The Forgotten

  “But you’re a genius.” She pulls away from me with excited, feverish eyes. “You can figure something out.” She takes a hold of my arm and begins towing me down the corridor. “You can invent a cure. You can find a way to stop it, to save him. I know you can. You’re brilliant at everything. You’ll find a way.”

  I stop in my tracks, planting my feet on the floor. Bennet lurches forward a few steps, and then turns to me with a heart-breaking, bewildered expression on her face.

  “Bran …”

  “I have tried. Don’t you think I’ve tried? I did every test I know, every experiment, every trial, and others besides them. I have done everything. It is too advanced.”

  Her expression hardens. “What is it?”

  I frown, not understanding.

  “The illness—what is it? Is it a fever? A disease?”

  I stare at a chipped wooden board in the floor. I’ll have to ask Joel, our valet, to patch it up. He’s the person we go to whenever something needs fixing. He can repair anything from a china cup to the complex pipe maze of the heating system my father invented for our home.

  “Branwell!” Bennet yells and I still completely. Further along the corridor, near the stairwell, I hear a clattering noise that sounds like porcelain smashing and then an exclamation. My sister doesn’t seem to notice.

  “It’s an advanced form of poison. That’s all I could discover. It must be the result of a chemical he’s worked with. It has grown progressively worse as time’s worn on. And now … the doctor says there is little hope for him.”

  “He went to a doctor?”

  “The doctor says he has weeks,” I continue, some wild animal writhing under my skin, “and I can find nothing to help him or even ease his pain.”

  “Bran, stop,” she whispers. Her face had paled.

  “Nothing works, and every second he lives he is burning from the inside. Is that everything you wanted to know, Bennet, or do you desire to know the scientific details of the poison eating away at our father?”

  There are tears on her cheeks. “Just please stop talking.”

  “I’m done.”

  I walk away from her, past damp stone walls into the cellar that is my room. In the cold, comforting familiarity of my room I find it impossible to hold onto the anger and everything slowly dissipates into hopelessness. I don’t know why I shouted at Bennet.

  For the remainder of the day I ignore all of the calls from the ground floor for me to go for dinner, and the ache inside my chest that urges me to return to the attic and make the most of the time I have left with my father.

  At what I’d guess is five in the evening, Bennet comes down to my basement. I don’t see the crack of light she lets in from above but I hear the soft click of her shoes on the stone. She crawls onto my bed and holds me while I fail to fight the tears. I gasp an apology and she shushes me, tightening her hold on me, always the protector, always the sensible, strong one.

  I fall asleep eventually, cradled between the cold blanket of my wall and the warm reassurance of my sister, safe from thoughts about losing my father.

  *

  At some point during the night a commotion upstairs jolts me awake. Benny sits up, startled, and we both strain our ears.

  “I’ll go see—” She never finishes the sentence; Florence, our housemaid, glides quickly down the stairs. In the gloom of my room I can see that her hair has come loose from its normally impeccable bun and that her face is etched with anguish. I jump out of bed with a sinking feeling that I know what she’s going to say.

  “Oh, thank the Lord,” Florence breathes. “It’s your father. He’s had a bad turn and he’s asking for you.”

  “How is he?” Bennet asks, clasping her hands together. Even in the faint light I can see her eyes are dark with dread.

  “Ill, Bennet. Very ill.”

  I don’t hear Benny’s reply; I’m already on the steps and running for the attic. My father should be resting in bed but I know he’ll be in the attic, stubbornly refusing to leave the side of his life’s work.

  When I get there, panting for breath, I find him laid out on the floor with two blankets over him and a pillow under his head.

  “Bran,” he says upon seeing me, his voice so weak that my stomach drops right out of me. He fumbles for my hand and I kneel, gripping his tightly. He’s worse than when I left him, worse than he’s been all week. “You have to hide it.”

  I pull the blankets closer around him, fighting off tears. “Hide what?”

  “Bury it. Hide it inside the earth. Keep it safe.”

  His mind is deteriorating too. Oh God, he’s going to—I can’t—

  I swallow against the lump in my throat, battling to make my voice normal. “Keep what safe?”

  “The Lux—my energy device. My inventions. All of them. Hide everything. Bury them deep underground. Keep them safe, keep everyone safe.”

  For a moment I just stare at him. “But … bury them? Why?”

  “They cannot fall into the wrong hands, Branwell. If the wrong people were to possess them …” He stares at me with an empty gaze, his train of thought gone.

  I whisper, “What?” I’m leaning closer to him to catch every strained utterance. He gets quieter with every word. “What would happen? Who’s going to find them? Please. Please explain it to me, all of it, your entire thought process.” Please keep talking and don’t leave me, please don’t leave me behind.

  His fog in his eyes clears for a heartbeat. “The world … would be destroyed, unrecognisable. What they want…”

  “I’ll hide it,” I vow, my voice thick. “I promise. I won’t disappoint you.”

  He tries to raise his hand to my face but it falls limply at his side. “I know you will.”

  “Father!” Bennet cries, reaching the top of the stairs. She’s out of breath and her eyes and cheeks are red. I wonder how long it took her to calm down, to bring herself out of the panic that traps her breath in a cage and immobilises her body. I should have stayed and helped to calm her. I shouldn’t have just run out. But father and his weakness and—

  “Bennet,” our father rasps with a thin smile. His eyes are almost closed now but he must be able to see us. “My girl. My children. Keep each other safe. Promise me. Don’t run after danger. Promise me.”

  “What are you saying?” Benny whispers. Her voice is shaky, her jaw clenched. “Father? Do not talk as if you’re dying. We won’t let you die. Will we, Bran?”

  I can’t find words. I’m a second away from my composure cracking in half and tears pouring out of the gap. I have tried so hard to keep him alive but I’ve failed him.

  “Keep each other safe,” father repeats, his breathing so faint I struggle to hear it. “No matter where you are. You have a dangerous path in your future. If you separate, one of you will lose something vital.”

  “What?” Bennet says at the same time I say “What does that mean?”

  We both lean towards him, waiting for a response fails to come. It is too late. Our father is gone, along with any hope of understanding the things he told me.

  For a moment it feels as if time has stopped its steady, constant procession in sympathy for our father, the steady, constant, love holding the remnants of our family together. He may have been infatuated with his work, he may have been absent, but we always knew he loved us. We always knew he was here. And now he’s …

  My composure doesn’t simply crack. It shatters like a gunshot through glass. My chest rises and falls so fast I can’t separate one breath from the next, my vision a veiled mess of tears.

  When Bennet and I were eight years old we lost our mother in a train disaster. A year later our brother of two years died of an unknown illness. And now …

  Will we be next? Will I never wake up one morning? Or will the world be cruel enough to take Benny first, leaving me to suffer the rest of my life without my twin?

  It takes eternity for the lump in my throat to shrink, for my eyes to clear, but I’m left with
a solid, all-encompassing ache behind my rib cage. When I’ve stopped crying, it’s as if everything in me had stopped too. As if I’m no longer made of sinew and bone but empty air.

  Bennet watches me with red, tear-filled eyes. Her face is so pale that I can see the freckles across her nose that are usually disguised by her olive skin. When she crawls to me, I hold her shaking form, and she holds mine, and we both watch the still figure of our father as if expecting him to flutter his eyes and come back to us. But the memory of him pleading with me to bury The Lux is too real, too loud in my thoughts. So is the memory of him imploring me to keep Bennet safe, for her to keep me safe too.

  We stay there until night falls outside the single window of the attic, until darkness descends like a cloak over our hunched, huddling bodies, the tables full of elements and metal scraps and glass tubes, and inventions that will never be touched again, never be completed. My father never opens his eyes again.

  ***

  Honour

  06:03. 18.09.2040. Forgotten London, Shepherd’s Bush Zone.

  By the time I get back to my room it’s three minutes past six. The factory float has already gone rattling down the road, and my sister is sitting bolt upright in bed. Her eyes narrow at me when I slide into the room and I know I’m in for it.

  “Have a nice walk?” she asks scathingly.

  I wince. “Just down the road.”

  “You ever do that again and I swear to God I will castrate you, Honour Frie.”

  “I won’t.” I don’t have to. I know all I needed to—it’s possible to get outside the barrier, to follow the instructions left to me. I lower myself onto the mattress.

  Horatia looks like she could kill me if she tried. “You went somewhere you shouldn’t have, didn’t you?” she hisses. “What’s wrong with you lately, Honour. You used to be sensible. After everything—” She swallows the reminder of our suffering—homelessness, scavenging for food, almost freezing to death. “You can’t keep risking things like this. Just stay inside until it’s time to work.” She pins me with a scowl. “And come straight home. I don’t want anything to happen to you. If it did—” She shakes her head, eyes haunted.

  “It won’t,” I say gently, my heart twisted up with guilt now. “I’m sorry, Tia. I won’t go out again.”

  She nods, glancing through the pathetic covering over the window into the street where people have slowly begun to rise and leave for early work positions. “You’d better not. Honestly, if I didn’t know this was just you being a complete idiot, I’d think you were trying to catch one of the strains. Anyone out there could have one. We agreed—straight to work and straight back again. Do you actually want to catch one of the strains?”

  “No.” I look at my hands, the coarse blanket clenched in my fingers.

  The Sixteen Strains is the collective name given to the diseases that are slowly wiping out all signs of life in the Forgotten Lands. According to States, one of the two major Cities of our world—the rest of which is made up of scars and ruins and disease, the paltry remains of the world’s population clustered into Forgotten Towns to stay alive—there are even more Strains outside the borders. That’s why we live inside the fence: to keep out the spread of even more diseases. Well, that’s what I used to believe. Now I’m not sure what I believe.

  States is the most powerful City in the world. They’re the richest and because of that, because the rest of us are so needy and dying, they control everything. They provide food and protection from their military and make sure production of clothes and purification of water and everything else the world needs to cling to survival keeps running. Without them, we’d have no food, no homes, no clean water, and we’d probably have been wiped out by the strains. I used to think they were benevolent, even if the Officials scared the crap out of me and were too rough and violent with their punishments.

  The other City is Bharat; a wealthy place on the other side of the planet that I know next to nothing about. Even though Bharat is bigger and has a higher population, States is the City every Forgotten Town answers to. It’s their money that funds our development and provides the ‘opportunity’ for work. (In a place where not working is punishable by death, opportunity is a laughable word.) It’s their doctors that help us when we’re in need of care, even if most of the people who go for help are never seen again. It’s their people who organise education for kids aged five to thirteen. It’s their military that polices our streets and keeps us safe from violence and free from disease. Apparently.

  They haven’t done a great job of stopping The Sixteen Strains inside the borders from spreading. A hundred people still die each week twenty years after the first outbreak. That’s why Horatia is so angry with me. She’s scared I’ll die before the life expectancy catches up to us at twenty.

  She sighs, running a brown hand over her face. Her anger has begun to fade. “Will you be a bit more careful? And have some sense, for God’s sake.”

  I nod, rubbing my eyes. Going out before a full day of work wasn’t smart but I hardly have any free time. “I’ll try.”

  “You have twenty minutes before you need to get ready for work. Do you want me to set an alarm?”

  I yawn yeah and roll over. Within seconds I’m out for the count.

  12:27. 18.09.2024. Forgotten London, Shepherd’s Bush Zone.

  By the time I get home from work that evening, after weaving my way through the quieter back streets and avoiding the shortcuts Officials frequent, Horatia’s already left for her late shift.

  She works five hours a day, at the factory at the bottom of our road, weaving wool on the looms. It’s one of the less dangerous jobs in the factories—one that I begged her to do instead of working at The Allocation Centre like she intended to—but it has one of the highest risk factors because you’ll be executed on the spot if any of the supervisors catch you stealing. Wool is a prized luxury; apparently it’s popular with the rich people in States’ Ordering Body, those who make the big decisions for the rest of us.

  Sometimes I end up turning the wool Tia and her co-workers weave into clothes; cardigans and jumpers and socks. None of it is for us of course. God forbid we wear anything that feels nice against our skin. I’m stuck wearing the same old shirts of faded, worn-bare cotton and jeans in a canvas-like material.

  Thalia’s in the kitchen when I stumble through the back door, the exhaustion catching up to me from my trek last night. I smile as I remember stepping through the fence and onto the open plain that sits beyond our town, just waiting for someone to go out and make it their home. There might be certain death coming for F.L. but it won’t take my sister and the rest of my family.

  “What’re you so happy about?” Thalia asks with narrow eyes.

  I laugh and lift a piece of carrot from behind her.

  “Hey,” she snaps. She attempts to knock the carrot from my hand but it’s already in my mouth. Thalia mutters under her breath, a number of inventive suggestions I can do with parts of my body.

  “M’having a good day,” I say around the carrot.

  “Good for you. Maybe you can put your good day to use by tidying the living room—there’s paper everywhere. It looks like a solar flare hit.”

  “I’d rather not.” I chew the last of the carrot. Now that I’m paying attention, I notice that Thalia’s making a stew. We haven’t had stew in a few months since there’s been a shortage on vegetables, but judging by the pile of cans in our bin, there’s been a delivery to the Allocation Centre. Either that … or she’s found my stash of stolen cans. “Wait, what day is it?”

  “Wednesday, why?” She’s trying not to smile. So she did steal some of my cans. I cross my arms over my chest, debating the pros and cons of yanking on her pony tail.

  “Allocation day’s on Friday this week.”

  She smirks wickedly. “So it is.”

  “You’re gonna regret that,” I threaten emptily and slink through the door frame and into the hallway.

  I’m not too
angry at Thalia for stealing the food I’ve been saving. I’m more disappointed than anything. I was hoarding that food for when we cross the border and go out into the diseased lands. She used three cans of veg, judging by the rubbish, which means I should still have six unless she’s stolen them too. Surely she wouldn’t take it all…

  I run to the small wall-cupboard in my and Horatia’s room and sigh in relief when I find six cans of food still there. That’s still enough to sustain us for half a week outside F.L. I should put them somewhere else, though. Thinking of it now, the cupboard was probably a bit obvious.

  I move the food to inside a pile of clothes at the bottom of our wardrobe. It doesn’t have a door, but unlike Thalia and her husband’s it’s not leaning at a ninety degree angle with most of our possessions hanging out.

  I can smell the stew now as I head to the living room we share, and my stomach grumbles. I’ll eat after I tackle the tornado-blown mess that is our carpet. God knows what John—Thalia’s elder brother by a year—wants with these papers but they’re getting in the way of everything.

  I gather them into a messy pile, glancing over a few as I do. They’re about The Sixteen Strains, but I can’t think why John would want to research this. Everyone knows what caused them and what the symptoms of the diseases are—there are leaflets put in with food allocations and they’ve been broadcast every night for the past twenty years to anyone who owns a TV or a radio. I hate the guy who does the broadcast; I see him as blonde and slick, with a slimy smile.

  The Sixteen Strains are the catastrophic result of the twelve solar flares that stole our home from us in 2015. Of the tiny portion of our people that remained after the disaster, the Strains took from us half of them. But they didn’t stop there, oh no! The Strains are relentless vermin, draining our lives and using it to fuel their own existence—taking our families and loved ones from us, stealing our friends, our neighbours. Well I say enough! The time to take action is now. It is time to take a stand, to make a change.

  If you, your family, or anyone you know have any of the symptoms, contact an aid worker or Official immediately. If you have even an inkling that someone has contracted one of the Strains, contact an aid worker or Official immediately. These people need our help, our care, but the more time The Sixteen Strains have to take our nearest and dearest, the longer they will live. We must stop these diseases now, and reclaim our home.