Resurgence (24 page)

She is rocking herself back and forth, wordlessly staring into space. I’m not sure she realises what has happened.

There is movement behind me where Max has pushed himself towards a wall. A large cut has opened above his eye, trickling blood across his face into his beard. He wipes a smear away with the back
of his hand as his gaze flickers from me to Knave, who is standing over him clutching a knife.

‘Put it away,’ I bark, as Knave looks across, confused. ‘I’m serious; you’re not going to kill him.’

Knave slips the weapon into his belt slowly.

I cross the room and crouch in front of Max. Using a spare cloth I had in case my nose bled again, I dab at his face, wiping away the blood. He winces but doesn’t stop me.

When I have cleared the worst of it and swabbed around the welt, I hand him the cloth. ‘I’m sorry about that.’

He cranes his neck to look around Knave at Rosemary.

‘Is she going to be all right?’ I ask.

‘She’s been like that since what happened to Paisley. I don’t think she’ll ever be all right.’ His voice cracks at the mention of his son.

‘We’re going to go, Max. I really don’t want to have to hurt you or your wife. I need you to tell me,
promise
me, that you’re not going to run out of the front
door and cry for help the second we leave.’

‘You’d take my word?’

‘Yes.’

He breathes in through his nose, which squeaks noisily from the damage of Knave’s fists. He turns to look at me. ‘Darling, the only way you’re gonna stop me doing that is by
putting me in the same hole you put my son in.’

I can tell by his fearless gaze that he is serious – he’d be happy either way. I push backwards, sitting on the floor, resting against the back of the sofa. Twinges shoot along the
bottom of my back as Max continues to watch me.

Hart is closest to the window. ‘Silver . . .’

Knave moves quickly, diving forward and putting a hand over Max’s mouth. Pietra does the same to Rosemary. Kingsmen’s footsteps are echoing noisily along the concrete outside. Max is
kicking and biting, doing everything he can to escape Knave’s grip. Rosemary sits still and I doubt she would scream even if Pietra released her. Opie joins Knave and together they restrain
Max, pinning him to the ground.

Hart presses himself to the window, straining to peer around the angle until eventually saying ‘clear’.

Opie and Knave relax their grip and Knave uncovers Max’s mouth one finger at a time. ‘Are you done?’ Knave asks.

Max breathes in and I think he is going to say something. Instead he draws back and spits in Knave’s face. Furious, Knave lunges forward, grabbing Max by the throat and pressing him to the
wall.

‘Stop,’ I say.

Max laughs, his top lip snarling. ‘Come on, big fella. Let’s do this.’

Knave has a hand on his knife but I scramble forward and pull him away and he wipes his face clear with his free hand.

‘We’ve got to go,’ Hart says, peering both ways out of the window.

I look from Max to Rosemary, wondering how I got us into this. Max would like nothing more than to be put out of the misery he is mired in. Rosemary is gone. Perhaps that is why I was drawn to
her in the first place? She is lost to grief, unable to move past the loss of Paisley. I haven’t had time to deal properly with all the death I have seen. Perhaps she is me in the future? Or
maybe I will feel like Max, desperate for someone to end it for me just so I don’t have to see all those lifeless faces whenever I close my eyes?

‘Silver, we’ve got to go . . .’ Hart repeats.

Knave takes his knife from his belt. ‘I’ll do it if you want?’

I feel the blade on my ankle. ‘I can do my own dirty work.’

He doesn’t say it but I can feel his thoughts. ‘Do it then.’

Max is practically begging me, eyes wide, lips curled. The blood is dribbling from the cut over his eye again. Everyone is watching me, urging me to make a decision, to do something.

‘Find something to tie them up with,’ I say, sighing.

For a moment, no one moves, but then Pietra, Jela and Opie all shift at the same time. The kitchen is so full of junk that there could be anything there.

Max is staring at me, daring me to meet his eyes. When I finally do, he only utters one word – devastating but true. ‘Coward.’

Opie returns with metal twine, tugging Max’s arms behind his back and tying his hands. It reminds me of Faith securing the Kingsmen in the house up the road. He asks if he should tie
Rosemary too.

‘Loosely,’ I say. Another cowardly cop-out.

Knave rips through a sweater that has been left on the floor and ties the sleeve around Max’s face, gagging him. I tell him to leave Rosemary, who is still rocking herself creepily back
and forth.

I stand awkwardly and have to lean on a nearby chair to support my weight. There are still jolts firing through the muscles below my waist.

‘Are you okay?’ Opie asks.

‘Fine. Let’s go.’

I point everyone towards the backyard, watching them leave one at a time until I am the only one left. I kneel next to Max and tell him I am sorry. I can see in his face it means nothing.
Rosemary is staring at the wooden train on the floor next to her. She has finally stopped rocking but her eyes are blinking rapidly. ‘Choo-choo,’ she says chirpily without looking up. I
turn and head into the garden, feeling the weight of Max’s gaze and Rosemary’s madness far heavier than any physical injury.

* * *

Outside, the others have formed an uncomfortable semi-circle. No one seems able to meet the others’ eyes. Their breaths twist into each other’s and drift airily into
the night sky. It is cold and the hairs are standing up on my arms.

‘I fell,’ I say, explaining why I am hunched over. Not even Opie moves. None of us is proud of what we have done.

I check my thinkwatch. It is hours since we left the towers. Vez and everyone else underneath the church would have expected us to have teleported back a long time ago. I wonder if Imrin has
stayed up waiting for us. For me. What would he have said about the way we have left Max and Rosemary?

I reach into my back pocket for the teleport box and feel a sinking sensation. I was so concerned with not being able to feel my feet that it didn’t occur to me that the fall hadn’t
broken simply me.

Everyone gasps together as I pull out the crumpled metal box, sending a clatter of shattered parts cascading to the ground.

Nobody bothers to ask if I can fix it. If I had the tools on me, I would still need parts that are hard to find, even in the mass of broken technology that litters the gully.
Here we could scavenge for weeks and not find half of what I need.

And so we walk.

Opie, Hart and Knave take it in turns to give me a piggyback until we reach the woods on the outskirts of Middle England. When we were here before, we stayed in the house on the fringe of these
abandoned streets, but that holds memories of two dead Kingsmen. Nobody wants to walk through the night but we have none of our blankets or any other supplies. Opie looks for undergrowth that we
can wedge ourselves into, but no amount of leaves and branches can prevent the cold from searing through me. Knave and Opie cradle me between them, trying to use their bodies to warm me, but I
still shiver in the cold. Half an hour after we start to settle, a helicopter blazes overhead, blades rattling like thunder. A spotlight zips from side to side, occasionally flashing across the
spot where we are hiding, but no Kingsmen come.

Pietra whispers that this probably means Max has freed himself but I have no idea if that is a good thing. He could be punished for allowing us to go.

It is not long until the chop-chop-chop drifts away and then stops completely. Even the siren from the plaza is silenced, leaving us with the familiar soundtrack of the woods for company. Slowly
Opie’s breathing deepens, followed by Knave’s. Sleep, equally my friend and enemy, is a foe once more. I lie awake, listening to the breeze and the rustle of squirrels, hedgehogs and
whatever else lives here.

The night is long as the events of the past few days run through my head over and over. I remember glaring into the Minister Prime’s eyes, imploring him to pull the trigger. I wonder if my
eyes were pleading in the same way Max’s were. At the time I didn’t think I meant it but perhaps I did?

I begin counting, seeing how high I can get before sleep finally takes me, but it never does. Eventually the sun starts to creep above the horizon. Through the trees, I can see the outline of
the towers. They are as impressive as ever but the shadow they cast stretches far beyond anything physical.

Opie awakens with a yawn and a grim look of realisation at where we are. He smiles thinly but is unable to disguise his true feelings. He wraps his arms around me, rubbing my skin.
‘You’re freezing,’ he whispers.

‘I know.’

‘How did you sleep?’

‘Perfectly.’

Soon the others wake too, a huddle of stretching, quivering limbs, ruffled hair and unending yawns.

The day is long, a mixture of piggybacks and jagged shooting pains. It is only as the sun begins to dip that I am able to walk any distance at all. Pietra is exhausted and unable to stop herself
falling behind, so Hart ends up carrying her, despite her protests that she is fine. We stop constantly, occasionally because we spot Kingsmen, but mainly because we are too tired to continue. Jela
doesn’t say a word the entire day but holds the crossbow tightly in her hand in case she needs it.

Jela, Pietra, Hart and myself have walked this route before – but in the opposite direction. Some of the landscape seems familiar but we use the sun for guidance, mainly heading south but
occasionally drifting east when we spot landmarks we recognise.

We spend the first night in an abandoned house on the edge of a village and the second in a farmhouse long since left to rot. Compared to the woods, they offer some degree of warmth – and
there are even old bales of straw in the barn – but I still struggle to sleep. Even when I do, it is only for minutes here and there, rather than anything that feels satisfying.

As the others sleep in between the pockets of hay, I sit in the corner, eyes closed as a gentle patter of rain begins. Soon, water is dripping through the roof, waking the others. We sit looking
at each other, hoping it will stop and waiting for some sort of inspiration.

‘At the pace we’re going, we’re a day away from the church,’ Knave says, but that is still another day on our feet in the cold.

Pietra has the idea of using the straw to pad ourselves, so we stuff bundles into our clothes. Instantly I feel warmer, which helps to mask the stabbing in my thighs and back.

After two hours of listening to the rain, we decide we are going to have to face it. Within a couple of minutes of venturing outside, I am drenched through, water gushing over my face,
plastering my hair to my skin and my top to my back. We walk for hours, no one speaking under the onslaught from above. Perhaps predictably, we don’t see a soul on the streets or in the
fields. The torrent provides the safest journey we could hope for, while at the same time trying to wash us away like a stain that cannot be removed from the earth.

Knave’s hopes of being one day away from the church are way off the mark as we cannot move quickly enough through the storm. As soon as the sun starts to set, we shelter under the remnants
of a road bridge. I am so sodden that I can barely tell we are under cover. It feels as if the water has seeped through my clothes, through the straw and into my skin. Only Pietra can sleep, curled
across Hart’s lap as he strokes her hair tenderly.

When the rain finally slows to a tinkle, Knave speaks. ‘You’d think we failed . . .’

He’s right; we achieved everything we tried to. I spoke to the nation and have hopefully stopped towns and villages from outwardly rebelling, preventing people from getting themselves
killed. We even got ourselves out of the tower through Jela’s brilliance, despite being trapped in a room with blocked stairs and no lift. The teleporter may be broken but I could repair it
or use it as a template to create another if I can find the parts. I will heal too. I’ve had worse injuries.

Yet somehow, it still feels like a defeat. I know Paisley’s death was an accident the same way that I know it wasn’t my fault, not really. None of that stops me remembering the way
the moonlight made Rosemary’s eyes seem entirely white. A milky mess of her own doing that was preferable to seeing the shoeprints embedded in her dead son’s flesh. I suspect she can
still see them, indelibly imprinted on her mind.

‘You wait,’ Knave adds. ‘When we get back to the church tomorrow, you’ll see how well this has gone. Vez will be on top of everything. The King will have been on screen
every night trying to turn things around, but it will be too late. Everyone will be doing as you said, sitting tight, getting angry, waiting for the call.’

He might be right but it does little to change our mood. The rain, so wondrous in my dreams of the woods outside Martindale, is now a melancholic drumbeat signalling a victory that feels like a
loss.

By sunrise, the rain has finally stopped. We follow the route of the broken, crumbling road until Knave tells us he knows where we are. As the sun scorches high in the sky, a total contrast to
the previous day, we skirt around the edges of a town to avoid the Kingsmen, so obvious in their borodron uniforms. We stop to dump the straw, now itchy and too hot.

‘Under an hour,’ Knave says, much to everyone’s relief. Most of the pain in my back has gone but my legs are exhausted. Hart hoists Pietra onto his back, saying he will carry
her the rest of the way.

It feels as if my thinkwatch is lying, the time as unmoving as the orange face. Knave is correct, but each minute seems like ten until finally we reach the fields that overlook the church. I can
see the woods to the east where we first approached after escaping Windsor. I’m not even sure how long ago that was.

Knave starts to speed up, but the closer we get, the more it becomes apparent something isn’t right. At least three thin plumes of smoke are rising into the air, twisting upwards until
they become one. We can smell the burning from half a field away.