‘No!’ Sheila shouted out suddenly. ‘No, he’s lying. He’s evil. He’s not on our side. He’s not. He can’t be . . .’
‘Hush,’ Pip said softly. ‘Sheila, Derek is telling the truth.’
‘Then why didn’t he help us?’ Anna asked accusingly. ‘Why did he lock me up? Why did he let Sheila . . . let the Surpluses . . . How could he?’
‘Yes,’ Jude said suspiciously. ‘How could he?’
Pip moved towards him and put his hand on his shoulder. ‘Jude, you must understand. Derek had to be closer to Richard Pincent than anyone. He had to be beyond suspicion. We couldn’t risk him being discovered, even if it meant suffering. Even if it meant that we lost people.’
‘Derek told you about Unit X,’ Peter said suddenly. ‘He’s the reason I went in. He helped us save Sheila.’
Pip nodded. ‘He alerted me to many things, but we had to ensure the intelligence appeared to come from other sources,’ he said.
‘All this time?’ Richard gasped. ‘All this time you’ve been working for him?’
‘Albert told me what would happen. He predicted everything,’ Derek said quietly. ‘Even this. He knew everything would end, unless . . . unless –’
‘Unless what?’ Hillary interjected.
‘Unless we ensured there were children,’ Pip said quietly. ‘Unless we protected the eternal cycle of life. Birth and death, as it has always been. That is what the ring symbolises, Richard. Not the formula to Longevity. It is Nature’s eternity, the right way to live forever. Through our children, through our children’s children. Through Peter, Jude, Molly and Ben, the Surpluses around the world.’
Jude tried to swallow but found he couldn’t – a huge lump had appeared in his throat. Instead he turned to Pip desperately. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I doubted you. I thought you . . . When I saw you with Derek I thought you were on his side. I thought . . .’
‘You were right to doubt me,’ Pip said gently. ‘You are a leader, Jude, and a leader can never trust blindly. You have helped me more than I can say. I am . . .’ He looked down. ‘I am very proud of you, Jude.’
Jude bit his lip. ‘No,’ he said miserably. ‘I let you down.’
‘You could never let me down,’ Pip said, his voice choking slightly. Then he took a deep breath. ‘I have been so hard on you, Jude. I have lied to you, I have kept the truth from you. From all of you. But I only did what I did to protect you. To protect the circle of life. Now I have done what I needed to do; now I have paid the price for what I did all those years ago. It is time for you now. You are a leader, Jude. It is time to lead. You must inspire, you must plan, you must make the world a better place. Peter, you are a fighter. A protector.’
‘No,’ Peter said, shooting a look at Anna. ‘No, Pip. I’m a father. That’s what I should have been instead of coming to London. I’m not a fighter. Not any more.’
‘Yes you are,’ Anna said, her voice small but firm. ‘You are a fighter, Peter. You’re a father too, but you can be both. The children and I – we’re not the only ones who need you.’
Peter looked at her for a few moments then nodded gratefully, as he realised that she had forgiven him, that she understood.
‘Anna’s right – you must be all these things,’ Pip said gently. ‘Fight for the future. Protect those who need protection. Be a father, Peter – to your children, to your future children, to others who have no parents of their own. And Anna?’ Anna looked up, her eyes wide but resolute. ‘You, Anna, must be the mother of all. You need to be the strongest of all, because you will need to lead and protect and fight. You must negotiate, you must convince, you must provide. And you must look after Sheila.’
‘I’ll look after Sheila,’ Jude said tightly, but Sheila shook her head.
‘I can look after myself,’ she said calmly. She walked towards Pip, and her eyes stared into his unwaveringly. ‘I don’t need parents any more,’ she said, her voice catching slightly. ‘I don’t need protectors. I’m going to be useful, Pip. I’ll protect the Surpluses. I’ll help.’
‘Yes, you will,’ Pip said, smiling gently. ‘You are stronger than you know, Sheila, and I wish I could be here to watch you discover that strength.’
‘You can,’ Jude said uncertainly. ‘You will.’
But before Pip could reply, Richard staggered up from his chair. ‘Enough of these lies,’ he seethed. ‘Hillary, do something. Stop these lies. Guard, take them. Kill them all . . .’
Hillary looked at him with distaste. ‘Guard,’ she said, ‘call for someone to take him away. I have heard enough of his lies. Quite enough.’
The guard nodded and seconds later, two masked men arrived. They grabbed Richard by the arms and legs and carried him out of the room.
‘No!’ Richard screamed as he was dragged down the corridor. ‘No! Water! I just need water . . .’
Seconds later the screaming could no longer be heard and the room was filled with silence.
Hillary looked around glassy-eyed, then focused on Richard’s scientist who was standing next to the door, his face as white as his lab coat.
‘So there is no contamination? There’s a virus? It can’t be cured?’ she asked.
He shook his head. ‘No. Perhaps the symptoms can be alleviated with old medicine, but we’ve carried out hundreds of autopsies and we can’t . . .’ He trailed off, looking slightly ill. ‘No,’ he whispered. ‘It can’t be cured.’
‘And it affects everyone?’
‘Not everyone,’ Pip said gravely. ‘Not Opt Outs. Not Surpluses. Not those whose immune systems have been allowed to function.’
Hillary nodded slowly. ‘Then we need to plan,’ she said, only her shaking hands betraying her emotion. ‘We must maintain order. We must organise.’ She studied Pip carefully. ‘How long do we have?’ she asked eventually.
‘Weeks. Months at most,’ Pip said. ‘We need to protect those who will survive. That is paramount.’
‘Of course.’ Hillary nodded. ‘And we need to cope with the bodies . . . logistically, I mean. We have no graves. No –’
Derek moved forward. ‘We’ve already drawn up plans for civil management too. We don’t want riots. We don’t want mass hysteria. But things are going to get messy. There will be a shortage of key workers, a shortage of police, of farmers, of gravediggers. There might be terrorist attacks from abroad, war even if people get really desperate.’
Hillary was nodding, as though on autopilot. ‘You’re talking as if the world is coming to an end,’ she managed to say.
‘Not an end, a new beginning,’ Pip said gently. ‘A beginning without Longevity. A beginning that has life because it also has death. Hillary, people have been sick for a long time now, not from disease but from their half-lives – not enough food, not enough energy, not enough things to fill the day. It’s time for Longevity to end. It’s time to end the sickness.’
Hillary nodded vaguely. ‘The children – they must be taught. They have to understand so much if they are to . . .’ She trailed off, frowning, as though her brain was trying to process too much information at once. ‘The young must be taught. And quickly,’ she said. Then she fell back against a chair, clutching it, her white knuckles shaking.
‘Hillary,’ Pip said, moving towards her and putting a hand on her shoulder. ‘They understand more than you know. How to lead, how to provide for themselves, how to fight for what’s right, for what they believe in.’
He looked over at Jude, at Peter, at Anna and Sheila. ‘I could not be prouder of you,’ he said, his voice catching. ‘Of all of you. Jude, Sheila, Anna – you are all the parents of the new world. A new chance to get things right. Or at least to do things better. We have made so many mistakes, ruined so much. You are our hope.’
‘We? You’re talking like you won’t be around to help,’ Jude said awkwardly.
Albert smiled, his blue eyes twinkling. ‘Exactly right, Jude, as always,’ he said. ‘You know, I’ve waited for this moment for a very long time,’ he said.
‘As soon as I knew the end was near, I stopped taking my Longevity. It was a release. You mustn’t try to hold on to things that are past their sell-by date. None of us should, including me. Now I just need to say goodbye to you, to make sure you have all you need for the brave new world ahead of you. I have days, perhaps, but no more.’
‘But . . . but we need you. The Underground needs you,’ Jude said, fighting back his tears.
‘No.’ Pip shook his head. ‘The Underground is over. There is no need for it any more. It has served its purpose. There is a new world to build, Jude, and I know that you are capable of building it.’ He smiled gently. ‘The truth is, I’m looking forward to a very long sleep. The longest.’
‘But . . .’ Peter said, shaking his head. ‘You can’t go. You can’t.’
‘We all go eventually,’ Pip said softly. ‘And others come in our wake. I am just a leaf, Peter. Just a leaf falling from the tree so that a new bud may grow. Look after the buds, won’t you? And each other. I shall miss you.’
‘And we’ll miss you,’ Jude said, his voice full of emotion. ‘But you can depend on us. We’ll be the future, Pip. We’ll do it together.’ He reached out to Sheila and took her hand.
‘Together.’ She nodded tentatively.
‘Together,’ Peter agreed, holding out his arm to Anna.
‘Together,’ she said.
‘’Gether,’ Ben said, looking up at her uncertainly. ‘Home now? Go home?’
‘This is your home, young man,’ Pip said, his eyes twinkling again. ‘The whole world is.’
.
Epilogue
14 MARCH, AF 15
Molly lay back in her chair, letting the sun warm her face for just a few minutes more. It was early afternoon and she knew she shouldn’t be wasting good daylight, but it was too delicious, too blissful just lying there, suspended in time.
‘Molly?’ She glanced up to see Albert, her younger brother, looking at her curiously.
‘Yeah, I’m coming. I was just . . .’ She trailed off as she saw him grin, his eyes twinkling, and realised that he wasn’t annoyed with her, wasn’t going to tell.
‘I know exactly what you were doing,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Just don’t let Dad catch you.’
She nodded, and pulled herself off the chair wearily.
‘He’s fixed the tractor,’ Albert continued.
Molly’s eyes lit up. The tractor had been out of action for days now, resulting in aching limbs and backs for all of them. ‘He did? How?’
Albert shrugged and put his hands in his pockets. ‘Dunno. Ben was helping him. Engine was dirty or something.’
Molly rolled her eyes. ‘Dirty?’ It never ceased to amaze her that her brother showed so little interest in anything of a technical nature. ‘Do you know how an engine actually works, Alby?’
‘No, and I don’t want to,’ he said, winking. Molly laughed and followed him down the dirt track towards the fields where they spent their afternoons every day. Mornings were for learning – her mother was always clear about that. Words and sums and science and questions were what mattered in Mum’s eyes. ‘You have to question everything,’ she’d say. ‘You have to always ask why, and if you don’t understand the answer, you ask again.’
So Molly did. She asked questions all the time, demanding to know how things worked and why, discovering what happened when you added one thing to another, finding out how to make things and how to break them. She also asked about the past. She’d been too little to remember the Old World much – all she remembered was heated conversations and moving around a lot and staying inside because ‘the hoodlums’ were smashing up the high street and pillaging. She remembered her father disappearing for what felt like years to join the New Underground Army to patrol the streets and divide things up fairly, to Manage the Handover. She still wasn’t sure what the Handover was, but she knew that what was being handed over was valuable and that the people who had it didn’t want to give it away.
Her parents didn’t talk about the Handover much – they said it was too recent, that the New Civilisation was still too fragile. But they answered Molly’s questions about the Old World happily enough. What was it like to have shops instead of having to produce your own food? Was there really a time when there were too many people? What was wrong with Mrs Baker up the road, and where had Mr Baker gone?
The shops were OK, her mother told her, but you weren’t always free to buy what you wanted and sometimes things were so expensive you couldn’t get them even if you were allowed. That led to another question about money, which sounded very exotic and exciting to Molly, but her mother assured her it never helped anyone much.
Yes, the world was indeed too full once, her mother told her, and no children were allowed at all because no one died. Molly used to love and hate that story in equal measure. It had been her favourite bedtime tale when she’d been little – a world with no children, with Catchers and Surplus Halls and no brothers to play with, no space to play in. They had all the space in the world now, her mother would tell her. They were very lucky, even if it was cold sometimes and there weren’t many other children to play with. They had each other and that was more important than anything. They had the future too.
As for Mrs Baker, her mother told her that she was one of the Old Legals. There weren’t many of them left because most had died a long time ago from the Virus, but some had survived – no one really knew why. Now she was very, very old and she couldn’t do much more than sit her time out, which was why they had to look after her and Molly was sent round every day to read to her, to make things more bearable until the end came. Mr Baker had already gone to the Other Side. It was good to go there, her mother told her, when it was your time. No one should outstay their welcome.
‘Come on, slowcoach, or you’ll have no supper before bed.’
Molly looked at Albert and raised an eyebrow. Her parents always threatened that when one of them was naughty, but they never went through with it. Mum used to be hungry a lot when she was little, Dad had told Molly once. That was why she never let them go without a meal. That was why the sight of protruding bones sent her racing into the kitchen to bake bread. Uncle Ben used to tease her sometimes, pretending to faint from hunger when he didn’t like the meal she’d made, usually in the winter when stocks were running low and they were eating porridge for the fifth time in a week. But he never teased her for long because none of them could bear to see her sad.
‘There you are.’ Dad was waiting for them in the field and Ben was in the tractor, a dot in the distance, the reassuring hum of the machine just audible. Every time it broke Dad would say that was it – no more tractor. He would say it was a relief because it guzzled more energy than both his children put together, but somehow they always got it working again. Dad said that one day there wouldn’t be any more petrol and then they’d have to do the work by hand. ‘Alby, chickens. They need a run out. And Molly, clean out the pigs. OK?’
They looked at each other, Albert evidently triumphant at the division of labour. ‘See ya! Wouldn’t want to be ya!’ he whispered under his breath as he disappeared towards the chicken coop.
‘Pigs?’ Molly screwed up her face in distaste. ‘Really?’
Her father nodded sternly. ‘Really,’ he said, tousling her hair. ‘Go on.’
She sighed and wandered over to the pigsty. It was large enough for fifty pigs, but they only had twenty. Dad had told her that they used to keep a hundred pigs, all penned together. That was what Molly thought the world must have been like before – people all squashed up with no space to move. Dad said that people had used too much energy and the world had been heating up, but Molly thought it was just that they didn’t have enough room. Sometimes, when they were younger, Alby used to sleep in her bed when he was scared, and she always ended up throwing off the blankets.
Quickly she set about sweeping the sty, filling the troughs with food and water. Then she played with the piglets for a few minutes, being careful not to an
tagonise their mother. Lastly, looking around to check that no one could see her, she dug out her notebook. She carried her notebook everywhere – it had been a fourteenth birthday present from her mother. In it, she would record interesting events such as the monthly town debates where all the grown-ups would get together and argue about things like land division and use of old stock and whether wells were the property of the community or the landowner. Once you were fourteen you were encouraged to go to the debates and learn about how things worked, and while Ben dismissed them as boring Molly like to write down everything she heard and think about it later. She also drew pictures in her notebook and listed her hopes, her fears, her desires and her views on other people.
She flicked over the pages, stopping every so often to reread a passage she was particularly proud of, like the one on Stock. Her parents had recently told her all about Stock warehouses, where things from before were kept, like petrol and watches and tissues and books. They’d been put there by the Authorities just before the Handover. You had to buy the things from the town leader, paying with food or Community Work, but her parents said one day the warehouses would be empty because no one could make those things any more. They said Uncle Jude was trying to start a training programme but no one wanted to take part. They said that the grown-ups didn’t like the idea of training because it brought back bad memories of how things used to be.
She continued turning the pages until she got to her favourite picture. It was a rubbing and her mother had taught her how to do it, taking an object and putting it under the paper and rubbing the other side with a pen so that the object was revealed like a picture. She’d tried it with a few things, none of which had looked very pretty, and then her dad had given her his ring and let her rub the engraving. It was beautiful – a flower, so delicate, so beautifully drawn.
The picture was very important, Dad had told her – it represented Renewal, which meant new replacing old. Like the green leaves that come through in the spring, he’d said, and the old ones falling to the ground. Molly had nodded sagely when he’d told her, but secretly she’d thought he was wrong. It didn’t represent Renewal – it represented something else, something she didn’t understand yet but would figure out one day, she was sure. Because what her father didn’t seem to have noticed was that the picture was made out of letters and symbols, like the ones she’d learnt about in science. She’d copied them out on the following page and stared at them until her eyes had hurt, but for now they didn’t want her to know what they meant. She’d find out, though. That was what science was all about – that was what Great-great-grandpa Albert had said in his letter to her. The true scientist lets truth emerge.