The Deserter Read online

  Even stranger was the clothing they had given him. It was a uniform. He looked like a Warden.

  ‘Where have you been?’ asked Tarini.

  Instinct made him check his store of memories in the Roof, but there was nothing to be found there, of course. He’d been out of touch. He’d been … and for a moment he found himself back in the cage as jaws the size of his head fixed themselves about his arm. He shook off that nightmare only to dredge up another: an arrogant Elite officer with a damaged voice. The man was congratulating him on the betrayal of his friend. Hiresh sat up, feeling suddenly nauseous. What have I done? Oh goddess, what have I done?

  ‘Hiresh, why are you crying?’

  ‘I’m sorry, I’ll stop now.’

  ‘That’s good, because … because I think you’re a Warden now and we have an audience.’

  He wiped his eyes. ‘We do?’

  Tarini pointed up to the corner of the room where the foliage of the projected forest had tangled itself into a particularly dense knot. A tiny black box hung there, and Hiresh had to log on to find out what it was. ‘A camera?’ The Roof refused to spy, so some humans must have spent a very long time producing this clumsy machine for themselves. Or else it was an antique left over from the age of the Deserters.

  ‘I’ve been trying to rip it down, but I couldn’t reach it.’

  ‘For a full day? Why didn’t you just make the room grow a ladder?’

  She hit him hard on his injured arm, and even with the Nurse there to protect it, he howled in pain.

  ‘Sorry!’ cried Tarini. ‘I forgot, I’m sorry! I just …’

  ‘Why?’ he gasped.

  ‘I hate it when you call me stupid. I lashed out.’

  ‘But I didn’t call you anything!’

  ‘This room won’t obey me. It won’t even make a cubicle for a toilet when I ask.’ She shrugged. ‘And anyway, you enjoy pain.’

  Hiresh steadied himself, his arm still throbbing. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  Tarini sat down beside him and reached for his right hand. She shook her head slightly when he hesitated, and he knew that this time she would be as gentle as she was able.

  ‘There,’ she said. Through the green sheath a trace of the old scarring could still be seen, although it had mostly healed now. ‘You have those cuts everywhere, don’t you?’

  He tried to pull his hand away, but she wouldn’t let him. ‘I used to wonder how you could stand it; how you’d even lived through it. But then I remembered a girl from back in Canyon Sector before the Rebellion who used to slice herself all the time. Once or twice a night at least. Why do it if she didn’t like it?’

  She had Hiresh’s sore arm in her grip and must have felt the tremble that ran through his whole body. It would be agony to pull away. Otherwise he would have been out of the door already.

  ‘I didn’t enjoy it,’ he whispered. ‘All right?’

  It had taken months of cutting himself while everyone slept to get rid of the tattoos. Of course it should have hurt, and yet somehow it hadn’t. But nor was it exactly a pleasure, just a feeling of … relief. That was it. Relief. He couldn’t explain that to her; would never be able to explain it to anybody and wasn’t even sure he understood it himself. During the day there was the tiny apartment. And around that, for kilometres in every direction, nothing but Children of the Goddess. Just warriors bulking up on the rations that belonged to their wives and children. The starving boys and girls who should have understood more than anybody simply hated Hiresh for his traitorous words. He couldn’t bear it, couldn’t stand the sight of his mother fading, fading before his eyes, and nobody to talk to and nothing to look forward to but that hour of the night when he dreamed of his escape and cut the holy art out of his skin one millimetre at a time.

  Yes, it was a relief, but not one he would ever make sense of.

  Hiresh felt the tears coming back. ‘Let’s just get out of here,’ he said.

  ‘There are Wardens guarding the door.’

  ‘Wardens?’ He had kept his part of the deal as far as the authorities knew. By now, the hunter and his woman would be in captivity and there should be no more call for Wardens on the door or ancient cameras or anything else. And why had they dressed him in a uniform?

  He found he was feeling stronger now. He swung his legs over the side of the bed.

  ‘They won’t let us go,’ said Tarini. ‘I’ve already tried to get to the Academy to collect a few things, but they kept me here.’ She smiled. ‘I would have come back, you know. I wanted to see you. But I don’t like anybody closing me in. Sooner or later there’ll be another one of those quakes, and when the Wardens trip over their own big feet, I’ll run out of the door between them.’

  He nodded, remembering the quake in the Plaza of the Abandoned, and the blood on his face after one of the statues had crushed some people.

  ‘We’ve had two in this sector since you left,’ she said. ‘That’s a lot, isn’t it? It used to be about one a year.’

  Hiresh didn’t want to think about that. ‘You’re right, Tarini. I don’t like that camera thing spying on us. I’m sick of it.’

  He stood up, feeling good now, feeling normal. He waved the door open. The Roof would always let people out of any room it controlled, but not necessarily in. There could be privacy, but prisons had to be manufactured by hand.

  The Roar flooded in, along with the usual smells of a vibrant humanity. How he’d missed it! Normality. Home. Sure enough, two female Wardens waited just outside the door with their visors up. Both had perfect features, but without Medicine they’d been ageing for years now, and parts of their faces and bodies had begun to sag. The effect was subtle, but it looked to Hiresh almost as though they were melting.

  ‘You’re supposed to stay in there, Sergeant,’ said the taller of the two, her voice gruff and certain.

  Sergeant? Was it really true that he was a Warden now? Why else had they dressed him in the uniform?

  People were stopping to look. A few must have noticed the Nurse on his arm, for they were pointing and whispering, nudging each other.

  ‘An important visitor is coming to see you as soon as you’re up and ready.’

  ‘He’s up now,’ said Tarini.

  ‘I am,’ said Hiresh. ‘But if somebody’s coming to see me, I’ll just go back into the room and wait, shall I?’

  That wasn’t the message he transmitted to Tarini.

  Even as the guards started nodding, the two youngsters ducked between them and disappeared into the crowd. It was easy, far too easy, and Hiresh was amazed that those two idiots had been able to stop Tarini getting out. Unless she hadn’t really been trying, of course.

  And now they ran, as they had done so many times before, ducking and sliding. Spinning around old ladies, finding some gaps and making others. Whooping and transmitting insults to one another. All the horrors of the last few days got tangled up in the crowd and left behind. Hiresh wouldn’t think about his betrayal or his mother or a hundred and one other things. He was escaping.

  He struggled through a thicket of angry men even as Tarini pulled ahead of him on the right, but she had a religious procession to cope with – the twirling, unpredictable movements of the dancers would slow her enough to give him the lead … Not that they had set a destination of any kind, or a finishing line.

  He laughed, knowing his friend well. She liked it this way. She’d announce victory just as soon as she was ahead and starting to tire.

  But that wouldn’t be for a while yet. They’d been cooped up, and energy flowed in him like he’d never felt before.

  For a few minutes a gang of small boys started trailing after him, trying to keep up. Some clumsy parents hunted them down. He grinned, between deep, deep breaths.

  A transmission from Tarini: Wardens up ahead.

  Turn right for the next shuttle station, he sent. If we can get into a car, the Roof won’t tell them where we’re going.

  Don’t you want to meet your important
visitor?

  I already had my important visitor.

  Hiresh saw her stumble before gathering herself again. He loved to embarrass her. But the truth was, he felt sure that any new visitor would just want to talk to him about Stopmouth, maybe to congratulate him some more. Or to gloat a little.

  At the end of the corridor he could see a few Wardens coming his way. A little tickling sensation in his mind told him they were trying to contact him, but he shut that off right away. Instead, he and Tarini ran down the ramp to the shuttle station, and although it was as crowded as anywhere else, he simply had to shout, ‘I’m a Warden and I’m taking the next car!’

  The uniform, as well as the Nurse and his sense of urgency, was all the proof anybody seemed to need. He and Tarini jumped into the car and sent it tearing down the vacuum tunnels towards the far side of the Roof.

  They lay on the floor, panting and laughing, too tired to order up seats for themselves. A deep throb of pain pulsed into Hiresh’s arm with each beat of his heart. But he felt … wonderful. Happy.

  ‘It’s better …’ managed Tarini, ‘when somebody chases …’

  He nodded and allowed his eyes to rest on the tunnel lights that had already turned into a single bright blur with the speed of the car. They lay like that together and he became aware that their shoulders were touching. The normally flighty Tarini seemed content with that, and so, Hiresh realized, was he. Not that it meant anything.

  A few more minutes passed and a strange sensation began in his tummy. He sat up, staring at the light outside. ‘We’re slowing down,’ he said, and cursed. Somehow the Wardens had found a way to track their car. But that wasn’t it, because all at once the lights outside extinguished themselves, and Tarini shouted something – something that he couldn’t understand but knew must mean ‘quake’. The shuttle didn’t shake with anything like the violence he remembered from the Plaza of the Abandoned, but they were in total darkness now. That made it all the more terrifying.

  Tarini’s hand found his. He heard her fast, frightened breathing near his ear. She even let a little sob escape – something she was sure to deny later.

  They waited. The last quake had lasted only a few minutes, so it wouldn’t be long.

  I’ll count up to a hundred and it will be over.

  Hiresh was wrong about that. And wrong the next few times too. It was now warm in the shuttle, far too warm. The air circulation had stopped working and soon, he knew, it would become hard to breathe. A little after that, impossible.

  Tarini whispered something he couldn’t understand, but it sounded like ‘afraid’ in his language. He pulled her closer, terrified himself. She whispered something else, and the next thing he felt was her breath on his face, and then her lips against his – not forceful or desperate, not Tarini-like in any way at all. They were soft and full. Her hand stroked his face. And he kissed her back.

  His heart still thudded in his chest, but whether through elation at the kiss or fear of their approaching deaths he didn’t know. His fingers traced the line of her shoulder, and then, with more daring, slid downwards to lie on her hip. In the blackness it felt as if he were seeing her through his hands. He’d never noticed before how firm her legs were, never seen how sweetly arched was the base of her spine.

  ‘Tarini,’ he said.

  He felt her lips smile against his, and then the lights came on and, as if nothing had happened, the car started to move again.

  Both of them jumped, and Tarini looked around like a trapped animal.

  ‘Embarrassed?’ he asked.

  ‘Of course I’m not embarrassed!’

  ‘Of course not,’ he said, smiling.

  ‘Anyway, Hiresh, that was the first time you ever got a kiss.’

  ‘No – no it wasn’t!’

  ‘Don’t worry. It was my first time too.’ She shrugged. ‘With a boy anyway.’

  Hiresh jumped to his feet. ‘Tarini!’

  She burst out laughing, though about what he couldn’t tell. ‘By the gods, Hiresh, you’d swear you were a Religious! And what difference does it make? I prefer you.’

  He calmed himself, or tried to. ‘Thank you. I prefer you too.’

  Her grin gave him an awful urge to kiss her again. She stopped him with a finger to the chest. ‘You’ll have to go back,’ she said gruffly. ‘To meet your visitor.’

  He swallowed and nodded, but when he reached for her hand, she beamed. ‘I’m not Purami, you know.’

  ‘I’m not Chakrapani.’

  ‘Gods curse them both!’ she said.

  ‘Gods curse them and take them!’

  14. DAY FIVE

  STOPMOUTH’S SKIN BURNED and itched. His head rang and his ankle throbbed even through fitful fragments of dream-sleep and the type of ominous messages sent by ancestors that were meant to save your life, but were always forgotten by morning. The burning increased as his body rested until finally it drove him into wakefulness.

  He opened his eyes and closed them at once, crying out in fear.

  A giant burning Globe hung in the air above him. It shone brighter than the scalding Roof had ever done, fusing itself to his eyeballs so that even when he covered them with his arm, the sphere still danced and mocked in his vision.

  ‘Shtop-mouth! Shtop-mouth!’ he heard from right beside him. Indrani was there with Wallbreaker’s child. Now that all the Talkers were broken, and the Roof too – at least in the Upstairs – it was hard to understand her. ‘Is good, Shtop-mouth. Not to … Not to running.’

  Dots danced behind his eyelids for hundreds of panicked heartbeats. He had never seen anything so terrifying, he thought. But Indrani stayed with him and spoke calmly in her poor Human. When next he dared open his eyes, he shielded them.

  ‘We name this … sun, Shtop-mouth. Sun. Window in Roof let us to see it. Is good, yes?’

  The ceiling around the burning Globe had turned blue. No sign remained of the previous evening’s random tracklights. It felt terribly strange to have just one single burning light instead of a luminous, sheltering Roof, but not wrong. It didn’t feel wrong to him.

  All around him lay a scene of utter devastation, beautifully lit by the glaring … sun. Bodies, hundreds of bodies, cooking in the heat for thousands of paces in every direction. Many lay half dissolved in puddles of slime, and it seemed to Stopmouth as if they’d been slowly sinking into the floor. It explained the cloying smell he’d noticed the previous night. Behind him were the corpses of the two men he’d killed or caused to be killed. The sight stirred his stomach into a rage of hunger. But the bodies reminded him of something else too, something horrific.

  ‘Oh ancestors,’ he whispered. He clutched at Indrani’s arm. ‘Did we spend a whole night here?’

  ‘Why, Shtop-mou?’

  He wanted to be sick. Instead he tried surging to his knees, but his ankle wouldn’t take his whole weight. ‘Ancestors, ancestors. Indrani!’

  Her face was full of confusion and concern.

  ‘It’s the fifth day, Indrani.’ Or he thought it was. He couldn’t keep track in the Upstairs, and just because the sun made him feel that it was morning didn’t make it so. But if it was the fifth day, then his people only had one more left before the Diggers reached them.

  ‘We have to go, we have to get going! Help me – help me up!’

  She peeled Stopmouth’s fingers away from her arm and set the baby down beside him. Flamehair didn’t like it one bit and started crying. The child’s soft, delicate skin had turned red where her own little nails had scratched it.

  ‘Where are you going?’ he asked Indrani. ‘What about the tribe?’ Stupid thoughts raced through his head: why had they fallen asleep last night when they needed to be getting back? How had he allowed that to happen? But they’d been exhausted and lost in the dark without the Talker’s light to guide them.

  Indrani returned with a stick for Stopmouth to use as a crutch. Of course, she was being sensible while he panicked. Then she was binding his ankle with rags from the bod
y of one of the Wardens he’d killed.

  ‘No,’ he said, although every heartbeat’s delay frustrated him. ‘We can’t use their clothing. Do you understand?’

  She didn’t, and was clearly reluctant to take hides from the burned husks of men and women that lay all around. He made her wear the mask to show her the green dots. Curiously it no longer seemed to work. As if the sun had killed it. He flung the device away. So much for the Roofpeople’s magic!

  In the end she had to overcome her disgust at the rotted bodies. His ankle prevented him from helping her, but he tried to revive both their spirits by calling out annoying encouragement every time she started gagging. ‘Save a bit for me,’ he shouted, and was only half joking. His stomach screamed with hunger.

  For a distraction, he took the Talker from his belt. It had got covered in slime, and he had to wipe it clean with a piece of old uniform. When Indrani finally returned, sweat was rolling down her face. She dumped an armful of stinking clothing before him.

  ‘Too hot for to wear now,’ she said. Stopmouth could only agree.

  His hand began to sting. There seemed to be more slime on the Talker. He wiped it off again, and watched in amazement as tiny droplets of it formed on the surface, almost as though the little object were sweating too. Cursing, he threw it away. Then he thought of something else: the broken mask. When he crawled over to the spot where he’d flung it – even though it hadn’t landed in a pool of slime – it was filmed with the stuff. He showed it to Indrani and she shook her head in amazement. This, then, was the alien Virus that seemed to be eating her world.

  And still there were more delays. With the Talker dead, they would need torches for the sunless corridors beyond the park. So Indrani had to go back out in search of wood to make a fire.