Where the World Turns Wild E-Book

Nicola Penfold

• Herausgeber: Little Tiger Press
• Kategorie: Für Kinder und Jugendliche
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 340

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

Juniper Greene lives in a walled city from which nature has been banished, following the outbreak of a deadly man-made disease many years earlier. While most people seem content to live in such a cage, she and her little brother Bear have always known about their resistance to the disease, and dream of escaping into the wild. To the one place humans have survived outside of cities. To where their mother is. When scientists discover that the siblings provide the key to fighting the disease, the pair must flee for their lives. As they cross the barren Buffer Zone and journey into the unknown, Juniper and Bear can only guess at the dangers that lie ahead. Nature can be cruel as well as kind... Will they ever find the home they've been searching for? A thrilling and thought-provoking ecological adventure from a fresh new voice in children's fiction. Perfect for fans of THE EXPLORER, THE LAST WILD and THE ISLAND AT THE END OF EVERYTHING.

Leseprobe

For Matilda, Daisy, Freddie and Beatrice, and the wild in all of you.

I wonder what would happen if every human on the planet were to fall asleep for one hundred years like the princess and her courtiers in Sleeping Beauty. The mass extinctions would end. The forests would return…Will [the trees] miss us when we’re gone? And who would tell them how beautiful they are?

From Oak and Ash and Thorn: The Ancient Woods and New Forests of Britain by Peter Fiennes

Contents

Title PageDedicationPraise For When the World Turns WildPart One - CityChapter OneChapter TwoChapter ThreeChapter FourChapter FiveChapter SixChapter SevenChapter EightChapter NineChapter TenChapter ElevenChapter TwelveChapter ThirteenChapter FourteenChapter FifteenChapter SixteenChapter SeventeenChapter EighteenChapter NineteenChapter TwentyChapter Twenty-oneChapter Twenty-twoChapter Twenty-threeChapter Twenty-fourChapter Twenty-fiveChapter Twenty-sixChapter Twenty-sevenChapter Twenty-eightPart Two - WildChapter Twenty-nineChapter ThirtyChapter Thirty-oneChapter Thirty-twoChapter Thirty-threeChapter Thirty-fourChapter Thirty-fiveChapter Thirty-sixChapter Thirty-sevenChapter Thirty-eightChapter Thirty-nineChapter FortyChapter Forty-oneChapter Forty-twoChapter Forty-threeChapter Forty-fourChapter Forty-fiveChapter Forty-sixChapter Forty-sevenChapter Forty-eightChapter Forty-nineChapter FiftyChapter Fifty-oneChapter Fifty-twoChapter Fifty-threeChapter Fifty-fourChapter Fifty-fiveChapter Fifty-sixChapter Fifty-sevenChapter Fifty-eightChapter Fifty-nineChapter SixtyChapter Sixty-oneChapter Sixty-twoChapter Sixty-threeChapter Sixty-fourChapter Sixty-fiveChapter Sixty-sixChapter Sixty-sevenChapter Sixty-eightThanksJoin Juniper and Bear on their Next Adventure…Between Sea and SkyBeyond the Frozen HorizonAbout the AuthorCopyright

Praise For When the World Turns Wild

“A sense of the natural world’s curative power runs through this adventurous story like a seam of gold.”

Guardian

“Some books are excellent story telling, and some books broaden your knowledge and mind, and some just ought to be written and this book is all three. I loved it.”

Hilary McKay, author of TheSkylarks’War

“A brilliant adventure that pulls you headlong into Juniper and Bear’s world, where survival depends upon finding the wild.”

Gill Lewis, author of Sky Hawk

“A fabulous debut with a powerful ecological message.”

AM Howell, author of TheGardenofLostSecrets

“A truly heartfelt and very striking novel.”

Darren Simpson, author of Scavengers

“A beautiful, memorable story about all the important things – love, family, loyalty and courage.”

Sinéad O’Hart, author of TheEyeoftheNorth

“Wondrous, warm-hearted, wildly exhilarating.”

Nizrana Farook, author of TheGirlWhoStoleanElephant

“This compelling book has future classic written all over it!”

Lindsay Galvin, author of TheSecretDeep

“This novel packs a powerful punch.”

Cath Howe, author of Ella on the Outside

Chapter One

Onceuponatime,almostfiftyyearsago,climatechangeand deforestationandhumansransackingeverythinggoodand beautiful,haddrivenourplanettobreakingpoint.Naturewasdying–plantsandtrees,animals,birds,insects–new speciesdisappearedeveryday.ButthentheReWilderscreatedthe disease.

It was grown in a lab by their best scientists and let loose in a population of ticks – eight-legged little creatures that hide in the undergrowth.

Thebeautyofthediseasewasnoanimalorbirdevergotsick,onlyhumansdid.Humansgotsosicktheydied.Lotsofthem.Andthediseasewassocomplex,soshifting,itwasimpossibletotreatandimpossibletovaccinateagainst.Theonlywayforhumanstosurvivewastoliveenclosedincities,shutawayfromallotherlivingthings.Andthat,ofcourse,hadbeentheReWilders’planallalong.Forintheabandoned 10wastelands outside the cities, nature could regrow, and it grew wilder and wilder.Wilder than ever.

ItwashumansortheWildandtheReWilderschosetheWild.Iwouldhavechosenittoo.

The glass tank is slippery in my hands and my cheeks burn red as I walk down the corridor from Ms Endo’s room. Stick insects. One of the city’s few concessions. Therapy for wayward kids. For us to concentrate on, to control our out-of-control imaginations. The Sticks are the last remedy in this place.

Before you’re sent to the Institute. That’s the next step. The cliff edge. There’s no going back from that.

There’s a whisper around me. Kids in my year and Etienne too, though he’s calling my real name – “Juniper! Juniper!”

They’re not going to forget this in a hurry. Juniper Green, getting the Sticks. But if I concentrate hard enough I can shut them out. I can shut them all out.

I grab my bag and storm past everyone – through the door and the playground, and across the road that separates Secondary from Primary. Bear will be glad of the insects at least.

But my brother’s not in the surge of bodies rushing out of his Year Two classroom. I catch the teacher’s eye quizzically 11and she beckons me over. “I’m sorry, Juniper. He’s in with Mr Abbott. You’ll need to go and collect him.”

I gulp and my eyes sting with held-back tears. Not Bear too.

Ms Jester looks at the tank. “Your turn for the stick insects, huh?”

She puts a hand on my shoulder. She was my teacher once. One of the good ones.

I nod vacantly and make my way down the corridor, keeping my gaze straight ahead. There are fractals on the walls either side – repeating patterns that are meant to be good for your brain. Soothing or something. Usually the fractals are OK, but today the grey geometric patterns leading to Abbott’s room make my eyes hurt.

The head teacher’s room is right at the top of the school – a glass observatory from where he can survey not just Primary and Secondary but the whole of the city almost. I take a deep breath, but even before I knock Abbott’s voice rings out from behind the door. “Enter!”

I go in, leaving the stick insects outside so he doesn’t have another reason to gloat. The Sticks are Ms Endo’s thing. Abbott wouldn’t allow them if he had his way. They’re not meant as punishment – Ms Endo’s our pastoral support worker and she’s not like that – but still everyone knows. I’m on my final warning. One more slip up and I’ll be sent to the Institute. 12

Bear’s curled in a plastic chair – his eyes rimmed red, his cheeks blotchy and swollen. I rush over. “Bear! What’s happened?”

“Your family is surpassing itself, June. Twice in one day,” Abbott chimes, signalling an empty chair. But Bear’s not going to let me disentangle myself now, so I sit on the same chair and Bear folds himself into me, his head pressed against my chest. He’s shaking.

“I’m afraid it was another disruptive day for your brother,” Abbott says, frowning at Bear, who’s completely turned away from him, his hands over his ears.

“OK,” I say, wary, stroking Bear’s long dark locks. The curls the other kids rib him for.

“I’ve made several attempts to contact your grandmother.”

“She’ll be in the glasshouse. She never hears the phone in there.”

Abbott glares at me – his porcelain face cracked, like the vases you get in the Emporium, the old junk store just around the corner from our block. “Then make sure she checks her messages. We have to come up with a plan. Your brother’s becoming increasingly difficult to control.”

Use his name, I shout silently at Abbott. It’s because he hates it, the same way he hates mine. Animals, trees, flowers – our city forbids them all, so I’m always June to Abbott. Plain, ordinary June.

“What happened?” I ask instead. 13

“Your brother threw a chair. It could have hit another child.”

“It didn’t?”

“That’s not the point. He’s wild.” Abbott leans in closer and I can smell the carbolic. It’s coming right out of his pores.

“He’d like to be,” I say, nervous, wishing Annie Rose was here. She wouldn’t hold back. Not when it comes to Bear. Well, of course he won’t sit at a table all day and be quiet. He’s a child. He needs to be outside more!

Abbott looks astonished. To him any defence is just impertinence. “I think we’ve heard enough on that subject for one day!”

The whispered hiss of the other kids comes back to me.

It’s coming up to fifty years since the city declared itself tick free and our citizenship class had been asked for essays. ‘Reasons to be proud’. The best ones were to be read out before the whole of Secondary. I should have known Abbott would get involved. Get involved and twist everything around.

What was I even thinking? ‘The beauty of the disease’. ‘Choosing the Wild’. I gave Abbott a plate of gold when I handed in that essay.

“Bear wouldn’t want to hurt anyone,” I go on, quieter now. If you knew him, I think. If you could see him with the plants in our glasshouse. 14

“Perhaps you’d care to see a clip of him this afternoon.”

“No,” I say quickly. “I don’t need to.”

But it’s already playing. On the white screen Abbott has waiting on his desk for the ritual shaming, the humiliating rerun of misdemeanours.

Bear’s a different person on that screen. Like a caged animal, if we even knew what that looked like any more.

“I’d really rather not watch,” I say. I can feel Bear’s heart racing – fast, fast, too fast. His fingers are pale from holding them against his ears so tightly that not one decibel goes in. I want to pick him up and carry him away, but I’ve had enough warnings today about where rebellions lead.

I wish I could shut my eyes, like Bear has, but Abbott’s gaze doesn’t leave my face. He’s watching my reaction. He’s enjoying this.

On screen, Bear’s thrown a pot of crayons across the floor – scattered them, like a broken rainbow. Ms Jester’s come over, smiling, but cautiously. The other children have formed an arc. Leering around him, they’re laughing, expectant.

“Why did he do that?” I ask. “Bear loves drawing. Something must have upset him.”

Abbott remains silent. I can hear the chant through the speakers.

“Through the city storms an angry bear.”

The on-screen Bear is bristling. If he was a bear, all the 15hairs on his body would be raised.

“Shall we pick these up?” Ms Jester’s saying. She’s kneeling down to help him, but the chant’s getting louder.

“An angry bear

Withhislongbrownhair.

Sendhim back! Send him back!

Send him back to the forest!”

“Class, please! Quiet!” Ms Jester’s begging them but Bear’s already starting to shriek. Hands over his ears, he’s opened his mouth as wide as he can and he’s screaming.

The children explode into laughter – they’re pointing and coming closer. It’s not an arc any more, it’s a circle and Bear’s in the middle of it – screaming, lashing out.

“Please turn it off,” I say to Abbott. My tears are coming now.

“This is the part, here,” he says dispassionately.

That’s when Bear breaks free of me. He runs out of the room and down the stairs, and I go after him, I have to, only just remembering to pick up the Sticks on my way. So I never see Bear picking up that chair. I never see whether he meant to hurt anyone. I wouldn’t blame him if he had.

Chapter Two

“Bear! Wait! Slow down!”

He’s fast, my little brother. In a couple of years he’s going to be way faster than me. He’s over the playground already, hurtling across the Astro to the school gate.

“Wait, Bear! I’ve got the phasmids! I’m bringing them home.” Despite himself, Bear starts to slow at that. “The phasmids, Bear! Like you wanted!”

He turns around, his eyes on the tank in my hands. The vivarium.

“Wow, Ju. What did you do?” he asks breathlessly. There’s a gleam in his eye.

“I wrote something they didn’t like.”

“I drew something they didn’t like,” Bear says, proudly now.

“What did you draw?”

“Trees. In the city. What did you write?”

“Something about the ReWild. I tried to defend it.”

“Ju!” Bear’s look jolts me. I’ve gone too far even for him.

You can’t say the things I wrote in that essay – you can’t have those views. The ReWilders can’t be anything but bad. Terrorists. Traitors to their own species. Only sometimes you have to stand up for what you believe in. Last night, something had turned in my brain and I just couldn’t write an essay of lies.

“But you got the Sticks, Ju!” Bear says, peering into the vent. “How many are there?”

“Five, Ms Endo said. But I’ve only seen two so far.”

“What will you call them, Juniper?”

“You can help me choose.”

“Can I?” He looks at me, completely grateful and excited. I love him so much it scares me.

“Let’s get out of this place, Bear.”

“Skedaddle?” he says.

“Scarper,” I join in, and we ping back all the words we can for leaving as we wind our way through the estates to the south edge of the city where our apartment is.

Bear’s amazing for six. He knows as many words as me, he just won’t write them down. The only mark-making he’ll do at school are his drawings and then he always gets into trouble for drawing the wrong things.

Trees in the city. Make-believe.

By the time our leave-takings are all used up – the fleeing

and the bolting and the bunking and the disappearing – we’re almost there.

You can spot our building a mile off because of the tall glass dome at the back. We call it the Palm House. That’s what it was once, for the old Victorian mansion block where we live. We have a tiny apartment on the ground floor where the entrance to the Palm House is. There are no palms now. They’re banned species. They need too much water. It’s just cacti and sedums. Succulents. The plants that require least water of all and could leach nutrients out of a stone if they needed to. Still, they’re the best things about this city.

My grandmother’s a licensed Plant Keeper. People need to see green things. It’s a medical fact. So the Keepers are tasked with growing safe species – plants adapted for dry, desert conditions, plants the ticks would never go for – to be distributed through all the estates. Into the schools and workplaces and hospitals. A fix of green for people’s windowsills.

“Annie Rose!” I call as we go into the Palm House. She doesn’t stand for being called Grandma or Nanny or anything like that – she’s always just wanted to be Annie Rose. “We’re home!”

“Juniper berry! Bear cub!” Annie Rose’s voice sings out. “Come find me!”

I’m thirteen now but I still love this game. This must be

the best place in the city for hide-and-seek. Old towering cacti, dense mats of sedums, we creep through them. Bear runs ahead silently. He’s learned to pad.

I know from Annie Rose’s squeal when he’s found her. I see his tousle of hair lifted up, triumphant – black against her beautiful silver-grey. “How was your day, Bear?”

Bear grunts and pulls away, and a shadow falls across Annie Rose’s face though her eyes stare blankly ahead like always. “Not good, huh?” she asks.

“I hate school,” Bear growls.

“You’re home now.” She reaches out to find him. “I’m going to be sick tomorrow.”

“No, Bear!” I say, pleading. “It just makes it worse.” He’s had too many days off already. Any more and we’ll have Educational Welfare coming round, asking questions.

“Come into the kitchen,” Annie Rose says gently. “Let’s make tea.”

“No,” Bear says. “Never!” And he’s off through the plants – howling, squawking, screeching. Every animal noise he knows.

“You come then, Juniper.” Annie Rose sighs and puts her arm out for me to take. I try and manoeuvre the tank to one side so she doesn’t notice, but it’s wide and the edge clangs against her. “What’s that?” she asks, feeling the smooth surface with her hands.

There’s no point lying. The school always leaves a message

when anyone gets the Sticks. The beeping on our answer machine will be furious today if Annie Rose hasn’t already silenced it.

“Ms Endo gave me the phasmids,” I say quietly.

“Oh, Juniper.” Annie Rose sounds sad but there’s not a hint of anger. This is what I love about her most. She’s always on our side.

Chapter Three

“How could a piece of writing get you in so much trouble?” Annie Rose asks, when I tell her about Abbott’s reaction to my essay. “You write so well. All those words you know.”

“It was about the ReWild.”

I watch the confusion in Annie Rose’s face change to something else. Fear, I think.

“He made me read it out in assembly, Annie Rose. In front of the whole of Secondary. Only not all of it. Not the things I most wanted to say.”

It was the first part I wanted them to hear. Where I wrote about what the world had been like once – the magnificence of it, the beauty. I’d stayed up for hours working on that bit – crafting it, re-crafting. Pulling words from the thin yellowing pages of our old dictionary, looking them up again in the thesaurus section at the back, changing them for other words. I needed to get 22it right. To do it justice. If they could imagine it. If, just for once, the kids in my school could be allowed to hear about it, to know about it, then they’d see things differently. They’d know why the natural world had to be saved. At any cost.

But Abbott hadn’t let me read that part. Or the next, where I named all the things humans were doing back then. The long list of ecological disasters. The burning of fossil fuels. Greenhouse gases. Deforestation. The oceans filled with plastic. Overfishing. Toxic waste. Pesticides. Overflowing landfill. Rivers of oil and chemicals. Fracking. Etc., etc., on and on, ad infinitum. And the one common factor in all those things. The one undeniable culprit. Us.

Someone had to stop people from ruining everything.

Annie Rose sounds nervous. “What did you write, Juniper?”

“I said the ReWilders chose the Wild over humans.”

“And?”

I say the next words quickly. “I said I would choose it too. I would choose the Wild. Over people.”

“And Abbott made you read that out?”

“Yes. He said I would condemn everyone to the disease. To the ticks.”

He did worse than that. He brought up a montage of old film on the screen at the front of the hall. A hospital corridor lined with metal trolleys and writhing, desperate 23people. A young mother cradling her dead child and herself sweating with fever. A mass grave. A crowd of mourners.

I’d stood there in front of the moving pictures, the sadness spilling out from the crackly old speakers, and Abbott had, in his finest preacher voice, listed the symptoms that followed a tick bite. The circular weals on the skin. The fever. The shakes. The vomiting. The diarrhoea. The bleeding that signified the final collapse of your internal organs. Young and old it was the same. The disease didn’t discriminate.

Then still with the mass grave behind him and the keening of the mourners through the speakers, Abbott had pointed to me and calmly said, “This. This is what you would choose. This is what you find beautiful, June Green?”

“No,” I’d said. “No.” And I hadn’t cried in front of them, even though I’d wanted to. I’d tried to explain. “That’s not what I meant. There was just no other way. We were killing ourselves already. The Earth’s our home. We need it as much as any other species.”

Abbott had shut me down and ordered me into the central aisle of kids, who bent away in a wave like I was diseased, like I was dangerous. And they began their chorus. Their whispered words. Freak.Feral.Wilding.Which I’m used to by now. Same as Bear. But today there were other words. Traitor.Terrorist.Murderer.

I’d walked down the aisle to my class and stood trying to 24find where my space had been as my classmates bunched together and looked up at me with scared, accusing eyes. Traitor.Terrorist.Murderer.

I don’t tell Annie Rose all this. Of course I don’t. “The whole school hates me now.” That’s what I say.

“I’m sure they don’t actually hate you.”

“They do, Annie Rose!”

Annie Rose sighs. “Sit down, Juniper.” She takes my hair – the two long plaits I weave each morning to keep my hair out of my eyes when I paint – and she twirls it round her hand like it’s precious silk. “Abbott deliberately took your words out of context!”

“Maybe they weren’t out of context. Maybe most people deserved to die!”

“Juniper!”

“What, Annie Rose? We had our chance. We pretty much killed everything. We were killing ourselves too. The disease gave nature a chance to recover and that’s good, isn’t it? That’s a good thing.”

Annie Rose’s face is contorted, like she wants to nod and shake her head at the same time. “Not to Abbott. Not to Portia Steel.”

I roll my eyes. “Didn’t it give Steel exactly what she wanted? The chance to swoop in and save everyone? Our president protector?”

Annie Rose smiles, despite herself. “Oh, Juniper! Things 25were different when the disease first came. Steel was different. Cities were collapsing everywhere. Armageddon really had come. Portia Steel stepped up to save us.”

“I know, I know!” I drawl. “The Buffer Zone. Glyphosate Patrol. Burying the rivers underground.” That was what our citizenship essays were meant to be. Ovations to our acclaimed leader, Portia Steel. We’re meant to be proud of her because she made it all happen. Other cities didn’t fare so well, but ours triumphed. We eliminated the disease entirely.

But power corrupts. Annie Rose says that’s one of the oldest stories of all.

She laughs softly. “The venom in you, sometimes, Juniper. You remind me so much of your mum.” Then she sighs again. “You have to be careful. You have to be more careful than anyone else.”

“I know that.”

“Do you?” she asks, turning her face towards to me like she really can see.

“Yes. Of course I know.”

“You have to try and fit in. You and Bear both.”

“But we don’t, Annie Rose.”

I look at the picture on our kitchen wall. It’s a hut by a lake surrounded by mountains. I drew it when I was little and anyone who saw it would think I conjured up the whole thing from my head, from a child’s outlandish imagination. But it’s real. It’s where Bear and I were born. 26A faraway valley called Ennerdale in a land of lakes and mountains.

So maybe we are freaks and we’ll certainly never fit in here. We’re transients, visitors, imposters. We came from the Wild and one day we’ll go back there.

“No one would have listened to my stupid essay anyway. I don’t know why I bothered,” I say.

Annie Rose’s voice is tired. She’s been through this so many times before. “Juniper, you’ve got to give the other children a chance. They’re not to blame. They don’t know any different. When I was young…”

“You went on marches to save the world,” I cut in. “I know, Annie Rose.”

Annie Rose looks sad. “The kids at your school have never known what nature is. It’s not their fault. Don’t be so hard on them, Juniper. You’re as prickly as the cacti sometimes!”

I scowl, but Annie Rose can’t see scowls. The lenses in her eyes are clouded over like frosted glass. I get this sudden gush of love – love and guilt and sadness, everything mixed up together like the colours in my paint palette. “I’ll try, Annie Rose.”

She squeezes my hand. “You’re a good girl, Juniper. Don’t let them tell you any different. Now come on. Scoot! I have to call that ridiculous head teacher about your brother.”

Chapter Four

Bear’s peering over the Sticks. Ms Endo was right. There are five. Only two of any significant size though. I make Bear leave the small ones in the tank. It’s not that I think he’ll hurt them – years of plant-tending have taught us both how to be careful. It’s because I’m worried we’ll lose them. That they’ll slip away and I’ll have failed from the start at my redemptive project.

“Look at this one, Ju!” Bear says, excited, as the largest insect climbs on to his hand. “Who shall he be?”

“How do you know it’s a boy, Bear?” I ask, rolling my eyes.

“Cause he’s so fierce!”

“I think she’s Queen of the Sticks. Queen Lady Jane Grey,” I pronounce in a solemn voice, remembering an old history lesson.

Bear nods approvingly, repeating my words. “Queen Lady Jane Grey. Who’s the other big one then?” 28

“He’s for you to name.”

“I’m going to call him Phantom. Cause they’re ghosts, aren’t they, the Sticks?”

“Yes. Phasmids, that’s what it means. Ghosts. They’re so good at camouflaging themselves they can disappear. What about the little ones?”

Bear’s nose wrinkles, the way it does when he’s thinking. “I don’t know, Ju. I don’t reckon they look much like anyone yet.”

“Let’s call them Stick, Twig and Leaf for now.”

“You’re funny, Ju.” Bear sits down next to me, Queen Lady Jane Grey still walking herself slowly up his arm. “I’m sorry about school,” he says in a quiet voice.

“No, Bear,” I say, stroking his hair, looping it round my fingers. “You just had a bad day. I had a bad day too. Some days are like that.”

“The kids in my class say I’m wild. They say I should be sent back.”

I pull a face. “They don’t know what they’re talking about. They don’t have the slightest idea about the Wild.”

“We do.”

“A little. But we can’t talk about it at school, can we?”

Bear shakes his head. “It’s our secret, Ju. Yours and mine and Annie Rose’s.”

“And Mum and Dad’s,” I whisper. Tears have spilled into my eyes and there’s a pain all around my heart. Our parents

sent us here to keep us safe. We’re here for our benefit – it wasn’t that they didn’t want us. Only none of that stops you feeling abandoned.

“When will they come for us?” Bear asks.

“One of these days,” I say looking away, out into the green sea of plants.

“I’m fed up of waiting.”

I squeeze him tight. “Me too, Bear.”

“Careful, Ju. You’ll crush Lady Jane! I’m going to show her round. This can be her kingdom!” He gets up and spins away from me.

Chapter Five

I walk through the Palm House row by row, checking for signs of disease. At the furthest end from the house, the tallest plants are stacked together. Too close really – it can make them prone to blight and mildew to be so confined. But they’re our screen. We don’t want to see what they’re hiding.

Most places in the city there’s a wall, but where there’s a building they don’t bother. Our building is made of glass so we can see right out to the three-mile-wide stretch of rocks and gravel that rings our city, drenched in herbicide and insecticide to keep the ticks away. The Buffer Zone.

There’s a space at the back of the plants. A little space, where you can be right up against the glass. I push the plants aside, ignoring the prickling on my arms.

I don’t look at the Buffer, I never do – it sends a chill right down my neck. I only look beyond. Right to the 31horizon where I swear I see the beginning of green. That’s where the Wild begins.

I was there four whole years before Mum brought me to the city. Even though I’d stayed healthy all that time, Mum and Dad were still worried about the disease. That’s what Annie Rose says.

Sometimes I wonder if that’s true. Maybe they were just fed up of having a kid to look after. But maybe not, or maybe afterwards they regretted sending me away, because a few years later they had Bear.

Then they gave him up too. Bear was only two years old. We never saw who brought him. A knock on the door at night, footsteps scurrying away and a small child in the doorway, clutching a crumpled note. Crying.

Dear Annie Rose. This is Bear. He’s for Juniper.Take care ofhim, and our Juniper Berry. Marian and Gael xx

Gael’s our dad, but I don’t remember him at all.

Annie Rose has photos hanging around of Mum. Her Marian. Only they’re all blurred and faded, and you can’t really know someone from a photo.

It’s Emily that makes me feel closest to Mum. This old rag doll with starry eyes and a cotton dress that looks like a meadow. Her face isn’t happy but it isn’t sad either. It’s kind of thoughtful. Wistful. Like she’s remembering something. Something worth remembering.

I keep Emily on my bed and even though I’m way past 32doll age, sometimes I still talk to her. Tell her things. About how wound up and trapped I always feel. About all the things I’m forgetting from out there. How I’m worried one day inside my head will be as grey and concrete as the city.

The doll’s the most precious thing I own, apart from Bear of course. And he’s not really mine. Bear doesn’t belong to anyone. He’s as wild as they come.

That’s why Annie Rose and I both ignore so much of what school tells us when they say he won’t sit down to be taught, that he won’t form letters or write numbers or even draw anything they want him to draw. We don’t want him taming.

Babies develop according to their environment. That’s one of the most incredible things about being human – how adaptable we are when we’re small. Those first formative months. That’s why all the other kids can stand living here. Nature has been banned from the cities, and they hardly mind at all because they grew up in this grey concrete metropolis.

And that’s why Bear and I hate it so much. Because when we were little our brains got used to trees and flowers and animals, and even though we can’t really remember much of all that, this whole city is a cage for us.

I don’t think our parents are really coming back for us. Not now. I think it’s too risky. But that’s OK. As soon as Bear’s old enough for the journey, we’re breaking out of the city ourselves.

33

Chapter Six

“Juniper!” Annie Rose calls and I slink back into the kitchen. “Can you get me down a jar of Rainbow Mix?”

Our kitchen is the most impractical food preparation space ever. Most of it is taken up with this old wooden table, then around the edges are shelves. Only the lower ones are full of books, not food. Our kitchen’s a library really.

Most of the books are forbidden now. There’s too much nature in them. A few years ago, Portia Steel, in her wisdom, outlawed even ‘descriptions and depictions’ of the Wild.

I scrape our wooden stool along the floor deliberately and stand on tiptoes to reach the Rainbow Mix. It’s right up by the ceiling.

I place the jar on the work surface with a thud. “Yummy! My favourite!”

The label shows carrots and sweetcorn and beetroot cut 34improbably into stars, but when you open it up, when you actually see what’s inside, the colours are muted and the shapes are mushy and don’t hold together. “You wouldn’t eat it if you could see it,” Bear tells Annie Rose every time she tries to get him to try some.

“Thanks, Juniper,” Annie Rose says, ignoring my sarcasm.

She’s buttering bread – a layer of grease on a solid square of congealed mycoproteins.

“I got through to Abbott,” she says.

“And?” I prompt.

“He said Bear overreacted to some harmless rhyme at school.”

“Harmless?” I boil. “How dare he? If you had heard it! If you had seen Bear on that screen. How scared he was.”

“Abbott gave me a rundown of your essay too. He enjoyed that.”

I flush. Of course he would.

Annie Rose opens her mouth to speak, then stops. When she talks her voice is measured. “There was something else too. He was talking about your blood. Yours and Bear’s. Maybe they can’thelpit,ifit’sintheirblood.Maybethat’swhatweshouldbedoingsomethingabout.”

I laugh. “Do something about? You can’t change what we are. As much as Abbott would want to.”

Pretty much everyone who ever came into contact with the disease died, but there were a few miraculous 35exceptions. People who had resistance to it. We learned about it in biology. Some freak sequence of amino acids that gave you immunity. Scientists had tried to replicate it in the lab but they couldn’t. You have to be born with resistance. Like Bear and I were.

Annie Rose frowns. “Abbott was hiding something, Juniper. And taunting me with it. The man’s draconian.”

A little voice pipes up behind us. “Is tea ready? I’m starving!”

Annie Rose smiles. “We were waiting for you, Bear cub! This table’s missing its knives and forks. Where were you?”

“Draconian. Like a dragon, Annie Rose?” Bear asks.

“Oh, much worse than a dragon,” Annie Rose says, and Bear starts parroting ‘draconian’ round the kitchen as he lines up the cutlery.

“What would I do without you two?” Annie Rose laughs, but her face crumples as she realizes what she’s said.

Annie Rose had a blood test right after the ReWild. She’s always known she doesn’t have resistance to the tick disease. She knows Bear and I will leave one day and she’s gathered the things we’ll need for the journey, but she’ll never be able to come with us. When Bear and I go back to the Wild, we’re leaving Annie Rose for good.

Chapter Seven

We do the bedtime ritual together, Annie Rose and I. Pyjamas, teeth, hair – tousling Bear’s curls into some kind of shimmery order – and though we barely fit any more, all three of us, we squeeze into Bear’s room.

When he came to us, Bear wouldn’t settle in a bed. Every night he rolled off and woke crying, so instead Annie Rose made this little nest in the smallest room of all, a cupboard really, with a mattress on the floor and painted stars on the ceiling.

I was a different person then. My behaviour record was immaculate. Exemplary. But the real me was hiding. When Bear came, he brought me back to life. His energy and spirit, they woke mine back up. I could smell the Wild on him. I could hear it in his voice.

Annie Rose gave me paints and brushes and asked for the stars, but I didn’t stop at that. I got out Annie Rose’s 37old wildflower book and painted them around the walls so Bear could see them – ferns and forget-me-nots, cow parsley, harebells and foxgloves, poppies and cornflowers. His own meadow.

I did it for him. For Bear – this tiny brother, this creature who had miraculously been brought to me, with his big open heart and all that energy coursing through him.

I was out in the Wild twice as long as Bear but Bear kept hold of it better, like he kept hold of his curls. Like the curls are his wildness.

Bear thrusts a book into my arms. “It’s Kingfisher tonight, Ju!”

BirdsoftheWorld. I look down at the amazing winged creatures on the cover. It’s Bear’s favourite book, even though he knows every single bird already. But then Bear knows most nature things. Acorn, buttercup, conker, daisy. That’s Bear’s alphabet. The only one he’s ever bothered learning.

He points to the kingfisher on his wall, flying over the meadow. “It’s on its way to the river, Ju. Remember? For fish.”

“Yes,” I say and I stare at it, all blue and orange and cyan. I painted all kinds of birds, but it’s the kingfisher I’m most proud of. Tears mist up my eyes. “I’m going out. Annie Rose can read tonight, Bear.”

Bear sits bolt upright. “Ju! You love kingfishers!” 38

“I’m going out,” I repeat flatly.

Annie Rose places her hands on Bear’s shoulders. “Let your sister go. I’ll tell you all about kingfishers. I saw one once, when I was very little. It must have been one of the last of all.”

“Did it have a fish, Annie Rose?” Bear asks, wide-eyed, lying down to listen, even though he’s heard it a thousand times before.

Annie Rose’s voice floats after me as I go to the kitchen table to pick up my sketchbook and pencil. “You do just mean the Palm House, Juniper?”

“Of course,” I say. “I know the rules.”

39

Chapter Eight

In the night, Bear comes into my bed. He’s half asleep, rubbing his eyes. Usually I go straight back to my dreams but tonight I can’t. I’m worried about Bear, but I’m worried about me too. I’m lying awake, listening to the generators and the city sirens that call out above everything whenever there’s any kind of alert. Someone breaking Curfew. Disturbance at the Buffer. Trouble in the Warren. You never really find out.

“Camouflage,” Ms Endo said, when she put the tank of phasmids in my arms. “That’s what you could learn from them. You’ve got to keep your head down, Juniper. Blend in a bit. Has something happened you want to talk about?”

“No,” I’d said, but I’d stopped there because how could I explain? It’s not one thing – it’s everything. Everything’s just gone on too long. Each long day at school like the one before and the one before that. Everything regulation. 40Everything the same.

When it’s cold, they turn the heating up. When it’s hot, they put the air-con on. When it’s dark, all the city lights illuminate to make it exactly as bright as the day before, for the exact same period of time. Until switch-off. 8pm. Curfew. That’s when our days end. When the wail of the siren sounds. The klaxon.

I know it’s autumn because it’s the end of October and I’m eight weeks into Year Eight, but there are no leaves to colour and fall and in our crowded, clean city the cold never really penetrates too much. The breaks go up if it’s windy, the canopies if it rains.

And every morning I’m waking from my dreams of an altogether different kind of canopy of branches and leaves, and I think I can’t stand it any more. Another day in this city.

Then I think of Annie Rose and the hard place inside me softens a little.

When the Buffer went up, it was the Plant Keepers who kept a link to the outside. Most of the ReWilders had left the city by then. They’d taken their chances out there and most had already died. Not just from the disease. Hunger. Cold. Annie Rose said humans had forgotten what it was like to survive off-grid.

A few of them found Ennerdale though and for a while the ReWilders kept up communication with the Plant Keepers. 41Supplies came in, supplies went out. Messages. And, in our case, children.