.

  We talked and threw until the premonition of dawn sent the birds into chorus and the rabbits scurrying into the open.

  Raf had recovered by now and was so keen to show me he was OK that he demanded to throw the last missile. We sent up a collective prayer. Don’t spark this time. Be off. Please, Fence, be off.

  But the Fence paid us no heed and the metal landed with a clang and a bright orange flash.

  It was freakishly hot today. There’s all that stuff in books and plays about temperature influencing moods, about there being links between heat and aggression. I mean, if you think about it, the words temper and temperature must have the same roots in whatever language they came from, Latin probably. Anyway, I for one totally buy it.

  Lee, Jack and Ella returned to base camp at midday, under their very own thundercloud.

  ‘We didn’t expect you till dark?’ I said, wary of Lee’s flashing eyes and Jack’s scowl.

  Jack and Lee didn’t respond, just stomped off in opposite directions, so I latched on to Ella instead.

  ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘It’s not working,’ she replied. ‘Lee’s plan’s not working. We’ve been throwing bits of metal at the Fence for three days now and there’s no change – no sign that there’ll ever be a change. Jack pointed this out to Lee in a none-too-tactful way and Lee took it really badly and got all defensive and angry.’

  As if on cue I heard Lee’s shouted reply to something Jack must have said.

  ‘What do you suggest, then, art boy? That we draw ourselves out of the situation?’

  This was getting out of control. Someone was going to go too far. Say something that couldn’t be taken back. An invisible line crossed.

  ‘Come on, guys!’ Raf stood up from where he’d been skinning a rabbit and raised his voice. ‘Group meeting, now.’

  Everyone obeyed, as if they’d secretly wanted a referee to rock up and end things.

  We gathered round the now-cold fire pit and strips of dried meat and bottles of water were passed from hand to hand like a ritual peace offering.

  No one was speaking so I started.

  ‘Lee,’ I made my voice as gentle as possible, trying to channel Dad who always managed to soothe Mum when she’d had some crazy stressful time at work. ‘In a way, Jack does have a point. The plan doesn’t seem to be working.’

  ‘It might,’ he responded, with no trace of the manic smile I liked so much. His black eyebrows were knitted tight together, approaching monobrow status. ‘We haven’t given it long enough.’

  ‘It’s been three days,’ Jack interjected, with no attempt at softness.

  Silence.

  ‘I’ve been thinking,’ I began again. How to phrase this without causing further conflict? ‘That our plan might be too flawed.’

  Lee’s mouth was a thin line but there was a vulnerability to his eyes. He was listening.

  ‘We can’t continuously throw objects at the Fence. There are gaps between throws, intervals. Not to mention the time when groups are changing over. We’ve been acting like the circuit will be down for at least an hour, but a circuit test might just last a few seconds, mightn’t it? Or less even. Off for a miniscule amount and then straight back up again?’

  I wanted Lee to interrupt, to shout me down. To tell me that circuit tests didn’t work like that. That our section of Fence would be off for half a day and we just had to keep doing what we were doing.

  But he didn’t, shout that is. He didn’t say anything. He just very slowly nodded his head.

  When she was eleven, Daisy went through a stage of keeping a journal by her bed. This was when she was going through her wanting to be a writer phase. She was convinced that people were at their most creative when they were asleep and their subconscious had free rein. Her hope was that an amazing idea for a novel would pop into her dreams and then she’d wake up and write it down before she forgot it by morning. It didn’t really work for her. She gave up writing stuff down after she’d had this super weird dream where she was on a date with Mr Daniels(!), our horrific headmaster, and he kept on ordering peas for her and telling her she needed to remember how many peas she’d eaten as that would definitely come up in the TAA.

  I don’t have a journal so when my eureka moment hit in the middle of the night, I knew I had to wake someone else up and share it there and then.

  My vocal functions and word sequencing took a while to catch up with my firing brain and Raf was wrenched from sleep by my tugging at his arm and triumphantly mumbling, ‘Satellite … water… Ah ha!’

  I waited, grinning smugly, as he came to and my speech normalised. He was giving me a slightly patronising look – yes, love, you’ve had a dream, well done, now go back to sleep. To be fair on him, the last time I’d woken like this it was because I’d dreamt talking wolves were after us, not because they wanted to eat us, but because they wanted to steal our hair and turn it into wigs.

  This time, though, my drea
m made sense, and it was pretty damn important.

  ‘We’ve been going about it all wrong – waiting for the circuit to be switched off. Waiting for something we can’t control.’

  ‘What other choice do we have?’ he queried, the remnants of sleep adding these really sexy gravelly tones to his voice and turning his eyes into deep blue and green pools. ‘The transmitter’s not going to work, Noa. Lee said it was destroyed by the saltwater.’

  ‘Exactly!’

  ‘I’m not following.’

  ‘That’s what water does. Saltwater especially. It destroys electric circuits – short circuits them.’

  ‘So?’

  It’s difficult sometimes explaining things. When they’re so clear in your head and you don’t get why the other person isn’t keeping up, although you sort of appreciate it’s not totally their fault as you’ve left out loads of stages of reasoning.

  ‘So we use that. We short circuit the section of Fence.’

  ‘How?’

  I bit back a scream of exasperation.

  ‘What was in front of it? What did we have to get the bits of metal over?’

  Raf got it. He got it at last. And by the way his eyes went ping and his mouth went all hungry and wolfy, it can’t have been a totally rubbish plan.

  ‘The river. We divert the river. You little midnight genius.’ And then he grabbed me and kissed me until Ella, woken by the noise, yelled out, ‘Shut up, guys. Wait until you’ve got a room at least.’

  The timetable’s changed. No more chucking metal at the Fence. Lots more hunting and weaving instead. To dig you need spades. And if you don’t have any spades you need something to trade with people who might.

  I’ve skinned fifteen rabbits this morning. Turned beautiful furry animal after beautiful furry animal into a glistening body of muscle and sinew. Like the outside was just a lie. A cuddly toy. And the inside is the truth of existence – all raw and alien. Repetition doesn’t make it OK. It’s still horrible. Still makes my stomach contract and shiver. But you get used to it after a while. More used to it, anyway.