The Year of the Flood

  "I need to put on my clothes," I said.

  "Fine," said Lucerne. "Ten minutes." She left the cubicle.

  "What'll we do?" I whispered to Amanda as I started to dress.

  "I don't know," Amanda whispered back. "Once you're in there she'll never let you out. Those Compounds are like castles, they're like jails. She won't ever let you see me. She hates me."

  "I don't care what she thinks," I whispered. "I'll get out somehow."

  "My phone," Amanda whispered. "Take it with you. You can phone me."

  "I'll get you in somehow," I said. By this time I was crying silently. I slipped her purple phone into my pocket.

  "Hurry up, Ren," said Lucerne.

  "I'll call you!" I whispered. "My dad will buy you an identity!"

  "Sure he will," said Amanda softly. "Don't take shit, okay?"

  In the main room, Lucerne was moving fast. She dumped out the sickly looking tomato plant she'd been growing on the windowsill. Underneath the soil there was a plastic bag full of money. She must've been ripping it off, from selling stuff at the Tree of Life -- the soap, the vinegar, the macrame, the quilts. Money was old-fashioned, but people still used it for small things and the Gardeners wouldn't take virtual money because they didn't allow computers. So she'd been stashing away her escape money. She hadn't been such a doormat as I'd thought.

  Then she took the kitchen shears and cut off her long hair, straight across at neck level. The cutting made a Velcro sound -- scratchy and dry. She left the pile of hair in the middle of the dining-room table.

  Then she took me by the arm and hauled me out of our place and down the stairs. She never went out at night because of the drunks and druggies on the street corners, and the pleebrat gangs and muggers. But right then she was white-hot with anger and filled with crackling energy: people on the street cleared out of our path as if we were contagious, and even the Asian Fusions and the Blackened Redfish left us alone.

  It took us hours to get through the Sinkhole and the Sewage Lagoon, and then the richer pleebs. As we went along, the houses and buildings and hotels got newer looking, and the streets emptier of people. In Big Box we got a solarcab: we drove through Golfgreens and then past a big open space, and finally right up to the gates of the HelthWyzer Compound. It was so long since I'd seen that place it was like one of those dreams, where you don't recognize anything, yet also you do. I felt a little sick, but that might have been excitement.

  Before we got into the cab, Lucerne had mussed up my hair and smeared dirt on her own face, and torn part of her dress. "Why'd you do that?" I said. But she didn't answer.

  There were two guards at the HelthWyzer gateway, behind the little window. "Identities?" they said.

  "We don't have any," said Lucerne. "They were stolen. We were forcibly abducted." She looked behind her, as if she was afraid someone was following us. "Please -- you have to let us in, right away! My husband -- he's in Nanobioforms. He'll tell you who I am." She started to cry.

  One of them reached for the phone, pushed a button. "Frank," he said. "Main gate. Lady here says she's your wife."

  "We'll need some cheek swabs, ma'am, for the communicables," said the second one. "Then you can wait in the holding room, pending bioform clearance and verification. Someone will be with you soon."

  In the holding room we sat on a black vinyl sofa. It was five in the morning. Lucerne picked up a magazine -- NooSkins, it said on the cover. Why Live With Imperfection? She riffled through it.

  "Were we forcibly abducted?" I asked her.

  "Oh, my darling," she said. "You don't remember! You were too young! I didn't want to tell you -- I didn't want you to be frightened! They might have done something terrible to you!" Then she began to cry again, harder. By the time the CorpSeMan in the biosuit walked in, her face was all streaky.

  39

  Be careful what you wish for, old Pilar used to say. I was back at the HelthWyzer Compound and I was reunited with my father, just as I used to wish long ago. But nothing felt right. All that faux marble, and the reproduction antique furniture, and the carpets in our house -- none of it seemed real. It smelled funny too -- like disinfectant. I missed the leafy smells, of the Gardeners, the cooking smells, even the sharp vinegar tang; even the violet biolets.

  My father -- Frank -- hadn't changed my room. But the four-poster bed and the pink curtains looked shrunken. It also looked too young for me. There were the plush animals I'd once loved so much, but their glass eyes looked dead. I stuffed them into the back of my closet so they wouldn't be able to look through me as if I was a shadow.

  The first night, Lucerne ran a bath for me with fake-flower bath essence in it. The big white tub and the white fluffy towels made me feel dirty, and also stinky. I stank like earth -- compost earth, before it's finished. That sour odour.

  Also my skin was blue: it was the dye from the Gardener clothes. I'd never really noticed it because the showers at the Gardeners were so brief, and there weren't any mirrors. I hadn't noticed, either, how hairy I'd become, and that was more of a shock than my blue skin. I rubbed and rubbed at the blue: it wouldn't come off. I looked at my toes, where they stuck up out of the bath water. The toenails looked like claws.

  "Let's put some polish on those," Lucerne said two days later, when she saw my feet in flip-flops. She was acting as if none of it had ever happened -- not the Gardeners, not Amanda, and especially not Zeb. She was wearing crisp linen suits, she'd had her hair styled and streaked. She'd already had her own toes done -- she'd wasted no time. "Look at all these colours I bought for you! Green, purple, frosted orange, and I got you some sparkly ones ..." But I was angry with her, and I turned away. She was such a liar.

  All those years I'd kept an outline of my father in my head, like a chalk line enclosing a father-shaped space. When I was little, I'd coloured it in often enough. But those colours had been too bright, and the outline had been too large: Frank was shorter, greyer, balder, and more confused-looking than what I'd had in mind.

  Before he'd come to the HelthWyzer gatehouse to identify us, I'd thought he'd be overjoyed to find that we were safe and sound and not dead after all. But when he saw me, his face fell. Now I realize that he'd last known me when I was a small girl, so I was bigger than he expected, and probably bigger than he wanted. I was also shabbier -- despite the drab Gardener clothes, I must have looked like one of the pleebrats he might have seen running around if he'd ever even been to the Sinkhole or the Sewage Lagoon. Maybe he was afraid I was going to pick his pockets or grab his shoes. He approached me as if I might bite, and put his arms awkwardly around me. He smelled of complex chemicals -- the kind of chemicals used for cleaning off sticky things, like glue. A smell that could burn right down into your lungs.

  On that first night I slept for twelve hours, and when I woke up I found that Lucerne had taken away my Gardener clothes and burnt them. Luckily I'd hidden Amanda's purple phone inside the plush tiger in my closet -- I'd cut open the stomach. So the phone didn't get burnt.

  I missed the smell of my own skin, which had lost its salty flavour and was now soapy and perfumy. I thought about what Zeb used to say about mice -- if you take them out of the mouse nest for a while and then put them back, the other mice will tear them apart. If I went back to the Gardeners with my fake-flower smell, would they tear me apart?

  Lucerne took me to the HelthWyzer In-clinic so I could be checked for head lice and worms, and for being interfered with. That meant a couple of fingers up you, front and back. "Oh my goodness," the doctor said when he saw my blue skin. "Are these bruises, dear?"

  "No," I said. "It's dye."

  "Oh," he said. "They made you dye yourself?"

  "It's in the clothes," I said.

  "I see," he said. Then he made an appointment for me with the In-clinic psychiatrist, who had experience with people who'd been snatched by cults. My mother would have to be at those appointments as well.

  Which was how I found out what Lucerne was telling them. We'd been grabbe
d off the street while in SolarSpace doing some boutique shopping, but she couldn't say exactly where we'd been taken because she'd never been allowed to know. She said it wasn't the fault of the cult itself -- it was one of the male members who'd been obsessed with her and wanted her for his personal sex slave, and had taken away her shoes to keep her captive. This was supposed to be Zeb, though she said she didn't know his name. I'd been too young to realize what was going on, she said, but I'd been a hostage -- she'd had to do the bidding of this madman, service his every twisted whim, it was revolting the things he'd made her do -- or my life would have been in danger. But she'd finally been able to share her plight with one of the other cult members -- a sort of nun. She must have meant Toby. It was this woman who'd helped her to escape -- brought her shoes, given her money, lured the madman away so Lucerne could make a dash for freedom.

  It was no use asking me anything, she said. The cult members had been nice to me, and anyway they'd been duped. She'd been the only one who'd known the truth: it was a burden she'd had to carry alone. What woman who loved her child as much as she loved me wouldn't have done the same?

  Before our psychiatry sessions, she'd squeeze my shoulder and say, "Amanda's back there. Keep that in mind." Meaning that if I told anyone she'd been lying her hair off she'd suddenly remember where she'd been imprisoned, and the CorpSeCorps would go in there with their sprayguns, and who knew what might happen? Bystanders got killed a lot in spraygun attacks. It couldn't be helped, said the CorpSeCorps. It was in the interests of public order.

  For weeks Lucerne hovered around to make sure I wouldn't try to run away or else rat on her. But at last I got a chance to take out Amanda's purple phone and call. Amanda had texted me with the number of the new phone she'd lifted, so I'd know where to reach her -- she thought ahead about everything. I sat inside my closet to make the call. It had a light inside, like all the closets in the house. The closet itself was as big as my former sleeping cubicle.

  Amanda answered right away. There she was on the screen, looking the same as ever. I longed to be back at the Gardeners.

  "I really miss you," I said. "I'm running away as soon as I can." But I didn't know when that would be, I said, because Lucerne was keeping my identity locked in a drawer, and I wouldn't be allowed past the gatehouse without it.

  "Can't you trade?" said Amanda. "With the guards?"

  "No," I said. "I don't think so. It's different here."

  "Oh. What happened to your hair?"

  "Lucerne made me cut it."

  "It looks okay," said Amanda. Then she said, "They found Burt dumped in the vacant lot, out behind Scales. He had freezer burns." "He'd been in a freezer?"

  "What was left. There were parts missing -- liver, kidneys, heart. Zeb says the mobs will sell the parts, then keep the rest in the freezer until they need to send a message."

  "Ren! Where are you?" It was Lucerne, in my room.

  "I have to go," I whispered. I tucked the phone back into the tiger. "In here," I said. My teeth were chattering. Freezers were so cold.

  "What are you doing in the closet, darling?" said Lucerne. "Come and have some lunch! You'll feel better soon!" She sounded chirpy: the crazier and more disturbed I acted, the better it was for her, because the less anyone would believe me if I told on her.

  Her story was that I'd been traumatized by being stuck in among the warped, brainwashing cult folk. I had no way of proving her wrong. Anyway maybe I had been traumatized: I had nothing to compare myself with.

  40

  Once I'd adjusted enough -- adjusted was the word they used, as if I was a bra strap -- Lucerne said I had to go to school because it was bad for me to be moping around the house: I needed to get out and make a whole new life for myself, as she was doing. It was a risk for her -- I was a walking cluster bomb, the truth about her might come popping out of my mouth at any time. But she knew I was judging her silently, and that annoyed her, so she really wanted me elsewhere.

  Frank seemed to have believed her story, though he didn't seem to care about it one way or the other. I could see now why Lucerne had run off with Zeb: at least Zeb had noticed her. And he'd noticed me, as well, whereas Frank treated me like a window: he never looked at me, only through me.

  Sometimes I dreamed about Zeb. He'd be wearing a bear suit, and the fur would unzip down the middle like a pyjama bag, and Zeb would step out. He'd smell comforting, in the dream -- like rained-on grass, and cinnamon, and the salty, vinegary, singed-leaf smell of the Gardeners.

  The school was called HelthWyzer High. On the first day I put on one of the new outfits that Lucerne had picked out for me. It was pink and lemon yellow -- colours the Gardeners never would have allowed because they'd show the dirt and waste the soap.

  My new clothes felt like a disguise. I couldn't get used to how tight they were compared to my old loose dresses, and how my bare arms stuck out from the sleeves and my bare legs came out from the bottom of the knee-length, pleated skirt. But this was what the girls at HelthWyzer High all wore, according to Lucerne.

  "Don't forget your sunblock, Brenda," she said as I headed towards the door. She was calling me Brenda now: she claimed it was my real name.

  HelthWyzer sent a student to be my guide -- walk me to the school, show me around. Her name was Wakulla Price; she was thin, with glossy skin like toffee. She was wearing a pastel yellow top like mine, but she had pants on the bottom. She gazed at my pleated skirt, her eyes wide. "I like your skirt," she said.

  "My mother bought it," I said.

  "Oh," she said in a sorry voice. "My mother bought me one like that two years ago." So I liked her.

  On the way to school, Wakulla said, What does your dad do, when did you get here, and so on, but she didn't mention any cults; and I said, How do you like the school, who are the teachers, and that got us safely there. The houses we were passing were all different styles, but with solarskins. They had the latest tech in the Compounds, which Lucerne had pointed out a lot. Really, Brenda, they're so much more truly green than those purist Gardeners so you don't have to worry about how much hot water you're using, and isn't it time you took another shower?

  The high-school building was sparkling clean -- no graffiti, no pieces falling off, no smashed windows. It had a deep green lawn and some shrubs pruned into round balls, and a statue: "Florence Nightingale," it said on the plaque, "The Lady of the Lamp." But someone had changed the a to a u, so it said The Lady of the Lump.

  "Jimmy did that," said Wakulla. "He's my lab partner in Nanoforms Biotech, he's always doing dumb things like that." She smiled: she had really white teeth. Lucerne had been saying how dingy my own teeth were and I needed a cosmetic dentist. She was already planning to redecorate our entire house, but she had some alterations planned for me as well.

  At least I didn't have any cavities. The Gardeners were against refined sugar products and were strict about brushing, though you had to use a frayed twig because they hated the idea of putting either plastic or animal bristles inside their mouths.

  The first morning at that school was very strange. I felt as if the classes were in a foreign language. All the subjects were different, the words were different, and then there were the computers and the paper notebooks. I had a built-in fear of those: it seemed so dangerous, all that permanent writing that your enemies could find -- you couldn't just wipe it away, not like a slate. I wanted to run into the washroom and wash my hands after touching the keyboards and pages; the danger had surely rubbed off on me.

  Lucerne said that our so-called personal history -- the forcible abduction and so on -- would be kept confidential by the officials at the HelthWyzer Compound. But someone had leaked because the kids at the school all knew. At least they hadn't heard about Lucerne's sex-slave lust-mad pervert story. But I knew I'd lie about that if I had to, in order to protect Amanda, and Zeb, and Adam One, and even the ordinary Gardeners. We are all in one another's hands, Adam One used to say. I was beginning to find out what that meant.

&nb
sp; At lunch hour a group gathered around me. Not a mean group, just curious. So, you lived with a cult? Weird! How crazy were they? They had a lot of questions. Meanwhile they were eating their lunches, and there was meat smell everywhere. Bacon. Fish sticks, 20 per cent real fish. Burgers -- they were called WyzeBurgers, and they were made of meat cultured on stretchy racks. So no animals had actually been killed. But it still smelled like meat. Amanda would've eaten the bacon to show she hadn't been brainwashed by the leaf-eaters, but I couldn't go that far. I peeled the bun off my WyzeBurger and tried to eat that, but it stank of dead animal.

  "Like, how bad was it?" said Wakulla.

  "It was just a greenie cult," I said.

  "Like the Wolf Isaiahists," said one kid. "Were they terrorists?" They all leaned forward: they wanted horror stories.

  "No. They were pacifists," I said. "We had to work on this rooftop garden." And I told them about the slug and snail relocation. It sounded so strange to me, when I told it.

  "At least you didn't eat them," said one girl. "Some of those cults, they eat road kill."

  "The Wolf Isaiahists do, for sure. It was on the Web."

  "You lived in the pleebs, though. Cool." Then I realized I had an edge, because I'd lived in the pleeblands where none of them had ever been except maybe on a school trip, or dragged along with their slumming parents to the Tree of Life. So I could make up whatever I liked.

  "You were child labour," one boy said. "A little enviroserf. Sexy!" They all laughed.

  "Jimmy, don't be so dumb," said Wakulla. "It's okay," she said to me, "he always says stuff like that."

  Jimmy grinned. "Did you worship cabbages?" he went on. "Oh Great Cabbage, I kiss your cabbagey cabbageness!" He went down on one knee and grabbed a handful of my pleated skirt. "Nice leaves, do they come off?"

  "Don't be such a meat-breath," I said.

  "A what?" he said, laughing. "A meat-breath?"

  Then I had to explain how that was a harsh name to call someone, among the extreme greens. Like pig-eater. Like slug-face. This made Jimmy laugh more.