Fragments (21 page)

‘Do you need to go?’ she says coldly. I nod, feeling stupidly ashamed again. She even comes in with me and I have to clench my fists not to lose my temper about the way she’s enjoying me being a prisoner.

After, she slightly pushes my shoulder towards a room at the end of the corridor and I whirl round.

‘I’m doing what you want,’ I say in an icy voice. ‘So keep your hands off me.’

We meet eyes. Hers are so cold and hard, I feel loneliness like a hollow ache in my stomach. I can tell she’s dying to say something and then it bursts out of her.

‘Why didn’t you resist them?’ she hisses. ‘I wouldn’t let them do that to me.’

I drop my eyes and ignore her. Maybe she’s right. Maybe I was weak and pathetic and that’s how they managed to turn me into a CATS’ Eye. If Tilly had been in the situation I was in and had to make that choice, she would have taken prison. Well, bully for her.

‘You wouldn’t understand,’ I mumble and she snorts.

‘Clearly not,’ she says and then unlocks the door in front of us.

I follow her in. It was obviously a kid’s bedroom at one point because there’s a line of painted animals around the middle of the wall and some tatty remnants of what looks like football stickers around the doorframe. The room is bare apart from a mattress on the floor, covered in a couple of blankets. Lace curtains the colour of old nicotine hang limply from the windows and the room smells musty and damp.

‘Don’t even think about going anywhere,’ says Tilly. ‘The windows are barred. Make no mistake, we don’t want you here – but
we
will choose when you leave.’ She stands a little straighter and her gaze scours me. She tuts. ‘The truth is, you disgust me.’

She walks quickly out of the room and I hear the key clunk in the lock.

Join the queue,
I think.

I sit down on the lumpy mattress, which is old but clean. I hold my hands, which are untied now, in front of my face and stare at them. My nails are clean and tipped white after having spent a night in the riverside flat. But they came close to being covered in that man’s blood. I clench them into fists and press them into my eye sockets until crazy psychedelic colours swirl before me.

C
HAPTER
21

their people

I
’m lying on the mattress with a rough blanket pulled over me. Grey daylight seeping through the curtains gradually begins to fade. The rain patters against the windows. There are other noises inside the house too. Quick footsteps and the sound of the front door opening and closing. I think they are moving out of this place. I wonder if they will leave me in here. It’s hard to care all that much.

Curled in a ball, I try to ignore the smell from the blanket and after a while I start to shiver. I keep picturing how it felt when I lunged at Dan with the knife.

I wish I could make them understand that it wasn’t my fault. If the farmhouse hadn’t been bombed, I would have stayed and fought with Torch.

Should I have resisted what they did in Scotland? I’m sure I couldn’t have. But maybe I was just too tired to fight. All this goes round and round in my head and I start to feel angry again rather than afraid. Angry that Mum died. Angry that Zander turned me into a thief. Angry that Jax was taken from me. And angry that Cal has been taken from me again. Maybe some of my spark is still there inside. A weak spark, but there all the same.

After a while a woman I haven’t seen before unlocks the door and gives me a tray with a plate of beans on toast and a mug of stewed orange tea. She stares at me as though I’m something in a zoo before carefully placing the tray on the floor and then scurrying away again.

I’m hungry, despite everything. I eat every last scrap, gulping down the metallic-tasting tea to the very bottom of the cup and holding it upside down to catch the dregs. Feeling sleepy then, I pull the smelly blanket around me again and close my eyes.

When I was little and something had scared me, my mum would say, ‘Think of something happy, baby.’ I’d scrunch my eyes tightly closed and remember ice lollies in the park, or the time we went to the Notting Hill Carnival and I sat on her shoulders, feeling like I was queen of all I could see, as noise and smells and colours whirled around me.

But too much has happened since then. I can’t think of anything any more that would take me away from this. Maybe I stopped being capable of happiness a long time ago. Maybe I just don’t deserve any. Still, as I drift off to sleep, the scene that plays through my mind is when Cal held me. A few hours ago. A lifetime ago.

I wake up with a jolt. My heart thrums against my ribs as my eyes adjust to the dark room. The pale glow of a streetlight seeps through the badly fitting curtains, which splash stripes of shadow on the wall opposite. A car alarm is wah-wahing somewhere in the street. Maybe that’s what woke me.

My arms ache from where Dan pulled them behind me and I wince as I wriggle them in slow circles. A gentle knock at the door makes me stop, mid-movement.

I don’t answer but watch as the door opens, feeling a weird sense of dread. For just a second, I’m convinced someone has come in here to kill me. I pull my knees up to my chest in a defensive ball but I haven’t the stomach to fight any more.

‘Kyla, are you awake?’ says Cal quietly. I mumble an answer.

He sits down against the opposite wall, stretching his long legs out in front of him. The broken patch of light on the wall bathes half his face in shadow.

‘You all right?’

I don’t answer him. I literally have no idea how to talk to him after all that has happened.

He brings one knee up and rests his elbow on it, threading his fingers across his forehead. He’s watching me. I’m self-conscious: unsure what to do with my limbs and hands. I clear my throat and pull my knees in closer to my chest, protecting myself, although from what, I’m not sure. I look at a patch of wall just past his face. It’s easier than meeting the full beam of his gaze, dark though it is. It’s like he’s trying to work out who I am. I don’t like how this feels.

‘I understand about
hate
,’ he says after a few moments of thick silence. I glance at him, confused and surprised by his words. ‘It’s what keeps me going sometimes,’ he continues, ‘the idea that we might beat these people someday. After what they did to me . . .’ He pauses and I see him swallow. ‘You see, I was lost for a while. I was completely alone in the world. Then I met you and Jax and I felt like I belonged somewhere, even if it was temporary.’ He pauses. ‘And even if it meant working for that creep Zander.’

I don’t know what he wants me to say so I say nothing at all.

‘And then they killed Jax . . .’ He hesitates again. ‘See, that’s what I don’t understand,’ he says, his voice rising in volume. ‘How you could join them after that? Can you help me
understand
?’

My eyes brim over and a hot tear skates down my cheek.

‘So you don’t get it either,’ I say, and my voice is thick now. ‘You think I chose for any of it to happen? I didn’t choose to get brainwashed. Didn’t Nathan explain about the brainwashing? That I’m a victim in all this too?’

He makes a dismissive noise. Angry heat creeps up my neck and cheeks. ‘I can’t make you believe me, Cal. Although I could tell you that I ended up in that place because I’d been arrested for attacking a man who wanted to rape me.’ I hear him gasp at this and know I’ve hit home.

‘What happened?’ he says and I shake my head.

‘It doesn’t matter now. OK, I chose to go become a CATS’ Eye rather than go to prison. But when I was there, I was brainwashed. And
you
, Cal Conway,’ I jab a shaking finger in his direction, ‘are the one person in the bloody world who
should
understand!’

‘Why?’ he says.

Fury surges up at how stubborn and thick he’s being. I’m sick of feeling guilty. I couldn’t help what they did to me. They were too powerful. I couldn’t fight back.

‘Because it was like what happened to
you
, you moron!’ I yell. ‘You of all people should understand that you can’t fight back!’ A new batch of tears threatens and I swallow them back angrily. ‘And anyway,’ I say fiercely, ‘I’m sorry what happened to your parents but don’t try to pretend that Torch are innocent too!’

‘What do you mean?’ he says and has the nerve to look bewildered.

‘I
mean
,’ I say in a hiss, ‘that whatever Nathan says, I know plaster bombs were being stored in that house!’

For a moment he stares at me and then, when he speaks, his voice is as loud as mine has become. ‘Yes and that’s because a batch of government-approved devices had been stolen and kept there! Didn’t you listen to anything? About how Tom and Julia had intercepted a shipment of bombs? And how they were being kept until it could be decided what to do with them?’

A sudden sharp memory flashes into my mind. Me, staring into the fireplace, numb with grief as I thought about Jax. There were conversations going on around me. Something about bombs and a sense of celebration.

I drop my head into my hands and squeeze my eyes shut. I was so out of it after Jax died, I didn’t really take in what was happening that much. But I know he is right. Cal isn’t a liar. What you see is what you get with him. Unlike me.

‘The government are the ones behind all the bombings of these past few years,’ he says. ‘They have all those old terrorist groups in their pockets now. Spreading panic and fear is big business. Think about how much money has been spent on personal security and private streets.’ I can sense that these are Nathan’s words he is speaking now, like he’s reading a script. I think about Adem and Stevie from the nursery. How I helped them be caught. I squeeze my eyes shut. I’d like to scrub my skin with a wire brush until I bleed. And it still wouldn’t be enough . . .

‘So,’ I say pathetically, ‘why did they teach us how to disable them then?’

Cal rolls his eyes as though I’ve said something unbelievably dim. ‘You have to understand what you’re working with, don’t you? Plaster bombs can go wrong or go off when they shouldn’t. I expect they want their people to know how to handle them.’

Their people . . 
.

We sit in silence for several more minutes. I’ve never been so tired in my life. I wish I could close my eyes and make it all go away.

‘So what’s going to happen now?’ I say eventually. I keep my eyes on my hands, which twist in my lap.

‘This clearly isn’t a safe house any more,’ says Cal in an exhausted voice. ‘So everyone has cleared out. I’m to wait here with you till morning so everyone has got time to get away properly. Nathan says it’s lucky this happened now. It’s so-called Freedom Day the day after tomorrow. All security attention will be on that.’

I’d forgotten what time of year it was.

Although any group of people larger than ten has been banned from meeting in public places since 2018 or something, once a year there is a so-called Celebration of Freedom. It’s a total joke. There is usually some sort of demonstration that ends in violence and I can’t imagine why anyone would bother going. But people like a party, even in 2024. And this is what passes for one, I guess.

I want to say that I won’t tell anyone about where I’ve been. I want to tell him I’m sorry for who I have become. I’m sorry his parents got killed just as he had found them again. And I’m sorry we never really had a chance. But instead we sit in silence.

The occasional car light licks the wall opposite, illuminating Cal’s face. His eyes are closed. The distance between us is only a few metres but might as well be the size of a continent.

I think about what I’ve lost and what he has lost. How do you weigh pain and loss? Are we equal now? I lie down and squeeze my eyes shut, wishing the night was over.

A dog barks somewhere outside. An ambulance siren shrieks in the distance, on its way to some other drama.

Neither of us speaks as we wait for morning.

I dream about the stag again.

I can almost feel the crisp Highland air burning clean in my lungs. Its head is bent as it tugs at grass, chewing slowly. I’m full of light and happiness but know I somehow have to get near the stag. But although I keep running, I never get any closer. There’s no sound at all but the stag jerks and a gaping, bloody hole opens between its eyes. It seems to fall for ages, never landing on the heather under its hooves, which quickly turns from purple to a deep, sticky red . . .

My face is wet as I crank open sore eyes into a blaze of sunlight. Cal is lying nearer to me now, on his side with one arm bent weirdly over his head like he’s fighting something off. He gives a gentle little snore and my insides twist with longing for the days when I could tease him about that stuff. I cough loudly and his body spasms as he comes back to consciousness. For a second he looks like the younger Cal from before and then his expression clears and hardens.

‘Is it time to go yet?’ I say through dry lips. I reach for the mug of water I was given earlier and down it, even though it is a bit warm and stale now.

He looks at his watch. ‘Um, yeah. I reckon so,’ he says, getting up. He avoids my eye. Maybe he’s embarrassed that he fell asleep when he was meant to be keeping watch on me.

My back and neck ache from a night on the lumpy mattress and I close my eyes and stretch my arms up, then wiggle my head from side to side. When I open my eyes Cal is staring right at me. A fierce blush spreads across his cheeks and he clears his throat and goes to unlock the door. What’s that all about then?

‘Come on,’ he mumbles. I follow him out into the hallway. It’s obvious straight away that they’ve all gone. The only sign anyone was here is a single sock on the landing and an empty drinks bottle lying sideways on the stairs.

We go to the front door and step out into the street. A range of emotions come at me now. Relief at being out of that room. But uneasiness at what happens next. Am I supposed to just go and carry on with what I was doing before? How could I? Especially now that I’ve learned I really am ‘expendable’. I glance around to see if there are any cameras here. I can’t see any. If they decide to check up on me, they will think I dossed down in an empty house. And they’d have to know which trains I travelled on yesterday to check the footage there.