The Invasion Page 6

  ‘Diseased little cow,’ Liz Sweeney whispers – it’s worse by far in Sídhe than it sounds in English. ‘You souring udder.’

  ‘It’s …’ Aoife can barely speak, ‘got … nothing … to do with … you.’

  ‘I have a right to be angry,’ Liz Sweeney says. ‘I mean, it’s not that I like you.’ As if there could be any doubt! ‘But you’re deserting us. Every student that leaves bleeds the school a little more.’

  ‘I’m … done for … anyway …’

  ‘Pick it up, Aoife!’ Taaft screams. ‘Pick it uuuuuup!’

  The school is already dead, as far as Aoife can see. It can only be a matter of days before the remaining students are parcelled out to other colleges. Anybody can see that. If it weren’t for the investigators wanting to keep the subjects of their enquiries all in one place, it would have happened already.

  But Aoife isn’t going to wait for that. Her Call is coming soon – the Sídhe in the graveyard told her so. She knows she won’t survive it. By Crom and Danú, she can barely stay ahead of twelve-year-old Mitch Cohen with his tiny legs! Or the bumbling, tree-high Krishnan, who can trip over thin air if no rocks or shoelaces are handy.

  She has decided to find a way to kill herself the moment she sees the spirals in the sky above her. Or before would be even better. She won’t risk being caught, and if the rumours about Melanie are true, well, she refuses to become a traitor either, murdering friends and family for a life that doesn’t include Emma any more.

  ‘Leaving is cowardice,’ Liz Sweeney says.

  They’re coming up to the edge of the trees now. The frigid air tears at Aoife’s lungs. The bare soles of her feet slap against the numbing frost of the grass. She wants to go home. If all she has left is a day or a week, she refuses to spend it here under Taaft’s sadistic instruction and Liz Sweeney’s needling. She’ll sit in her stepdad’s old chair for a night or two, and then, when Mam is out on an errand, she’ll visit the doctor and ask for the pill to which any child over the age of twelve is entitled.

  Emma, she thinks, I’ll join you soon. I’ll—

  Up ahead, Lena Peekya cries out and skids to a halt. Her rival, Bianconi the Boar, runs right into the back of her and both go tumbling to the ground.

  Taaft is furious at their clumsiness. Alone of all of them, the ex-Marine gets to wear boots, although these ones are literally patches of mismatched leather held together with string.

  ‘There’d better be a good reason for this!’ she cries, but even she stops speaking, her jaw agape, at what lies before her.

  Some women have walked out of the trees. Strangers. Something is wrong with them that Aoife can’t identify at first, because her eyes are watering from the cold air. But her stomach knows, yes it does, and it clenches hard.

  Bianconi the Boar whimpers and crawls backwards on hands and knees, but Lena Peekya allows her curiosity to take her forward.

  ‘Stay away, child!’ Taaft calls. ‘Stay away from … from them.’

  But there is no ‘them’. Not really. Aoife’s breath is like the mist of an overworked steam train in front of her face. Her shoulder aches with the grip of Liz Sweeney’s fingers.

  She sees only one woman here, her skin as dark as Krishnan’s.

  But unlike the gangly Year 4 student, this … this person has three heads. All are bowed. Aoife can see that one is an old man of African descent; the middle one is a pudgy, Chinese-looking woman, while the third head comes from a red-haired child, maybe eight years old.

  Aoife can’t close her mouth. She can’t blink or breathe or think. Because this … this is a thing of the Grey Land and it doesn’t belong here. Not among the trees, not with the sharp brilliant white of frost and the garish berries of a nearby holly. Impossible! Terrible and wrong!

  ‘I want everyone to lie down,’ Taaft says. ‘You hear me, Peekya?’

  The creature’s three pairs of eyes turn to fix the twelve-year-old at the front, and no two irises are the same colour.

  ‘They call it art,’ Liz Sweeney whispers.

  And the Sídhe do think of it that way. Aoife can see how the pale skin of the child’s head blends seamlessly into the darker complexion of the body below. The old man’s wrinkles form patterns: delicate whorls and breaking waves. The enemy care about such details and imagine them to be beautiful.

  ‘I’m going to shoot it,’ Taaft says. ‘Lie down, Peekya. That’s an order. Lie down!’

  Used to obeying the whip of Taaft’s voice, the girl lays herself flat on the ground.

  The sergeant creeps forward, all horror replaced by the dispassionate mask of a trained killer. The heads look at her with neither fear nor curiosity.

  Then the mouths open and something like magic occurs: the three voices speak, all at once, and in perfect synchronicity. But it’s more than that, because the timbre of each has been chosen so that together they form as perfect a chord as any played on guitar or piano. The body, too, adds to the message with fine, long-fingered hands that gesture and punctuate every phrase.

  ‘I am the Herald of Peace,’ says the magnificent voice in Sídhe.

  ‘What … what is it saying?’ asks Taaft, but none of the students can bring themselves to translate. Still, she lowers the gun and takes tiny Cohen aside. ‘Get Nabil. Get anybody you can find and tell them I want weapons here. Go!’

  Aoife surprises herself. She is the only student brave enough to speak. Maybe it’s because she has already decided to end her own life, or maybe it’s because she feels pity for the woman, the thing, in front of her.

  ‘What do you want?’ she asks it.

  Three mouths smile.

  ‘My masters have restored the Kingdom of the Battles, on whose border your settlement now lies.’ Over the centuries, Ireland has been home to hundreds of ancient kingdoms, some with names far stranger than this. ‘We have given it a new ruler. A human king—’

  ‘A traitor!’ Aoife says.

  ‘A king. Chosen by the humans who serve us. A king! Without whom the people of the Goddess could not return! The treaty has been repudiated and already the Many-Coloured Land rejoices to the arrival of my masters!’

  ‘Let them come back all they like!’ says Liz Sweeney. Of all of them, she has stood closest to the Fairy realm. She came within touching distance the day she climbed the mound with Nessa. She hasn’t been fully herself since. ‘When your masters shrink we will stamp on them like cockroaches.’

  Three mouths smile. ‘Those who shrink do so because they are not fully in this world. But the ways have opened now. The time of the Milesians, those you call ‘Irish’, is at an end. Many of Danú’s people have passed through the proper door, and more arrive by the hour. At last! At last they can age again and hope for death surrounded by the beauty of their stolen home.

  ‘From now on, the borders of the Kingdom of the Battles will grow until all the land returns to its rightful owners. In sweet celebration, my masters make you this offer: any who wish to go under the mounds of their own free will shall not be harmed.’

  ‘What is it saying?’ Taaft demands again. Cohen is already off in the distance, almost back to the gym and the burnt-out remains of the college.

  Liz Sweeney laughs. ‘You think any of us would willingly go to the Grey Land? That we would swap your world for ours?’

  Aoife feels sick at the thought. She wishes she could see the doctors right now and get that pill.

  ‘If you stay here,’ sing the heads, ‘my sweet masters will make you as beautiful as they have made me.’

  Aoife shudders. She’s not the only one. Taaft alone looks puzzled, wanting to kill something, but still unsure.

  ‘You have not answered,’ say the heads.

  ‘Oh, we’re going to answer!’ cries Liz Sweeney. She makes to step forward, but Aoife grabs her arm. ‘Don’t! Don’t!’

  ‘We’ll answer, all right! And the answer is no! The answer is never! The answer is—’

  In the forest a horn sounds. Not one of the assembled child
ren has ever heard it before. They’ve prepared for it their whole lives of course. It’s just that they never expected to feel that deep despairing note while they stand paralysed in their own world.

  ‘Back!’ Taaft shouts, just as something comes slithering out of the trees. ‘Back to the school! Run, you shits! Run!’

  And they do, all except for two – there’s Aoife, frozen in place by the sound of the hunting horn, and Lena Peekya at the front.

  A snake is coming. It has white human skin and the face of a man with weeping eyes. The Year 3 hops to her feet, as she’s been trained to do, but no sooner is her right foot in the air, than the ‘snake’s’ head darts forward and bites once. The girl screams, but she’s the fastest student remaining in the college and she keeps running.

  Aoife turns to follow, finding a speed she never knew she possessed. Why, she even overtakes Lena! A line of guards and instructors waits just ahead with automatic weapons and Aoife almost weeps with relief when she sees it.

  Nabil is there, his eyes wide with horror, and this makes Aoife run all the harder, terrified at what must be behind her. But the only thing there is another human. Lena Peekya, her pale skin riddled with silver threads of poison, her limbs inflating like balloons. Luckily for Aoife, she is facing the wrong way to see them burst.

  Visitors

  During the day, cell doors yawn open into the communal area. Women play table tennis with a dented ball older than most of them, while the country’s last radio station fills the air with Elvis and Lisa Hannigan, jazz and rap, hip-hop and metal and all the rest. And then Emmett Tinley comes on, his soaring miraculous voice singing about love in lost Chicago.

  Annie crows along, murdering the high notes, drowning those lower down in asthmatic wheezes. But before she can entirely ruin the song for Nessa, the music skips once. Then again and again. The presenter’s mic is still on for some reason, and he whispers, ‘Come on, come on. Oh, for the love of God!’ Then he sobs. ‘It’s the last copy. The very last copy.’ And he screams and weeps, smashing at something until abruptly he is cut off.

  Spiky-headed Ciara breaks the stillness that follows with a braying laugh. ‘Another one for the loony bin, eh, girls? Bloody old people. Fragile as eggs every one of them. You’d swear they were the ones had the Grey Land waiting for them, you really would!’

  Sitting by herself, in the corner, Angela Fonseca ducks her head, as though ashamed.

  Nessa misses the radio already. She has no poetry here to distract her from the heat in her bones. No Megan to make her laugh. Oh, Crom! She was never the type to feel lonely before, but it’s almost all she can think about. Even her body feels it: longing for the exercise of school and the buckets of appalling but nourishing slop that fuelled it.

  She was the one who’d insisted on going to a survival college. She refused the poison doctors offered to girls like her – the hopeless ones, the doomed. No! No, Nessa was determined to live. And she won, didn’t she? She conquered the Grey Land against all the odds.

  But her very success is now all the evidence people need that she has betrayed the Nation. If she can’t find a way to make herself useful, Warden Barry will put her in a boat and send her right back to what might be … what must be the Grey Land, never to leave it again.

  How? she wonders. How could anybody who has read the Testimonies send another human being to that place on purpose? And that’s when she spots Melanie peeking from the door of her cell, not daring to come out.

  Nessa feels her breath speed up and the warmth stored in her bones flushes her skin enough to bead sweat on her forehead. Melanie. It’s Melanie who put her here, who has sentenced her to death instead of happiness in Anto’s arms.

  ‘You OK, girl?’ asks Annie, but all Nessa sees is a tunnel with Melanie at the other end.

  ‘Where you goin’?’

  She limps across the common area. Her clothes are steaming now and women fall back from the heat of her body.

  ‘What’s wrong with her? By Lugh, is it contagious?’

  Melanie holds her ground and raises her chin, almost as though offering her neck. She is a beautiful girl – or was, anyway. Now, she’s more like a model from the old magazines, her bones and skull barely disguised by a thin scraping of flesh.

  Fire has no place in a human body and holding it there has taken a toll on Nessa. It wants out, and if anybody deserves to feel the force of it, it is the traitorous Melanie.

  ‘Do what you want,’ says Melanie. ‘I’m sick of it now. I’m sick of the heart attacks. I won’t survive another one anyway …’

  But all Nessa does is to push past her, the girl who has destroyed her life. ‘Shut the door!’ she gasps. ‘Shut … the … door.’

  The older girl obeys, blocking the view of those outside, who hoot with disappointment at the expected confrontation. Nessa falls to her knees, shoves her hand into the filthy toilet in the corner and flashes the water it holds to steam.

  ‘By the cauldron!’ cries Melanie. The room is like a sauna from the movies and Nessa lies like a rag doll against the far wall.

  ‘Why?’ asks Nessa.

  Melanie thinks she understands what’s being asked. She shuffles over to sit on the lower bunk. ‘What I did was wrong,’ she says. ‘Cooperating with the Sídhe. I knew that all along. But I wanted to live. Same as you. You must understand that. But later, at the school, when I saw how they almost won. With my help. When I saw how they were killing everybody. Oh, Crom! Oh, Dagda! They would have destroyed us. All of us! All of us!’

  ‘Except you?’

  ‘Except a few thousand, I think. They were going to heal me and leave me to live out my life. But I knew … I knew all along they’d have killed Daddy. Everyone. It was wrong what I did; I had to confess. I had to warn them about … about me. About people like me. About you.’ She stands straight, doing that thing with her neck again. ‘I don’t care if you kill me, Nessa. A fly could do it now. But at least I got you caught. I finally did the right thing.’

  Nessa doesn’t even know where to begin with this. She wants to scream her innocence at this girl, but what good will it do when even now the walls are dripping with the results of enemy magic? Nobody will believe she isn’t guilty. Nobody can believe her and if she doesn’t get out of here in the next few days, or if she doesn’t invent a few believable lies of her own to extend the deadline, they’ll send her back to the Grey Land, and this time it’ll be for ever.

  A shout comes from outside in the common area. Have they seen the steam? Does this mean she’s been caught? But then Ciara’s harsh voice is braying out for a watch to be found, and another woman, just outside, is saying, ‘What’s the rush? We’ll have our answer in three minutes anyway.’

  Somebody has been Called. And there’s only one person in the whole of the women’s prison that might be.

  Angela

  Angela has been sitting against the warm wall of the prison. Her eyes are closed, and when her chair disappears her first thought – it lasts barely a second – is that one of the usual bullies has yanked it away. But then her buttocks are in the freezing mud, and she finds herself sliding and then rolling down three metres into a soft moss-like plant that cushions her fall and replaces the chill of the mud with the warm towel-like texture of its tiny fronds. Now she opens her eyes and learns the truth. A squeak emerges from her throat, no more than that. She is a mouse after all. Only prey.

  ‘I’ve got to move,’ she says to herself. She hasn’t so much as gone for a jog in the last two years. She hasn’t sparred with anyone, and even when she did that sort of thing, her squeamishness, her slow reaction times, had the instructors shaking their heads and marking her down as lost.

  Yet two things make it worth Angela’s while to get up and run. First of all is the part that luck plays in survival – the Testimonies have demonstrated this again and again. Second is the sacred promise of the Sídhe ambassador. Yes, they will want to hurt her. Of course they will. But it’s something to hold over them, isn’t it
? It’s got to be.

  She has rolled into a hollow. Above her are the famous swirls of silver light. Rarely in her life has she ever felt so comfortable, and if it wasn’t for the acrid air, for the hunters that even now must be on their way, she might easily sleep here. But no. No. Time to get up! Time to move.

  The moss beneath her has other ideas. It sticks to Angela’s naked flesh wherever she touches it. She jerks one arm free and cries out in horror, for tiny, tiny tendrils have burrowed into her skin to sip at her blood. She weeps as she frees the rest of her body, although there is no pain yet, for the plant numbed her skin before it started to feed.

  Angela crawls out of the hollow – it’s full of bones, she sees now: human skulls on four-legged bodies.

  From the top of the little hill, she gets her first proper glimpse of the Grey Land. She sees an ivory white forest off to her right, the trees lumpy as though plagued with boils. To her left lies a plain with animals of some kind, blaring defiance at each other. She can’t make out what shape they are exactly, and this is a good thing.

  But then another sound rips through the air, a hunting horn. This world’s vile masters know she’s here. They are oh-so-desperately eager to welcome their new playmate in person.

  With another squeak, Angela flies in the opposite direction, off towards the trees.

  Between leaving school and being adopted by the remains of the prison system, Angela had moved home with her Italian-born father. Nobody ever asked for her as an apprentice, and what little money she earned came from allowing ageing experts to poke at her and shake their heads over her survival.

  ‘What do your friends say?’ asked one scientist, her face crusted with flaking make-up.

  ‘They’re all dead,’ Angela replied, before apologizing through noisy tears. She was nothing. She was nobody, and her life had seemed of less use than a bag of air.

  Now, as she leaves a trail of blood behind her in the freezing mud of the Grey Land, she longs for the paradise of her father’s decaying kitchen with the photos of Mammy and all her murdered siblings, each of them fitter at the time of their Call than she would ever be.