‘What do you mean you “couldn’t help it”?’ David asked, coldly. ‘You couldn’t help what?’
‘Not wanting to drink the Fit Mix,’ Mika muttered, shifting uncomfortably.
‘So you decided to chuck it in the Headmaster’s face?’ Asha said. ‘What a brilliant idea! Why didn’t you kick him in the shins while you were at it!’
‘What are you trying to do, Mika?’ David said, rubbing his thinning hair with exasperation. ‘Make us homeless? We can’t afford to pay a hundred-credit fine! We haven’t even finished paying your hospital bill yet!’
‘I know, I’m sorry,’ Mika said, earnestly. ‘But Mr Grey was trying to force me to drink that stuff.’
‘It was a party for odd’s sake!’ David shouted, unleashing his temper and beginning to frogmarch around the sofa. ‘Do you think they were trying to poison you?’
‘I don’t know,’ Mika said quietly. ‘I got this bad feeling.’
‘Oh Mika,’ Asha said, feeling a surge of desperate sadness because he seemed so lost. ‘Why would they poison you? You are the first children born for thirty years! They are trying to help you grow strong! The Fit Mix is extra vitamins and nutrients because all you eat is Fab food!’
Mika watched his father lean with both hands on the back of the sofa and for a moment he looked broken and Mika thought he was going to cry.
‘Do you know what Fab food is?’ Asha continued.
Mika shook his head.
‘Mould!’ she said, her eyes shining with tears. ‘White fungus grown on walls in the Fab Food Factories! They scrape it off and mix it with colour and flavourings so it looks like food, but it isn’t food! We only eat it because we have no choice! All it does is keep us alive! You should be grateful for the Fit Mix!’
His father seemed to pull himself together and stood up again.
‘You’ve got to drink it,’ he said, authoritatively. ‘When you go back to school you’re going to drink it.’
‘I don’t want to,’ Mika pleaded.
‘Well, I don’t want to drive a stinking train every day!’ David roared. ‘Do you think I enjoy going to work? Every day I sit in a train and drive from Oxford to Glasgow forty-eight times! In fact I don’t even drive the train! A computer does that! I just sit looking at a computer screen listening for warning beeps! Do you think that’s fun? NO! I’m so bored I want to pull my hairs out one by one just so I can count them!’
David thumped the back of the sofa. Mika jumped with shock and so did the sorting beads in the container he was holding. He’d never seen his father do that before.
‘Look at me!’ David gestured to his blue train driver uniform with its tacky gold buttons and lapels, then glared at Mika. ‘Look at your mother! How do you think she feels going to work dressed like that every day?’
Asha was wearing a cowgirl costume – a black and white cowskin-patterned Stetson hat with a white pearl-buttoned shirt, chaps and spurs. She worked as a waitress in a themed rich people’s real food restaurant in Oxford. Every day when she left work, her bag was searched to make sure she hadn’t stolen any half-chewed lumps of tank meat from the plates she scraped. Mika looked at her. He’d seen her dressed that way every day for the past seven years, so he was used to it, but for the first time he realized how ridiculous she looked – how incongruous the outfit appeared combined with her fine features and long hair.
‘Sometimes you just have to do stuff whether you like it or not!’ David shouted.
‘NO!’ Mika yelled and he ran into the bedroom and threw himself down on Ellie’s bed. ‘I’M NOT DRINKING IT!’
‘Then you can stay in that bed until you CHANGE YOUR MIND!’ David roared, yanking the door across.
‘GOOD!’ Mika yelled. ‘I WILL!’
* * *
Mika stayed in Ellie’s bed for the rest of the day, dozing on and off and staring at the low white ceiling of the bunk. The ceiling was usually decorated with holopics – most of Ellie that Mika had stuck up, grinning through her long dark hair or pulling stupid faces. The rest were pictures of animals Ellie had put up before she’d disappeared. Asha hated them. She couldn’t understand why her children wanted to look at the reason their lives were so awful: otters playing in a river, a herd of zebra on an African plain and a pair of lovebirds sitting together in a tree, their emerald green breasts touching. Mika loved the pictures, but now he felt so upset, he couldn’t bear to look at them. He took them down and held them in his hand under the cover, while his parents argued in whispers in the next room.
Later, he listened to them pull down their bed and settle for the night. He put Ellie’s pictures under his pillow and turned on to his side hoping for sleep so he could escape his fractious thoughts. It was hard to get comfortable with the metal collar pressing into his neck. He drifted into sleep like a stone skimming over an endless stretch of ice, his eyes jerking open now and then as if he’d hit a tree or a rock. After a while his eyelids felt too heavy to lift, and in those brief moments of near-consciousness, he kept them closed and coaxed himself back into oblivion. He didn’t know how long he’d lain in that state when he felt something cold and wet pressed against his left eye. He forced open his lids and started, pulling his head back on the pillow.
Close to his face was another face, with a wet black nose shaped like a soft liquorice sweet. Two dark soulful eyes gazed into his and a pair of soft ears pulled back as he did, displaying the creature’s alarm at his sudden movement. It was some kind of dog, Mika thought, but he wasn’t sure; he’d never seen a real one, only plague dogs on television with their eyes full of blood, and this dog was particularly odd-looking – a big skinny dog, that looked more like a deer than a dog, and it seemed more afraid of Mika than Mika was afraid of it.
‘Hello,’ Mika whispered tentatively, trying to sound friendly because he didn’t want to be bitten, and the dog responded by jutting its head forward to poke him in the eye again with its wet nose, then it slobbered all over his cheek with a smelly pink tongue. Mika could hear the dog’s tail patting against the cover, and its breath was hot and excited. Reassured it didn’t want to bite him, Mika pushed the dog gently on the side of its neck to stop it licking his face so he could get a better look at it. It was very heavy and felt warm and it was the colour of custard cream biscuits. Its nose, legs and tail were long and elegant, its fur short and silky; the softest thing Mika had ever felt. He ran his hand over the dog’s head and down its neck, admiring the darkness of its eyes and nose, contrasting with its soft, creamy fur. He could feel the muscles beneath its skin, its warmth. Its expression was gentle and kind.
‘You’re beautiful,’ he said. ‘Why are you here?’
The dog sat down and gazed at him benevolently.
‘What?’ Mika asked.
The dog lifted one of its long front legs and pawed the cover, its claws pressing on Mika’s arm beneath it. Mika heard a clink at its neck and saw the dog was wearing a collar with a round, metal tag. He pulled himself up in the bed and held the tag in his fingers, trying to read the inscription in the darkness.
‘Awen,’ he said and the dog’s ears pricked up as he recognized his name. ‘Awen, is that your name? Are you Awen?’
Awen panted cheerfully, his pink tongue hanging out of the side of his mouth.
‘Hello, Awen, nice to meet you,’ he said, stroking the dog’s silky ears and filling up with wonder as he discovered the magic of boy and dog. He couldn’t stop touching him – the feel of his silky fur and muscled body was addictive.
He likes me, Mika thought, and I like him.
The dog licked the fingers on his left hand, long slow licks like smelly caresses, and Mika felt his fingers tingle pleasurably. The more Awen licked, the more they tingled until Mika felt a strange sensation in his fingertips, as if something was pushing up out of them from beneath his skin. It didn’t hurt, it felt nice. He lifted his hand to stop Awen licking, and looked at his fingers and watched as tips of green pushed through the skin. There was no blood, no
pain, it tickled. He had stems growing out of his fingers, unfurling bright green leaves. When they were the same length as his fingers, they stopped growing, and Mika got out of bed and walked to the window so he could look at his hand in the moonlight – unaware that his parents were standing in the doorway watching him. They’d heard him talking to Awen.
‘What’s he doing?’ Asha whispered, clutching David’s arm, as she watched Mika stare at his raised left hand. The collar on his neck glinted and his eyes shone in the milky light.
‘He’s just sleepwalking,’ David replied. ‘He doesn’t look upset, we should leave him. He’ll find his way back to bed in a minute.’
They tiptoed away to their own bed and sat propped up against their pillows whispering in the darkness.
‘I wish I could get inside his head,’ Asha whispered. ‘I want to share his thoughts so I can understand what’s going on with him. I feel guilty, David. I wish we’d been more patient.’
David sighed. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘So do I.’
‘We should have talked to him and tried to understand why he did it.’
‘I know, but that fine – I was fuming.’
‘The thing is, I know he can’t help it,’ Asha went on. ‘I can see it in his eyes. He’s so unhappy and confused. He really believes Ellie’s not dead and that they’re trying to poison him. But why?’
‘I think we should ask Helen to visit him tomorrow,’ David said. ‘While we’re at work, so they can be on their own. Let’s see what she thinks. Perhaps he’ll talk to her.’
‘Good idea,’ Asha said.
‘Has he gone back to bed?’
‘I think so,’ David replied.
‘Good,’ Asha said. ‘It creeps me when he wanders around like that.’
7
A DEADLY WEAPON
The space station, the Queen of the North, was the headquarters of the Youth Development Foundation and Mal Gorman’s pride and joy. It carried several megatons of people and hardware involved in his new project in orbit around Earth, but although it was large enough to see from the ground, it looked no more than a hole cut out of the stars; an eyeless, silent hulk, her rumbling engines struck dumb by the nature of space.
On board it was past midnight London time and Mal Gorman was still working. In front of the desk in his enormous office, the catering department had laid out a buffet table for his visitors, a group of high-ranking politicians and military personnel, including the Defence Secretary and the Education Minister, who had come to celebrate the launch of the Fit for Life project on Earth. Gorman, as Minister for Youth Development, had spent the evening being told how clever he was, but now he was bored and his guests didn’t seem to want to go to bed, and he, being the host, had no choice but to wait up with them. He didn’t like people eating in his office and he watched irritably as they stuffed themselves from platters piled high with tank meat and plastic flowers, cheese sculptures, crudités, dips, tarts and wine and droned on about how important they were, whilst dropping pastry crumbs on the floor and discarding their plates of leftovers on his desk.
Eventually Gorman decided he’d had enough of it and called over his butler, Ralph.
‘Get the waiters to clear the table,’ he said.
‘But, sir,’ Ralph replied, ‘your guests haven’t finished eating. I was just about to send for dessert.’
‘They’re not going to starve to death between now and breakfast,’ Gorman snarled, watching the Defence Secretary walk away from the table with a whole platter of canapés. He was one of the youngest and still had a little bit of flesh on his bones.
‘Bring coffee,’ Gorman said. ‘No, scrub that, bring water. Perhaps when they realize the feed is over they’ll go to bed. I’ve got a busy day tomorrow and I want my office back, spotless.’
‘Yes, sir.’
After his guests had departed, having said goodbye with tight-lipped smiles, Gorman decided to walk to his rooms via the cargo bay. All the equipment for the Fit For Life project was packed and waiting to be taken down to Earth. The cargo bay was dimly lit and silent, a cavernous hole in the belly of the ship. Gorman’s footsteps echoed on the hard black floor. He nodded towards the guards in the office and they waved and took their feet down from their desk and turned off the telly so they looked as if they were working.
The equipment filled the whole cargo bay and was stacked in neat rows on metal pallets ready to be loaded into the freighter bound for Earth the next morning. Every box had the Youth Development Foundation logo, YDF, printed on all sides. The bigger boxes contained uniforms for the project staff. Their type and size were also printed on the box: uniforms for doctors, nurses, security guards – loads of jobs had been generated by the project, and even the people cleaning the toilets had a uniform with YDF printed on the pocket. For weeks the space station had been packed with people under Mal Gorman’s watchful eye, training for their new jobs.
The smaller boxes had ‘Fit Mix’ printed on the side of them and each contained ten thousand small sachets of powder.
Gorman patted them with a bony hand and smiled.
‘Mr Gorman, sir?’
Gorman turned to see a man standing behind him.
‘What do you want?’ he snapped. ‘I can’t get away from you for a minute.’
‘It’s Ellie,’ the man replied, nervously. ‘The lab staff sent me down to find you. She’s doing something interesting and they thought you’d want to see.’
They walked quickly towards the maximum-security area along a stark, white maze of corridors. Every twenty-five metres they passed through a door guarded by a security borg who scanned their retinas before letting them pass. Eventually, they entered a room marked ‘Opus Three’. It was an observation room, small and dark, lined with desks and equipment and monitor screens. A researcher in a white coat sat in front of a window, which looked out into another room lit by dark red light, where Ellie lay sleeping. The room was empty apart from a bed hollow moulded into the wall. Ellie was curled up on her side with her back to them and a white sheet wrapped around her like a shroud. The top of her head was bound up with tight bandages to prevent her from opening her eyes. It was six weeks since they’d recaptured her, and she’d been kept blind ever since. Gorman wanted to punish her for what she had done to him and, although he didn’t admit it to his staff, he was also scared of her. Everyone was scared of her. They knew now that with her eyes uncovered she was a deadly weapon.
‘She’s asleep,’ Gorman observed, impatiently. ‘What’s there to see?’
‘Look above her head,’ the researcher said.
Gorman leaned on the desk and stared into the dimly lit room. He could see something moving in the air above Ellie’s head, but until his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he couldn’t make out what it was.
‘Is that a sock shoe?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ the researcher said, smiling. ‘And the other one’s on the ceiling, look.’
Gorman looked up to see Ellie’s shoe bobbing across the ceiling as if it was on the surface of the sea. ‘How’s she doing it in her sleep?’ he mused.
‘She’s dreaming at the moment,’ the researcher said, pointing at a screen. ‘Look at her brain activity.’
‘That’s interesting,’ Gorman said, thoughtfully. He looked at Ellie as if she was a box of chocolates he wasn’t allowed to eat. ‘I want to know why,’ he continued. ‘I want to know more. I wish I could trust her; what an utter pain she is.’
‘She’s promised not to use her eyes like that again,’ the researcher pointed out. ‘She said when she hurt you it was an accident and she didn’t realize what she was doing.’
‘I know,’ Gorman replied, impatiently. ‘But do you trust her? Do you want to be the one to take the bandages off?’
The researcher looked uncomfortable for a moment, then shook his head.
‘Let’s try threatening her again,’ Gorman continued, thoughtfully. ‘Tell her we’ll kill her family and the monkey. I want to get on with the experime
nts. I want to know everything about her. Get a security borg to take the bandages off in the morning. When you’re sure she’s safe around people give her something to do, let her go swimming, she’ll like that, and give her a book to read. I’ve got a book of poems she might enjoy, send someone to my rooms to collect it. Tell her if she’s good I’ll let her see Puck. Tell her if she’s bad I’ll kill everyone she knows. And make sure she has an armed guard at all times.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Right, I’m off to bed.’
8
COMING SOON TO AN ARCADE NEAR YOU
Mika was awoken by a bright flash like a bolt of lightning through his eyelids. He was alarmed for a moment, then realized it was the television blinking on at the end of his bed. The light seemed unusually bright as though overnight the veil that had darkened his world for weeks had been lifted. He didn’t know that a thousand miles away, Ellie had awoken to find her eyes were uncovered; for Mika it was just another unanswered question to add to a growing pile.
The familiar drone of news voices began, the rush of water – his father in the shower – the metallic yawn of his parents’ bed folding up into the wall and the soft sound of his mother’s slippers padding on the carpet. Everything sounded normal, but it wasn’t. Mika put his hand to his throat and felt the metal collar. No, nothing was normal, he was going to spend the day at home doing the sorting beads and feeling tormented by guilt because he had caused so much trouble for his parents.
‘Morning, Mika,’ his mother said gently, putting clothes on the end of his bed.
‘Morning,’ he mumbled warily. His parents had gone to bed angry and he wondered what had changed. He’d thought it would take more than a night’s sleep to undo the damage he’d done.
‘What do you want for breakfast?’ Asha asked.
‘I’ll do it,’ Mika replied, swinging his legs out of bed. ‘You’ve got to go to work; I’m going to be at home all day.’
‘I’ve called Helen,’ Asha said, looking at him nervously. ‘I asked her to come round – we thought you might like to talk to her.’