‘So we have to shoot down number five and stay away from number fourteen,’ Audrey said.
‘This is going to be a nightmare,’ Mika said. ‘How are you going to understand all the controls?’
‘Tell me now,’ Audrey replied confidently. ‘Show me a few and the rest I’ll have to guess.’
Mika began to tell her, prioritizing the most important, and through the windshield, the familiar domed hangar of the mother ship appeared. They were not alone on the launch strip this time; on either side of them were the other competitors’ Pod Fighters. Mika could see the teams inside, adjusting their headsets and preparing for take-off. A green light flashed indicating the start of the game.
‘Ready?’ Audrey said.
‘I suppose so,’ Mika replied, nervously.
Their ears filled with the roar of thirty engines and Mika grabbed the gun controls as Audrey prepared for take-off. They felt the familiar rush of air in their headsets as they shot off the landing strip, out of the mother ship and into space.
‘Don’t forget,’ Audrey said, ‘we have to shoot number five and avoid number fourteen.’ She dropped immediately so they broke away from the group. ‘Start looking for them.’
Above them, the other Pod Fighters looped around each other trying to find their prey amongst the swarm. The first unlucky victim went out within thirty seconds in a sudden flash of light.
‘I can’t see their numbers,’ Mika said. ‘We need to get closer.’
‘Give me a minute to get used to flying,’ Audrey replied. She dropped the Pod Fighter again, looped in a sharp corkscrew, then shot up and stopped dead.
‘That was good,’ Mika said.
‘Of course,’ Audrey replied.
Suddenly a Pod Fighter shot towards them from the right and Mika’s heart missed a beat.
‘It’s OK,’ Audrey said. ‘It’s not our hunter, it’s number eight.’
The Pod Fighter flew a playful arc around them and shot off towards the main group again. The group was slowly dispersing and spreading out as hunters found their prey and set off in pursuit. Occasionally there was a flash of light as another team was shot down.
‘OK. Let’s go for it,’ said Audrey. Mika gripped the gun hard and they flew directly into the mass of Pod Fighters, searching anxiously for numbers five and fourteen, but everyone was moving so fast, they couldn’t see the numbers and within seconds they had someone on their tail.
‘Oh no, it’s our hunter!’ Audrey cried. ‘How did they find us? I can’t see the numbers!’
‘Neither can I,’ Mika said. ‘There must be some kind of display. Try the control panel. Try everything!’
Audrey dropped the Pod Fighter and looped, trying to evade their hunter while she jabbed at the icons on the control panels. Nothing happened; their hunter kept up and began to fire.
‘The controls aren’t doing a thing! Nothing!’ she yelled.
‘Try them in sequence or pairs!’ Mika said. ‘They must work somehow! Hurry! We’re going to get wasted!’
Their hunter was good; its hail of laser bolts was only just missing them, despite Audrey’s excellent flying. Twice Mika closed his eyes thinking, this is it, they’ve got us this time, only to open them again to find that by some miracle, they were still in the game. Audrey cursed as she stabbed at the icons and tried to keep them alive at the same time. Then all of a sudden an icon appeared in Mika’s visor, and as he looked at each Pod Fighter its number appeared.
‘That’s more like it!’ he said. They were silent for a few moments while they looked at the display.
‘We must be number thirty,’ Audrey said. ‘Look, you can see our hunter, number fourteen, following us. So where’s our prey?’
They searched the display for it.
‘I’ve found it,’ Audrey said, and she made a sharp U-turn back towards the mother ship with their hunter hard on their tail. ‘Top left. Eleven o’clock.’
The Pod Fighter they had to eliminate, number five, was hiding from them above the mother ship.
‘It must have destroyed its prey already,’ Mika said. ‘They didn’t waste any time, they must be good.’
‘Doesn’t matter,’ Audrey said. ‘We’ll get them anyway.’
Mika wasn’t so sure; they weren’t even in firing range when number five suddenly vanished.
‘No way! How did they do that?’ he exclaimed.
Their hunter fired a spray of laser bolts and they were forced to drop suddenly under the mother ship, losing their pursuer in the shadow of its bulk.
‘There must be an invisibility shield around our prey,’ Mika said. ‘In the last round we found a display for the invisible fighters, remember? They appeared like red ghosts.’
Audrey punched desperately at the control panel with one hand and wove the Pod Fighter through the shadow of the mother ship with the other. Suddenly another Pod Fighter appeared on the display. It was transparent and red, just like the ghost pods in the first round. When Mika looked at it, a red number five appeared.
‘OK, so we can see them now, that’s good.’
Their prey was a couple of kilometres away, hanging motionless in space. Audrey veered right and hurtled towards it, losing the protective shadow of the mother ship. Their hunter was on their tail again within seconds and firing at them.
‘This is impossible,’ Mika said.
‘No it’s not, I’m still looking for the invisibility shield,’ Audrey said, flying with one hand. ‘If our prey found it, we can.’ Moments later she said, ‘Yes!’ and a second red ghost appeared on the display.
‘That’s us!’ Audrey yelled, nearly deafening Mika through the headset. ‘Number thirty!’
Mika watched the display as their red ghost shot towards number five.
‘You’re a genius,’ he said, watching their hunter falter in confusion and surprise, then veer off in the wrong direction.
A few moments later, number five shot up, realizing it had been seen.
‘Game on,’ Audrey said, and shot after it.
It was not easy following an invisible target, they could see nothing through the windshield, only the red ghost on their display, and Mika was impressed with Audrey’s flying skills, which kept them right on target. However, actually hitting the craft was going to be a different matter entirely, and when Mika began to fire, his shots missed it by hundreds of metres. It was like trying to catch a fly in his hand with his eyes closed.
‘It’s like the shape shifters in the first round, you need to anticipate where it will move,’ Audrey said.
‘I know,’ Mika said, irritably, shooting another couple of pointless rounds. ‘But you could predict exactly where the shape shifters were going to move, you can’t predict this.’
He watched the red ghost of number five for half a minute as it looped, dropped and corkscrewed through space without firing a shot and tried to figure out if there was a pattern to the way it flew.
‘Come on! We’ve only got five minutes left!’ Audrey said.
‘Give me a chance.’
Mika suddenly realized that the Pod Fighter always took a right-hand loop out of a corkscrew and all he had to do was wait for them to do it again.
‘There are only four Pod Fighters left,’ Audrey said, anxiously.
‘Three,’ Mika said, and fired a round. Number five was just pulling out of a corkscrew, and just as he’d predicted, they took a loop to the right. There was a blinding flash of light. When they could see again, only fragments of the shattered ghost remained, slowly spinning and spreading out into space.
They screamed and jumped in their seats.
‘You did it!’ Audrey yelled. ‘I can’t believe it!’
‘Thanks,’ he said sarcastically, feeling a little offended by her lack of faith.
‘No, I don’t mean you’re a bad gunner, they were just so good!’
‘I hope that was Ruben,’ he said.
‘Yeah, so do I,’ Audrey replied. ‘It would serve him right. Fancy coming here wea
ring a black bandanna, as if he’s the King of Kung Fu. He’s so arrogant.’
‘How much time have we got left?’ Mika asked.
‘Just over a minute.’
For that minute they hung in space and watched their hunter fruitlessly search for them. At one point the Pod Fighter passed so close, they held their breath.
A ‘Game Over’ icon appeared and they climbed out of the simulator and took their headsets off. Audrey’s eyes sparkled as if she had green fireworks exploding inside them, and her fairy face and red hair were gleaming with sweat.
They grinned at each other. They’d done it.
* * *
The teams stood in line and the simulators loomed around them like a silent jury in a courtroom. A man walked out of the darkness and read from the tablet in his hand. ‘Three teams have made it through to the third round,’ he said. ‘Please step forward when your number is called.
‘Thirty . . .
‘. . . eight
‘. . . and nineteen.’
Mika and Audrey stepped forward, then another team they didn’t know, and last of all, Ruben and Yee. Immediately Mika turned to look at Kobi and Tom, realizing he hadn’t even thought about his friends for the whole game. Tom, who had risked his own safety to drag him on to the train. Kobi, who had been his first and only friend since Ellie had disappeared. He hadn’t thought about them once and he felt an uncomfortable tightness under his heart. They walked away with the losing teams and the door closed behind them.
‘Oh no!’ Audrey whispered. ‘How could Ruben win, but not Kobi and Tom! Tom’s going to be devastated! This is terrible. I hope they wait for us outside.’
‘So do I,’ Mika said, ‘because I’ve just thought of something really bad.’
‘What?’ Audrey asked. ‘Tell me.’
‘Remember how good number five was?’ he said. ‘How smart they were and how hard they were to catch?’
‘You don’t mean . . .’ Audrey whispered, ‘. . . we shot down Tom and Kobi? That they were number five?’
‘I hope not,’ Mika said. ‘But they were so good, I can’t help thinking it was them. Tom will never forgive us.’
A woman walked towards them with a white box in each hand.
‘Well done,’ she said. ‘These boxes contain capsules we want you to add to your Fit Mix. Take one a day. Just pull them apart and stir them in.’
Audrey and Mika stuffed the boxes into their bags without even looking at them, their eyes on the door and their hearts outside with their friends.
* * *
Outside the arcade, the rain was falling like grey rods that melted on to the pavement, then coursed like silvery ropes down the drains. Mika and Audrey ran into the street and searched frantically for Tom and Kobi. There was still a long queue waiting to go in and the road was littered with hunched-shouldered shoppers. Eventually, they saw their friends standing in the doorway of the cinema opposite, with film trailers playing behind them on a row of wet screens. Kobi’s black hair hung in rat-tails over his face, and Tom licked the rain from his lips and hugged himself as they crossed the road.
‘Hey,’ Tom said, trying to look pleased to see them, but Mika knew the truth the moment he saw his eyes.
‘We were your hunter,’ he said. ‘Weren’t we?’
‘Yes,’ Tom replied, looking away.
‘Oh no!’ Audrey cried. ‘We didn’t realize!’
‘It’s OK,’ Tom said. ‘We know it’s not your fault.’ He began to walk away.
‘We didn’t know!’ Audrey called after him.
Tom walked on, heading in the opposite direction to the train station.
‘Where are you going?’ Audrey yelled.
‘Leave him,’ Kobi said. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll talk to him. He does-n’t blame you, he’s just worried about his mum.’
They watched Kobi lope off down the street, a bundle of wet rags with his feet exploding like bombs in the puddles, and Audrey began to cry.
‘What’s going to happen to Tom’s mum?’ she said desperately. ‘Now he can’t help her!’
‘We didn’t know,’ Mika said. ‘It’s not our fault.’
They walked to the station in silence and Audrey’s eyes had the faraway look of someone too exhausted to think. They sat on the platform while they waited for a train and Audrey took Kobi’s cat out of her pocket and let it play on her hand. Mika was glad she was quiet. He had a war raging inside him between three overwhelming emotions: relief, dread and guilt. But when he got home and told his parents he’d won them their first ever holiday, his father’s eyes lit up with amazement and Asha skipped around the sofa with glee, and he felt a little bit better and wished he could tell them what he was really competing for.
17
ANIMALS WERE BEAUTIFUL
On Sunday mornings, Mika and Audrey usually went to the arcade to practise, but that Sunday Audrey called to say she had to go to her auntie’s for lunch, so Mika stayed home. He didn’t mind; after a day of competing in the Reading arcade, the last thing he felt like doing was playing Pod Fighter and he was also curious about the prizes he had won and wanted to be at home when they arrived. To pass the time, he tried to mend his coat, but when he tried it on, he realized he’d sewn the sleeve together by mistake and couldn’t get his arm into it.
‘You’d have looked like Frankenstein’s monster in it anyway,’ Asha said, as she unpicked his ugly black stitches. ‘I’m really annoyed with the boy who did this to you, now you don’t have a good coat.’
Mika had lied about the rip in his coat, because he knew she’d freak out if she knew the truth and he watched, guiltily, as she neatly mended the hole.
Just as she finished, the plague siren started as it did every Sunday morning, to test it was working. Barford North’s was on the top of the tank meat factory and for three awful minutes the sound of it paralysed their minds and froze the blood in their veins. Afterwards Asha was always irritable.
‘And you don’t just need a new coat and jeans and sneakers,’ she said, banging around in the kitchen. ‘We need to get you a new plague suit, too. Yours will be useless the amount you’ve grown recently.’
‘Don’t bother,’ Mika said. ‘I’m never going to need it.’
‘You might,’ she said.
‘Why?’ he said. ‘It’s forty-four years since the Animal Plague. Everything is dust on the other side of The Wall, and besides, the suits are so thin I can’t see the point of them. If an animal bit you, its teeth would go straight through it.’
‘They’re designed to protect you against saliva,’ Asha said, impatiently. ‘Not bites.’
‘So I’ll be all right if an animal licks me,’ Mika said. ‘That’s OK then.’
‘Don’t make jokes about it,’ Asha said, impatiently. ‘It’s not funny. You have to have a plague suit that fits, it’s the law.’
Mika threw himself on the bed and looked wistfully at Ellie’s animal pictures.
‘And I wish you’d get rid of those,’ Asha said, following him into his room. ‘They’re creepy. I don’t understand why you want to look at them. They’re only centimetres from your face when you’re going to sleep. I’m surprised they don’t give you nightmares.’
‘It’s not animals that give me nightmares.’ Mika said. ‘It’s people. I like the pictures, they remind me of Ellie. Animals were beautiful.’
‘You wouldn’t say that if you’d been around during the plague,’ Asha said.
‘You weren’t,’ Mika pointed out. ‘You were just a baby and you got evacuated before it was anywhere near you.’
‘Well yes, but we saw it all,’ Asha said. ‘They were broadcasting it twenty-four hours a day on television. You grew up watching cartoons. I grew up watching dogs biting babies in their prams and ripping windows from their frames. If you’d grown up seeing that you wouldn’t want pictures of animals centimetres from your face.’
‘Well, I’m not getting rid of them,’ Mika said, scowling. ‘They make me feel happy.’
br /> Asha huffed and stomped out of the bedroom and Mika began to wish he’d gone to the arcade after all. Staying in and arguing with his mum wasn’t half so much fun.
Luckily, a few minutes later, his prizes arrived so they had something else to think about. He heard the door buzz and a clown roly-polyed into the apartment and crashed into the back of the sofa. Asha gasped and put her hand to her mouth.
‘Are you OK?’ she asked, not feeling as polite as she sounded. She was in the middle of her Sunday morning cleaning spree and the last thing she wanted was a clown sprawled all over the floor. It was a creepy-looking clown too; its face was painted with a big red smile but the mouth beneath the makeup looked sour. They watched it scrabble around on the floor looking for its nose, which had rolled under the sofa.
‘Here,’ David said, finding it and giving it back.
‘Thanks,’ replied the clown, squidging it into place. Then it stood up and cleared its throat. ‘Congratulations, winner!’ it cried. ‘You have successfully completed the first two rounds of the competition!’
The clown waddled to the door, nearly tripping over its blue feet, which were as long as flippers, then, huffing and puffing, it dragged a large box with a red ribbon tied around it into the apartment. ‘Your prizes,’ it said, panting. ‘And information about your holiday. Have fun!’
Seconds later, it was gone and Mika and his parents were left staring at the box.
‘It’s very big, Mika,’ Asha said. ‘What did you say you’ve won?’
‘A phone companion,’ Mika replied, still dazed by the clown experience. ‘And a holiday.’ He pulled the ribbon, there was a sudden explosion and the three of them fell back, blasted in the face by a storm of silver confetti. Asha choked in shock and spat bits out of her mouth. Mika picked a piece off his jeans and looked at it. The confetti was shaped like the Youth Development Foundation logo, YDF, and the force of the explosion had plastered the silvery pieces to everything, even the curtains and walls.
‘Look at all this!’ David said, peering into the box. ‘There’s real food in here and party stuff!’ He began emptying it on to the floor: there were YDF banners, balloons, napkins and party hats. There was a large cake with YDF iced on the top of it and several cartons of food, including tank meat steak and real strawberries, and at the bottom, Mika’s phone companion.