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- Herausgeber: David Fickling Books
- Kategorie: Für Kinder und Jugendliche
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018
YOU'RE UNDER ARREST FOR HIGH TREASON!Imagine that your country is full of people ready to betray their family and friends to the cruel and pitiless ENEMY. Then, think that everyone has branded YOU as the traitor . . .Nessa is locked in a maximum-security prison where death awaits her, with only murderers and the monstrous for company. And now the ENEMY is about to invade . . .CAN NESSA ESCAPE TO STOP The Invasion AND PREVENT THE BLOODSHED? Find out in this thrilling sequel to The Call!
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Seitenzahl: 392
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Do Lúcás – ba chóir duit ceann acu a léamh, áfach …
To part us two is
To part the children of one home
To part the body from the soul
Anonymous, c.1150. Translated by Gerard Murphy
Contents
The Grave Robbers
Aoife tumbles out of her cot on to an ice-cold floor. Where am I? Am I … Am I there?
It comes to her almost as a relief.
However, this is not the Grey Land. Not yet. The palms of her hands find the smooth, familiar walls of the gym. And all around her, Boyle Survival College’s last thirty or so students fill the air with sighs and snores, with the smell of rarely washed bodies and the creaks of makeshift beds.
Perhaps she’s taken a fever, because she can’t get up. Her head is spinning and she convulses, hands over her mouth, as a wave of nausea punches her savagely in the guts.
It eases off until she can get her back against the wall, sweat chilling on her forehead.
‘No …’ a boy cries in his sleep.
‘By Crom, they’re eating my face!’ says another. It’s Krishnan, a thirteen-year-old so lanky that his feet stick out over the end of his mattress. His toes twitch and curl as though they’ve been stabbed through with pins.
The hackles on Aoife’s neck rise as all around her the rest of the children start tossing and turning in their beds, their voices suddenly louder, as if each and every one of them is having the exact same nightmare.
‘Get out of here,’ Aoife tells herself.
Her gorge rises in her throat again. The cold sweat seems to sizzle on her brow.
Out! Out!
But already the sleeping children are settling again.
Plenty of rumours have been flying about ever since the events that saw the Sídhe attack the school. Rumours of how Ireland and the Grey Land are closer to each other than they’ve been for centuries. Within touching distance, people say.
This is why the enemy appear so much more often now than they used to. And Aoife thinks that the frequency of these episodes of nausea and fear that only affect the young is rising too.
But what do I know?
She decides to get out anyway, hoping the freezing Roscommon air will make her feel better.
She knows the way in the dark, almost as though poor Emma’s ghost is pulling her through the night. Once out the door, Aoife passes the shadowy burned-out dorm building and walks down the alley formed by two long lines of caravans where the investigators and archaeologists now live. They won’t allow ‘civilians’ anywhere near the Fairy Fort they’ve been digging up, but Aoife has seen the dread on their faces at the end of each day’s work. Sometimes the last shreds of her curiosity want her to go and find out what they’re up to in the forest, but then she remembers what happened last time she did that, and she turns into a sobbing wreck. Emma! Poor Emma!
A dark figure looms suddenly in front of her and Aoife still cares enough about her life to gasp.
‘It’s me. Nabil.’
‘I’m going for a walk,’ she says, angry at him for frightening her. ‘You can’t stop me any more.’
He sighs, and she knows it was the wrong thing to say, for, of all the instructors, Nabil looks out for the students best and was a major player in saving their lives during the attack.
‘Here, my friend,’ he says. ‘Take my flashlight. Give it back in the morning.’
Now she feels even worse for snapping at him, but manages a small ‘thank you’. Then he’s gone and she’s free again.
The freezing wind gets her teeth chattering. She’s wearing nothing but her tracksuit and a thin raincoat she’s been using for a blanket. She used to have Emma to keep her warm and thinks of all the times she told her friend to leave her alone, to let her sleep – as if they were going to have eternity together! As if nothing could ever go wrong! How could she have been so stupid?
Up ahead lies the graveyard. Funerals are never allowed in survival colleges or there’d be little time for anything else. And the bodies of students who die are sent back to the parents. So the few graves on college grounds are mostly for teachers and instructors. People without family or whose families don’t want to know them.
And then there’s the odd body so horrifically altered by the Sídhe it is deemed better to tell the parents that the scientists in Dublin, having examined it, then mislaid it.
Emma’s parents accepted this explanation. They know what it really means and they have another girl back home to worry about.
Aoife moves in among the trees, escaping the wind again. Her once-plump cheeks are so cold they ache. She can’t feel the hand that grips the flashlight. And that’s when she hears the digging. No animal could make such a rhythmic, metallic sound. Only people. People hacking at the frozen soil of a graveyard in the darkest part of the night.
She stops in her tracks. How can there be somebody out here?
But her second thought is one of fury. It’s souvenir hunters, she thinks. Dragging Emma’s body from its resting place for the pleasure of gawkers. How dare they defile her!How dare they.
She crashes through the undergrowth, blundering out of the wood and into the graveyard proper, the ground slippy and hard as granite. She has come out right beside the heap of earth where Emma is buried, although you wouldn’t know it, for there are no markers.
She stops right there, confused to find it undisturbed.
Then the hairs on her neck rise. She swings around, turning on the flashlight by instinct. It’s an old wind-up one. Nobody makes batteries any more and its light is a pale blue flicker, but it’s enough to see the boy in front of her raise hands to cover his face.
‘Who are you?’ she cries.
‘Dubhtach, I was named.’ His voice would shame an angel, at once friendly and musical. ‘For my dark hair. See?’
Aoife is already backing away, her legs like jelly. It’s not a boy in front of her, of course, but a little man. She can see now how his skin glitters ever so slightly in the torchlight. How every part of him, from his delicate fingers, to the square cut of his jaw, has been sanded to perfection by whatever god or devil created him.
And he’s following, walking steadily forward, his grin wide and welcoming.
‘Leave the thief alone,’ says another voice, a woman. ‘We have what we came for. We must swallow it before we are too small. And this one … I feel it. This one we’ll be seeing very soon.’
Aoife flings the torch at the little man’s head. It knocks him back a pace and she uses the distraction to flee for her life, off into the woods.
When she returns an hour later with Nabil and Taaft, they find the graveyard full of holes and scattered remains. Of the Sídhe themselves no sign is left.
‘What did they want with rotted flesh?’ asks Taaft. ‘Are the little scum practising voodoo now?’
‘I never heard of that,’ Nabil replies. When he speaks English, he sounds so much more French than when he’s using Sídhe. ‘But I do not like it. It’s strange of them, no? They will have a reason.’
‘I’m going back to bed,’ says Aoife. Emma’s safe; that’s the main thing.
Or is it? The woman Sídhe said they’d be seeing Aoife soon, and she knows what that must mean. It’s funny how little she feared the Call only a few hours before, and how much she trembles now that it is finally reaching out for her. This impression becomes all the stronger when she realizes that, while she was gone, one of the few surviving Year 4s – Andy Scanlon – has turned up in his bunk with flippers for hands and blank skin where once he had a face.
He must have been lying there in the dark, his body cooling, as Aoife was stumbling outside.
Not So Lucky
Nessa sits near the front of the bus, one arm draped around the case beside her, as though it’s the dearest of friends. She watches Ireland streaming past the window.
Ivy and weeds push crumbling houses into the earth, and even trees rise in triumph over the corpses of factories and schools. The beauty of it overwhelms any sense of sadness. In winter, the bright green fields are all glamour in their capes of sparkling frost and the distant hills are little more than daubs of white paint against an intense blue sky.
I shouldn’t be here to appreciate this, she thinks. Nessa’s supposed to be dead. But she’s not, she’s not! She has paid her dues. No one has ever had to go twice to the Grey Land.
They pass through fading towns where only the old remain, and so rare is the sight of a working bus that all conversations stop and many people wave. Do they know there’s a recent survivor on board? They’d make more of a fuss if they did, and Nessa smiles at the thought of it. She smiles at everyone and everything, enjoying even the experience of potholes and roads blocked by cattle and a market at Ardee.
Other children get on there, a group of January-born ten-year-olds heading for a survival college near Balbriggan. She decides she’s not going to think about them for now, for the ninety per cent of them the Sídhe will murder in the next few years. Nessa has survived. She’s off to Dublin for the first time in her life, to see Anto, the boy she loves. A fourteen-year-old like herself, who came back from the Grey Land of the enemy with his life and a large chunk of his sanity intact.
She’s feeling shy already as rusty road signs tick the kilometres down. Will his parents be there? Will they mind if she kisses him? Will they care about the delicate twigs she was left with in place of legs after a bout of polio as a child?
They won’t mind, she decides. Although they might put up a fight if she tries to steal their son away to Donegal. She grins and her cheeks hurt with it, because she hasn’t changed her expression in hours.
And then the bus comes over the suspension bridge near Drogheda to find the Dublin end blocked by a minibus and a government car. It rumbles to a halt with the kids straining their necks to see what’s wrong.
The driver, nine-tenths belly, the rest grey moustache, exchanges a few words with an old policewoman before turning to the passengers. ‘We all have to get off,’ he shouts. ‘It won’t be for long, all right? Ten minutes.’
The pitted surface of the road hosts a group of trench-coat wearing adults that wouldn’t look out of place in a movie.
‘Line them up!’ says a man at the front. And then, ‘Wait! Don’t bother.’ He strides ten paces over to Nessa. The Sídhe have been murdering adolescents for the last twenty-five years, which means this tall stranger may just be old enough to have escaped the Call. But no. There is a strain about his movements that suggests he will never relax again. This man has seen the Grey Land. He would have been one of the first, back in a time when nobody understood what was happening. Before the specially trained counsellors were around to help with the aftermath.
‘This is her, isn’t it?’ He whispers the words, as though it burns his tongue to do so.
Some of the early survivors used food to cope with the trauma. Some turned to drugs, or immersed themselves in bizarre obsessions. Others faded away to nothing. But this man’s muscles stretch his coat to breaking point. He’s the type who’s been training every day, maybe every minute since his Call.
‘Yes, that’s her,’ says a young woman, and Nessa gasps when she catches sight of the beautiful and sad Melanie in the midst of the adults. The girl with a hole in her chest. One of the few students of Boyle Survival College to make it through the school’s destruction.
‘I don’t understand,’ says Nessa. ‘Mister …?’
‘Detective. Detective Cassidy,’ the man says. ‘And I am the one who doesn’t understand.’ He has a hero’s square jaw and his blue-eyed gaze is hot enough to melt a glacier. ‘How …?’ he asks. ‘How did the likes of you survive the Grey Land?’
Nessa refuses to flinch. ‘The same way you did, Detective. I fought the Sídhe and I won.’
Cassidy swings around. He pulls the smallest, feeblest of the untrained ten-year-olds out of the crowd. In the cold air, the boy’s terrified breathing appears in little puffs of mist, but all the stranger does is whisper in his ear, before nudging the little boy towards Nessa.
‘What … what did he say to you?’ asks Nessa. She has never been so confused in her life. She has left her warm jacket on the bus. She badly needs to pee and, above all that, the earlier euphoria of her imminent meeting with Anto is giving way to something more akin to panic.
Out of the blue, the tiny little ten-year-old kicks her bad left leg and down she goes, the frozen ground slamming the air from her chest.
The big man looms over her. ‘Vanessa Doherty,’ he says, his voice stiff with loathing, ‘you couldn’t have escaped the Sídhe. You can’t even beat this little child. I am placing you under arrest for treason.’ She feels handcuffs on her wrists and can’t understand what’s happening. What about Anto? She needs to see him! ‘The Nation will survive,’ he says. ‘I doubt you’ll be so lucky.’
The New Recruit
The bus station stinks of greenhouse tobacco and the damp warmth of a hundred people fighting for tickets on the rare remaining routes. But no matter what their errand, everybody finds time to stop and stare at Anto. It’s that freakish outsized arm of his. The Sídhe gave it to him, of course, and none of those staring will ever understand the pain he suffered at the fairy woman’s hands.
That trauma follows him wherever he goes. It wants to smother him, to leach the world of joy. Yet Anto grins. Nessa won’t let that happen. Somewhere a bus is bringing her closer to him, with that smile of hers, that’s too bright, too intense for any shadow of the Grey Land to withstand. He can’t wait to show her Dublin. He wants her hand in his, her head on his shoulder like the night she risked her life to climb into his bedroom. He can already feel the warmth of her cheek against his neck.
But now he shivers. A pair of policewomen are approaching him and his family with purpose. Please, he thinks, don’t let this be about Nessa.
His parents have brought him here to meet her. He’s thought of little else for days, suffering the teasing of his nine-year-old sister and embarrassing maternal comments such as, ‘She’ll be sleeping in the spare room. I’ll be watching to make sure you keep your paws off!’
But Ma has seen the guards approaching too, and she’s the one to squeeze his shoulder. You can deal with it, son. That’s what she’s saying. And she’s right. Nessa’s had a lifetime of stares, hasn’t she? Anto won’t let her down, so he straightens his back, always sore from the extra weight of the giant arm.
‘Oho!’ says Anto’s dad. ‘They must be coming to give you another medal for all those Sídhe you battered up in Boyle.’
‘Please, Da. I don’t wanna talk about that.’ Anto remembers the crunch of bones. Their screams, their laughter.
The guards take one look at the boy’s left side and nod. They don’t bother getting him to confirm his identity, but the younger one – still in her fifties – can’t seem to keep herself from mouthing, ‘Holy God!’
The other is more businesslike. ‘The State needs your service, Mr Lawlor.’
‘You don’t mean me, I take it,’ Da says, and the guards ignore him.
‘We need you to come with us.’
‘I don’t understand,’ Anto says. He can barely squeeze the words from his throat. ‘We’re here to meet my, uh, my friend, I—’
‘Vanessa Doherty won’t be arriving, son. I’m told she’s been given a mission of her own.’
Anto hasn’t seen Nessa since she went home to give her Testimony and be with her family. He finds it hard to cope with the dreams, and none of the counsellors can help him the way she does just by sitting near him, by being so … serene. Is that the word? Nothing gets to her. Except him, and only in good ways that make her smile and talk about her strange interest in lost poems and songs.
‘Are you saying my boy has a mission, guard?’ asks Da, puffing up his chest.
He’s oblivious to Anto’s shattering disappointment, but Ma can feel the quick rise and fall of his breathing under her fingers.
‘We’re not allowed talk about it, sir. But he must come with us. We have a car waiting.’
‘A car!’ Da is delighted. Thrilled. ‘You hear that, son? A car!’
‘I don’t want to go,’ says Anto. He doesn’t like the sound of the word ‘mission’. He needs to find a school now, a real school where the pupils aren’t murdered. He’s supposed to learn a trade and to have time to get to know the girl he loves. Da pushes him gently towards the women, but he resists.
‘You want to get us in trouble, son?’ asks the older guard. ‘And remember, your friend’s not coming today. You’re not missing out on anything.’ Her face is beginning to harden. They could arrest him, or even his parents. The Nation will do anything to survive.
What choice does he have?
For the first time in Anto’s life, he gets to travel by car. The journey takes them up the old M1 before they turn on to narrower roads, barely fit for purpose any more, with the sea on their right.
One of the policewomen is sitting beside him in the back seat.
‘Beautiful, isn’t it? Wales used to be out there somewhere.’
Now the horizon just fades to mist. He doesn’t like to look at it. He’s heard stories of boats heading out to sea, only to drift back to shore empty of human life.
The policewoman must be thinking the same thing. ‘Where do the passengers disappear to?’ she muses. But she has to know the answer is hell. The Grey Land. At least that’s what everybody says. A trip in a boat would be worse even than the Call, because there is no coming home again, alive or dead.
‘That’s where we send them all these days,’ she says. ‘We put them in rafts or dinghies and let the current take them into the mist.’
‘Who?’ Anto asks.
‘Oh, you know.’ She shrugs, as if the answer doesn’t matter. ‘Criminals. Traitors.’
Prison
The cell door is open, but Nessa stays where she is, lying on a mattress made of hard lumps. Damp stains splotch the ceiling and a thousand names and dates crowd each other on the walls, layer upon layer of them. ‘Effie took the boat.’ ‘Remember Cathy – not one bit sorry.’ ‘This here picture is the warden and a sheep.’
Outside, a woman screams. That’s how I feel, Nessa thinks. That’s it exactly.
Yet she’s not dead, is she? Not waking to the horror of the Grey Land either. Instead they have brought her to the women’s wing of what appears to be a prison. She never knew such a place existed. The Nation has no resources for criminals, does it?
She growls. ‘I didn’t do anything.’ But nobody’s listening. Nobody cares that she should be celebrated as a survivor, that she should be burying her face in Anto’s neck and teaching him to laugh again. No. Beyond the cell it’s all just shouting and jeers while somebody weeps.
‘Doughnut!’ a woman cries, winning applause. ‘Doughnut!’ The sobbing that follows is breathless, desperate, full of whispered pleading that Nessa can’t quite hear.
She throws off a thin blanket and walks gingerly to the doorway. The scene is like something out of a movie – an old one, from the time before prisons had automated doors. Two storeys of cells form a square around a central area containing what might be a table-tennis table. It’s hard to tell with such a thick crowd of women surrounding it, jostling, angry, laughing, while others hang back.
‘What’s going on?’ Nessa asks a pudgy grey-haired woman. ‘Aren’t there guards? Isn’t this a prison?’ But then the crowd parts to reveal Melanie, the only familiar face here, lying weeping on the table. She is naked from the waist up, the denim shirt everyone else wears has been ripped away to reveal a hole in her torso the size of two fists. She tries to lie down, but two burly women force her shoulders up while others take turns to put their hands right through her chest. They wave and make faces. Someone tries to stick her entire head through and Melanie screams with the pain of it.
‘My heart!’ she cries. ‘The doctors! Call me a doctor!’
Sturdy wooden chairs line the walls between the cells. Nessa helps herself to one, raises it above her head and smashes it across the wall, leaving her with a splintered leg. The crack brings sudden silence.
‘By the cauldron,’ she cries, ‘you’ll kill her!’
A pair of large women who were holding Melanie drop her and push their way through the crowd. The girl flops back like a doll, and what worries Nessa is that she makes no effort to cover her deformity.
But Nessa should be more worried about herself.
Almost everybody here has at some point been trained to kill. They have survived horrors beyond human imagination and, for some, the experience has taught them the worthlessness of life. Two of the strongest are facing Nessa now. A red-haired brute of a woman with a scar right across her nose, and a younger pale-skinned girl, her hair bleached and spiked, her bare left forearm deformed by the handprint of a Sídhe.
‘By Lugh, Mary.’ The spiky-haired woman is speaking the language of the enemy. ‘It’s strange the cripple should defend that little twist, isn’t it? Considering it was Doughnut who got her locked up here.’
‘What do you mean?’ Nessa asks.
‘That’s right, Ciara,’ says the red-headed Mary, grinning at Nessa’s confusion. ‘Doughnut made a deal with the Sídhe to cure her, and only when that fell through, she confessed. Says there are a lot more like her. Traitors. People who claimed to survive the Call.’
‘Only they didn’t survive, did they, Mary?’
‘Not really, Ciara, not really at all.’ She looks pointedly at Nessa’s legs. ‘Some of them couldn’t have made it through. Not without doing a deal with the enemy. There’s no other explanation, is there?’
And now they’re both looking at Nessa, grinning. Their shoulders tense, and this is a mistake, because how stupid of them! To signal their intention to fight like that. Nessa has never needed to wind up before delivering a punch; never needed to think it through. She simply acts.
Ciara goes down right away, with a chair leg in the side of her spiky-haired head. It’s enough to upset Nessa’s balance, but she saves herself by grabbing Mary’s shoulders and head-butting her hard on her scarred nose. Both of them fall together and when Ciara tries to rise, Nessa reaches over and uses every ounce of her considerable strength to squeeze the girl’s Sídhe-marked arm. The sound she makes shows just how much that hurts.
Finally there are guards everywhere, sharing out kicks and spraying jets of something that has women screaming and grabbing for their eyes.
Two men drag Nessa to her feet and hurry her down to the end of the hall and out through a security gate. She is breathing hard and not really paying attention to where they’re taking her. Instead she’s thinking about what those two bullies told her. How Melanie made a deal with the Sídhe. Nessa can’t believe it! That anybody would do such a thing. But Conor did, didn’t he? How many others can there be?
It’s a terrifying thought that the country could be brimful of people ready to betray their friends and families to the pitiless enemy. And then Nessa, normally so controlled, cries out loud enough that her two guards skid to a halt.
‘What’s wrong with her?’ one asks.
What’s wrong is that it’s only now coming home to her how suspicious her own survival must look. She gasps, her legs going suddenly loose and it’s all she can do not to heave up bile from her empty stomach.
‘There, missy,’ one of them says. For all the gentleness of his tone, he never relaxes his grip on her arm. ‘Come on now. We’ll be there in a minute, all right?’
Her throat constricts as though squeezed by a fist. It’s not just that everybody expected her to die. It’s far, far worse than that. Because the enemy, the Sídhe, actually helped her. They helped her! You could count on one hand the number of people altered in a positive way over the past twenty-five years.
Nessa will never be able to prove that they made her fireproof only to keep their promise to their ally, Conor. They saved her from the flames so that he alone would have the joy of killing her. Of course people think she’s a traitor! Everybody must be thinking it.
The guards drag her along like an empty sack, until Nessa, with every drop of willpower she has left, forces the fear from her face. She’ll figure it out. First though, she needs her self-control back. ‘I’m all right,’ she says. ‘I’ll stand.’
‘Good on ya, missy, but we’re here anyway.’
A door opens and Nessa finds herself in an office with a haggard old man behind a desk. He waves her to a halt. Then he smiles, but he has a phone pressed to his ear and whatever he’s hearing gets him frowning again.
‘Try to restart her heart,’ he says. Every word rises and falls in the sing-song accent of Cork. White tufts of hair grow from the ear she can see, and there’s more peeping out of each nostril. ‘I don’t care what it costs! For the love of God, boy, she’s fourteen! Just a girl … What? … I’m not accusing anyone of anything. But you think of it this way: she’s the only witness we have, and the minister will put both of us on boats if she dies.’
He replaces the receiver, but covers his eyes for a moment with the other hand. The hair in his nose rises and falls, rises and falls. Then he forces a smile onto his face and looks up.
‘Well,’ he says, ‘quite a splash you’ve made, girl.’ He coughs into a tissue, and the younger men who are still holding Nessa’s arms tighten their grip, forcing her to hide a wince. ‘Not so hard, lads, please!’
‘With respect, sir,’ one of the men replies, ‘you don’t know the training they’ve had. They’re always dangerous …’
‘I know, I know. But don’t hurt her. I mean, it’s not like …’ His eyes stray to Nessa’s legs, but to his credit he says nothing except, ‘Wait outside, lads. Please.
‘Well,’ the old man continues when they’re alone, ‘I know who you are, so let me introduce myself. I’m the warden. Mr Barry. As you can see, I’m in charge here. Running the last prison in the Nation.’ He waits, and Nessa waits too, but she’s better at this than he is and after no more than a few heartbeats he adds, ‘Normally they ask.’
‘Ask what, sir?’
‘Why this is the last prison.’
‘I didn’t think there were supposed to be any prisons at all, sir. They’re … uh, I heard rumours.’ She swallows. ‘Criminals are sent away in boats.’ And traitors too.
He nods slowly. ‘It doesn’t have to happen to you, you know.’
She stares, her mouth dry, not daring to reply.
‘You’re so young,’ he continues. ‘Of course you wanted to live! And in a gentler age, that’s exactly what you’d have been allowed to do. Nobody can blame you for … for any compromises you had to make.’
‘I didn’t betray the Nation, sir.’
But it’s her useless legs he’s looking at rather than her eyes, and when next he speaks, she has to lean forward to hear him.
‘You’re somebody’s daughter,’ he says, ‘and I can tell you, sure as God is in heaven, I miss my own and I wouldn’t have cared what she did if only she had come back alive. I would like to keep you alive too, Ms Doherty.’
‘You … you can do that?’
‘Our country has changed so much since my youth, girl. But there’s no point in looking back, is there? Because we live in a hard, hard place now. The Nation is desperate to live. Just like you were during your Call. And like you, it will cut any deal or any throat, just to get out of this intact. The sick? Useless mouths! Family pets? A source of food. Every beautiful tree cut down for fuel and every statue used as rubble for the roads.
‘And then there’s this prison, where thieves and wastrels are sent to … to …’ He wipes his brow. ‘Well, you know where they’re sent.’ At last he looks up and forces the smile back onto his face. ‘But there’s more to this prison than that, girl. We’re a second chance too. If anyone who comes through our doors can prove her worth, she’ll get to stay. Anybody! Why, the worst murderer in Irish history lives within these walls – a scientist. Unfortunately, she’s a … a …’ Nessa can see him biting his own tongue to stop what he’s about to say next. ‘It doesn’t matter what she is. That’s the point. What matters is her genius, that she’s the country’s leading expert on the Sídhe. She’s killed, and God forgive me, I’m sure she’ll kill again. But because we need her … Well, if we allow the likes of her to live, then, why not a child who had no choice in the crime she committed?’
‘Do I have to be a genius too, sir? To … to live?’
‘No, girl.’ He smiles. ‘For you, it will be much easier than that. All we need is information about the enemy. Tell us about the deal you made with them and I swear to you, for every nugget of information you give us, the ministry will allow you to stay here an extra week. I’ll fight them for more too! I don’t want to see you hurt.’
‘Sir …’ Nessa draws a deep breath. Her whole life is in the balance, but surely here she has found a reasonable and compassionate man. ‘There’s … there’s just one problem with that. I … I have no secrets to share with you because I am not a traitor. I would have died before, only—’
‘Please don’t do this,’ he says, visibly distressed. ‘Please … Look. Look, you have a few days grace to think about it. I’ll … I’ll do my best for you, Ms Doherty, that’s a promise.’
‘But, sir,’ her voice cracks, ‘it’s the truth, sir!’
‘But it’s not!’ he cries. ‘If only you could be honest. Don’t you want to live?’
She stumbles forward, stretching out to him, because he cares, she can see that, the distress clear in every line of his ageing face.
‘Get back!’ he says. ‘Guards! I’ve heard enough lying for one day. Guards!’
The two men arrive to drag her out the door.
Infestation
Anto doesn’t know what he’s doing in the country-side. Only a few hours before, he was waiting at the bus station for his girlfriend. But the guards who drove him out of the city have just pushed him through the door of a long low building. It’s warm inside and damp with the exhalations of two dozen … soldiers. That’s what they are. Men and women hurriedly checking weapons and stuffing kitbags.
Once, before the age of ten, the whole scene would have excited him. But he’s past that. All that matters now is that Nessa isn’t here. His arms, made to fight for her, to hold her, hang uselessly.
The draught of his entrance hits the soldiers. As one, they look up. The noise of their preparations, the hum of their chatter, comes to a sudden stop. His cheeks grow hot under their scrutiny.
Anto has seen soldiers before. They’re not supposed to wear their hair long like this lot, or to stuff their belts with so many wicked-looking knives. In his experience, they’re pudgy old men going to seed guarding warehouses; trudging alongside convoys of food making their way into the fading cities. But while many in the room have long seen the back of their thirtieth birthday – sporting scars, missing fingers or even ears – they look as trim as any teenager. They seem both frightening and frightened. How strange. The Call did its worst to them long ago. What could possibly worry them now?
They wear tattered uniforms of mottled green, and every one of them has a Stag’s Head on the shoulder. At least it resembles a stag, although Anto has never heard of deer with blazing red eyes and long, sharp teeth.
A woman at the nearest table looks up and sighs dramatically. ‘Oh, my poor sweetheart, were you looking for the playground?’
She stalks over to him. Her middle-aged frame has more than its share of muscle, and her dark-skinned face is hard too, totally at odds with the way she speaks, for her voice, her accent, belong surely to a white woman in petticoats, playing cards and sipping tea while her husband administers an empire.
She makes as if to shoo him towards the door, but then her eyes reach his left arm and widen.
‘Well, well,’ she whispers. ‘You are an odd little gentleman. Corless!’ The last word is a bark that makes Anto jump. It summons a hulking, scary-looking man with a charcoal cross drawn or maybe carved on to his forehead.
‘Sergeant?’ he rumbles.
‘Do let the good captain know that we have received a … a boy. By mistake.’
He lumbers off, utterly obedient to her ridiculously genteel demand. When she turns back to Anto, he spots three words tattooed in a column under her left eye. He’s heard of this custom, but never seen it. They’ll be the names of her children. The ones who didn’t come home. He forces himself to look away; he doesn’t want to read what’s written there.
Her dark eyes bore into him. ‘You dear little thing,’ she mutters. ‘You can’t be more than fifteen.’
‘Sixteen,’ he lies, and has no idea why he did that. Maybe because she’s so beautiful and scary at the same time. Like the Sídhe are, but the opposite of them too, for she is clearly ageing.
‘You’ve been trained to run, little boy,’ she continues, ‘and how delightful for you! Yet here …’ she has been speaking English up to this point, but switches now to Sídhe, ‘here we hunt a different type of boar. Here we—’
‘Leave him alone, Karim!’
A new man, tall enough for his head to scrape the low roof, has arrived. Old enough that sagging eyebrows threaten to blind him. Everybody moves out of his way though. Everybody except Sergeant Karim. He doesn’t seem to notice and steps around her as he would a particularly jagged piece of furniture.
‘The new recruit,’ he says.
‘A recruit, Captain? Surely not. He claims he’s sixteen. The infestation squad is no place for tiny children, however delightful they may be.’
‘What’s that to you, Sergeant?’ She grates on him, Anto can see that. ‘What’s that to any of us? Orders say he’s coming along tonight.’
‘But he’s staying in the truck, Captain.’
‘Of course. The boy can be the new mascot for all I care.’
The captain points Anto to an empty bench. ‘You sit there, son, until we’re ready to leave.’
‘I … I was told I had a mission.’
‘Were you, by God? A mission? Fair play to you, son. Stay the feck out of the way and do exactly what you’re told. That can be your mission. Understand?’
No. Anto doesn’t understand, but he does obey. He can’t make head nor tail of anything here. Not the gleaming weapons or the nerves. Not his presence either, because what Karim said is true. He doesn’t belong here, not for many years yet. His youth is an incredibly valuable resource in a dying country that can’t afford to waste anything.
He should be learning mechanics or farming. He should be getting married and having as many children as possible – or so the State would like. That’s what it normally demands, and the pressure it brings to bear to ensure such behaviour can be considerable. Not that anybody would have to pressure Anto! Now that he has found Nessa, he wants to do all those things.
The only purpose he could serve in a place like this is to get in the way. Sergeant Karim has made that very clear.
‘All right!’ the captain calls now.
And everybody except Anto knows what he means. Faces grim, they troop out the doors and into three trucks, each decorated with the disturbingly red-eyed stag. Engines sputter into life and the fried-food smell of bio-diesel clogs the air.
‘Come along, boy,’ says Sergeant Karim.
Anto is pushed into the last truck and shoved along like baggage until he’s right up behind the driver’s cab. He can hear the captain’s voice coming in over the radio. ‘Move out!’
And then, it’s off into the night. The soldiers whisper to each other in a bizarre mix of English and Sídhe and made-up words of their own. One of them, a skinny man with the twitching manner of a rat, pokes Anto in his massive left shoulder. ‘Did it hurt?’
Anto nods. It felt like his arm was being ripped off, not just once, but for the entire time the Sídhe woman was touching him. Her smile grew as she tortured him, and she whispered, ‘How marvellous! A giant! How I have longed for a giant of my own!’ Those are the words he hears in his dreams, and more than once he has woken in the stink of his own urine.
He doesn’t want to say any of that to the skinny man, but he doesn’t have to.
‘I’m Ryan,’ the soldier says. ‘Look.’ He bends over in the crowded space to show two spurs sticking out of his shoulder blades. They twitch as though they have a life of their own. Anto feels that way about his arm – that it’s not really his; that it doesn’t belong in this world at all.
‘They were going to make me into a bird, but I got away.’ The man shudders and twitches, although the event must be two decades in his past by now. ‘Doctors couldn’t cut them out without killing me. Have to sleep on my front.’
Ryan covers up again and they shake hands. ‘Thank you,’ Anto says. And he means it, because however useless he may feel, now he belongs.
They clatter over roads, passing the lights of farm dorms that Anto can only see in flashes through the open flap at the back of the truck. He hasn’t eaten in hours and nobody thinks to offer him anything.
‘Where are we?’ asks a hoarse voice. It’s Corless, the hulking man with the cross on his forehead and gleaming sweaty skin.
‘Meath,’ says Ryan.
‘The worst ones are always in Meath.’ Corless rubs at the cross.
‘The worst what?’ Anto wants to know.
‘That should be obvious,’ says Karim. ‘Infestations of course. But don’t you worry, dear. You shall have the big, big job of minding the truck. Don’t let anybody siphon off the diesel.’
Anto hangs his head.
‘She’s not so bad,’ Ryan whispers in his ear. ‘Honestly. You’ll see. She’s great.’ The soldier has no chance to say more. He’s interrupted by the captain’s voice coming in over the radio. ‘We’re pulling in by the field on the right. Everybody exit the vehicles. Extinguish all lights. It’s time for a hike.’
A moment later the truck swings over beside the two others.
‘Off we pop,’ says Karim, and as everybody rushes to obey, she turns back to Anto, ‘Stay put,’ she warns him. ‘We may be all night.’
‘OK.’
‘And let there be no sneaking after us. Some of the boys and girls are a little flighty and might shoot you. We’d all be devastated by the mistake of course.’
‘Uh, of course.’
Anto’s not the sort to sneak. Not like poor Squeaky Emma or Megan. He’ll hang out all night in the hopes that in the morning they’ll send him home again, or at least let him know where Nessa went. Oh, where is she? He’s hardly had a second to think of her all day.
The soldiers pile out of the truck and not one of them is speaking now, apart from the odd muttered prayer. Anto slides down the empty seats to look out of the flap. A full moon shows him moss-covered dry-stone walls with men and women clambering over them, ripping themselves free from brambles without so much as a curse.
What could possibly be out here? he wonders.
Time passes. Enough for the moon to rise a finger in the sky. He’s starving.
Since … since his experience, he needs so much more food than he used to. His arm needs it. Or so the doctors tell him. He’s hungry enough to eat the wooden benches, to chew on the leather straps, for all that he’s a vegetarian. But in the end what drives him outside is the shivering. The truck was never meant to stay warm, and the soldiers didn’t think to leave him so much as a blanket.
He jumps up and down a few times on the gritty ice of the roadside. He windmills his normal arm and does some of the back exercises the doctors gave him while his breath forms clouds through chattering teeth. The only distraction is the sight of a rabbit, and then another, running through a gap in the wall and sprinting across the road.
Anto laughs aloud. Are rabbits even nocturnal? Nessa would know, culchie that she is. He adds that question to the growing list of jokes and endearments he’s been saving up for her. But then the rabbits fall right to the back of the queue as another pair of shadows expose themselves to the moonlight. ‘Badgers!’ he cries. ‘By Crom! By Danú!’
And now a whole flood of animals are squeezing themselves past the wall: fieldmice, a fox, more rabbits, something that might be a weasel or a pine marten or Crom knows what. Above him are crows and bats and birds of every size and shape and slowly, slowly, Anto’s delight fades.
The infestation squad. Was it named for all these animals? Certainly, the wildlife of the countryside thrives now that both Ireland’s population and its industry are dying. But even a city boy like Anto knows something is terribly wrong here.
In the distance, far across the fields, a great crump sounds. Two more follow, each accompanied by a flash on the horizon. Next come tiny pops and cracks, like the snapping of twigs. And now the ground shakes through the thin soles of Anto’s shoes. It’s a rhythm, somehow familiar: the pounding, panicked heartbeat of a dying land. And in the moonlight Anto sees it: an inkblot that grows enormously quickly even as the tremors intensify.
It’s just another fleeing animal, he thinks. What else could it be? But then it reaches the edge of the field, and the dry-stone wall explodes. Rocks bigger than his head smash through the cab of the nearest truck, ripping apart the shrieking metal, shaking it on its axles. Other stones hurtle over the icy ground as though shot by a cannon, spraying splinters as they skip across the road.
And then silence.
Except for the breathing. A great bellows.
Anto finds himself on hands and knees with no memory of falling. Blood drips from his scalp and he realizes then that a stone must have clipped him. He crawls over to the wreckage, pulls himself up and looks round the edge of it.
The first truck stands completely unharmed, but the second has been thrown right into the next field. Anto doesn’t spare it a thought – how can he? – because all his attention is taken up by the bull. Its mighty boulder of a head whips from side to side in what must be fury, while thick mucus dribbles from nostrils that could hold a man’s fist.
The boy has seen minibuses that are smaller.
Moonlight glitters off its hide. Some of that is sweat, and some of it is darker, pooling on the ground beside it. It takes one step – away from Anto, thank God! – and then another. Limping. But a shot comes out of the darkness of the field and Anto fancies he can see where it hits the creature in the buttock. The bull roars. Anto cries out at the sound of it, stumbling backwards even as the beast whirls around and sees him there.
It charges: a tank of flesh. Its twisted horns are longer than he is. It barges through the wreckage to
