| |
The room was tiny, no more than a yard square, with a door opposite the one I had come through. The walls were a neutral grey, and there were vents in the floor and ceiling.
‘Brace yourself,’ said Corina, and before I could open my mouth to ask for what, a gale struck me from above, roaring in my ears and battering against my head and shoulders. From below, warm, damp air shot up the legs of my trousers. My ears ached, and the air smelt like stagnant water.
‘Now what?’ I asked, distracted by the odour.
‘We have to get you out of that area and change your clothes again. If I can make you look like one of the Aides, then nobody will look twice. Turn right, then press the thumb pad on the fourth panel on your left. It’s an elevator. Take it to level 16, then get out.’
I followed my instructions, trying to walk purposefully without hurrying. A couple of people passed me but gave me no more than a cursory look. I found the panel, although I nearly went to the one on my right, not my left, and waited for the elevator to arrive. My heart was hammering and I couldn’t seem to get enough air. I was inside the Dag ship. Actually inside, and getting deeper. But if I was inside, how come I hadn’t seen a Dag yet? How come everybody was still human? Were they the Stolen? They didn’t look like it. Perhaps it was connected to...
The elevator stopped, breaking my train of thought, and I got out when the doors opened. ‘Where now,’ I asked Corina, and for a moment I was sure that there had been something else I meant to bring up. It was on the tip of my tongue, but then it disappeared like mist in the morning.
‘Left,’ said Corina, then ‘No, Jax, your other left.’
I looked to either side, confused, then realised I had turned the wrong way.
‘Sorry,’ I muttered, and turned around. I shambled along for a few minutes, then Corina had me stop, open a door, and step into a room that looked a lot like her bedroom; plain, functional, monotonal. There was a bed, or a bench – I didn’t really care what — and I sat on it. I was bushed. I guess all my late nights and all my worrying had caught up on me, because I could barely keep my eyes open. I leaned my elbows on my knees and tried to get my breath.
‘Jax!’ Corina was yelling at me and I had no idea why.
‘What?’
‘Pay attention.’
‘I am.’
She made a humph, sounding like Aunt Trude. ‘Get to the closet. Ask for a new uniform.’
‘Do what?’
Now it was an exasperated noise. ‘Order yourself some clothes.’
‘You can shout all you like, but I still don’t know what you’re talking about. We just get clothes delivered to us once a week.’
Corina went quiet for a moment. ‘Sorry. I’ll see if I can do it from here.’
I grunted and lay back on the bed. My head was killing me, and the last time my lungs had burned this bad was when the lifts had broken down at home and I had walked up all the stairs from our commons to my secret room. I only shut my eyes for a moment before Corina was yelling inside my head again.
‘Jax? You have to get up Jax.’
‘Innaminnt.’
The halo whumped inside my head. It was annoying, but not enough to make me get up. I was wasted, the bed was really comfy, and I didn’t see what all the fuss was about. The halo whumped again, but this time there were two spikes of pain, one in each temple.
‘Ow. What was that for?’ I opened my eyes and raised my head, but it seemed too much effort and I let it drop back to the bed.
‘Get up!’ Corina snapped, and sent more spikes into my head. ‘If you don’t you will die.’
I was sure she said die. Almost. Can’t have been, though. I was in a nice quiet room on a comfy bed having a nap. Couldn’t get much safer. Then Corina stabbed knives into my head again, over and over, shouting all the time. I pulled myself together enough to listen to her in the hopes I could make her bugger off.
‘Jax, get off the bed and onto your feet. You have to get to the closet. I forgot about the air. You’re inside now. The air will kill you if you don’t get a filter. There is one in the closet.’
OK, so that was serious. I pulled myself up off the bed and fell straight to my knees. That hurt. Why would I be so stupid as to hurt my knees? And why would I feel so tired? All I did was get off the bed. Pain again, but in my head. Made me think I ought to remember...
‘The closet, Jax. I can open it for you, but you have to reach in and get the filter.’
That was it. Something important about a filter. I raised my head, which weighed a ton, and saw a hole in the wall. I crawled towards it, but it seemed a long way away. Corina kept yelling rah-rahs inside my head and I wished she would shut up.
About an hour later — well, that’s how it felt – I got to the closet and looked inside. On top of a pile of folded clothes was a box. There was a thin tube running from the box, making a long loop. I picked it up, but it made no sense to me so I sat back against the bed and looked at it again. If I closed my eyes and took a nap it would make more sense when I—
Ow! These pains in my head were really starting to annoy me. Part of me knew they were Corina’s fault.
‘Jax, find the nozzles at the end of the tube. Find them and put them in your nose.’
‘When I find you, I’m going to pinch your arm,’ I said. Seemed fair to me after the way she was needling my head.
‘What? Oh. All right, Jax. If that’s what you want. You have to find the nozzles first.’
I ran the tube through my fingers, dropped it, started again, and eventually found the pokey-out-bit Corina must have meant. And I was supposed to put this up my nose? It wouldn’t go very far. I decided it couldn’t hurt to try, and was rewarded with a whiff of fresh, cool air. I breathed in deeply, and started to cough.
‘Don’t let go, Jax. Keep it to your nose. Don’t breathe through your mouth. The coughing is your body trying to get rid of the bad air.’
Three or four breaths later my head began to clear, though my brain still pounded inside my skull, pulsing in time with my racing heart.
‘Loop the tube over your ears, then ease the little slider up until it all stays in place,’ said Corina. ‘Oh, I’m so sorry, Jax. I don’t know how I could have forgotten that. The carbon dioxide levels here are much higher than you are used to.’
I fiddled with the tube, caught on to the idea of how to fix it in place, then levered myself back up onto the bed. I hadn’t a clue what she was talking about other than the air that wasn’t good for me. I let it pass. ‘Anything else?’
‘Pardon?’
‘Anything else you might have forgotten that’s going to get me killed?’ I was only half joking, and maybe not even that much.
‘I said sorry.’
I reached into the closet and took out the clothes. They looked exactly the same as the ones I was wearing, but pale blue instead of canary yellow. I swapped, then looked at the pile on the floor. ‘Have you thought of a way out yet?’
‘Why?’
That sounded to me like the answer was really no, but I ached too much to argue. ‘If we are doing the same coming out, then I need to leave these somewhere, and leave them tidy. Is that the plan?’
‘It wouldn’t hurt,’ said Corina, still sounding like she was hedging her bets.
Then another thought came to me; was she having second thoughts? Was I risking my life here just to have her turn me away when I reached her? The thought hurt me, a catch behind my breastbone. What would I do if she did, and abandoned me inside the Dag dome? Something Corina said came back to me out of the misty memories of the last half hour and I seized on it as a good excuse to change the way my thoughts were going. ‘Corina, what’s an aid?’
‘Aides are helpers. Humans who tell the Dagashi things, fetch stuff for them, teach them stuff about humans and what human society is like. Like we do with the halos.’
‘We? But you’re one of us. I mean, you’re human.’
‘It’s complicated.’
Well, it wasn’t like I could bail out now anyway. Corina had got me in this far, and I wouldn’t stand a chance of getting out on my own. ‘So what do I do now?’ I asked, deciding I was well enough to move on.
‘So now you have to learn how to act like an Aide.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Oh dear, where should I start? You must never look directly at a Dagashi, unless the Dagashi is your sponsor, or you have been introduced by your sponsor. Even then, try not to make eye contact. If one you haven’t been introduced to speaks to you, keep your eyes on the floor, not that one should anyway because they aren’t your sponsor. Never speak to a Dagashi unless they speak to you first’
I didn’t say anything while I thought about that. The rules were wrong, unfair, as if they were meant to make the Aides feel small and unimportant. ‘So where do these Aides come from?’
‘They volunteer.’ Corina sounded like she was stating the obvious, and I got a sick feeling.
‘Funny, nobody mentions it on the outside.’
‘Perhaps they haven’t come looking near where you live,’ said Corina. ‘Are you feeling better now?’
I didn’t know what I should do. I had a suspicion about where the Aides came from, and I didn’t like it. They didn’t sound like volunteers, but I had no way to prove it. If I kept pushing Corina about it, she might go off in a huff. She’d done it before. Then I’d be really screwed. Or was I being unfair to her? I still didn’t understand what she was doing here. I figured that the simplest thing might be to get her out then I could push for some answers. Heck, I still wasn’t sure why I was here in the first place.
‘I suppose. What’s next?’
‘Next I have to get you to our home.’
‘How far away is it?’
Corina’s voice went flat again. ‘Assuming no further diversions or incidents, and that the optimal path is followed, using standard timings for variable events you should arrive at the threshold in no less than twenty-two minutes seven seconds and no more than twenty-eight minutes and thirty-five seconds.’
My guts twisted. Everything was suddenly on top of me, crowding in on me. And I was going to get to meet Corina, for real. I took a breath. ‘Better get started then.’
‘I’ll try to keep you away from people as much as I can. Just remember not to stare.’
Corina muttered directions into my head. I stepped out of the door, turned left, and kept walking. All the time I was telling myself you are supposed to be here, you have nothing to hide. It was difficult, trying to ‘walk casual’. Not too fast, not too slow, and not freezing every time I saw anybody else.
Everybody I passed was human, or looked it. More balancing: do I look or don’t I, and how long for? Some were easier than others. I’d never seen so many pretty girls. Some were younger than me, some grown up, but they all looked smart and attractive. Then it occurred to me the same applied for the boys. A lump of ice formed under my breastbone. I was a scruff from the outside. My hair wasn’t all neatly combed, and I needed a shave. Somebody would report me for sure.
‘Stop panicking,’ said Corina, and again I couldn’t be sure if I had been talking under my breath or she had read my mind. ‘You don’t look so bad, and some Aides are left a little — rough around the edges.’
I tried to put it out of my mind. There was another elevator to negotiate. I waited. A girl stopped beside me, flashed me a perfect smile when I glanced at her, and otherwise ignored me. The elevator arrived, empty, and we both stepped inside. The girl looked expectantly at me.
‘Ask her which level, stupid.’
I muttered the question, and pressed the symbols Corina told me to while the girl frosted me with her back and Corina radiated smug humour. I fumed, wondering again what on earth I was doing here and whether it would turn out worth it.
The girl got out first — no thank you or even a glance over the shoulder — and I went up a few more levels. The doors opened, and I froze. Everything up to now I had been able to pass off as not too different. A corridor with no windows was the same wherever it was, and a room was a room if it was nothing more than blank walls.
Now I stood at the edge of a huge open space. Dagashi milled around all over the place, ten of them for every boy or girl I could see. They were taller than us, and thinner. Their heads looked too big, and were vaguely triangular. I couldn’t see any ears or hair, and they had two thin slits instead of a nose, but their eyes were hypnotic. They looked a lot like human eyes, but were bigger, and the colours were brighter.
‘Move,’ Corina nagged in my head. ‘And stop staring. Somebody will report you.’
I darted out of the elevator as the doors started to close and followed Corina’s directions across the mall, trying to keep my eyes down. Everywhere was an explosion of colour; billowing clouds of fabric swooping across the ceiling and panels swirling bright shapes that changed as you watched. The Dagashi seemed to be trying to out-do each other in clashing clothing. Even their skin was marked with bright bands of jarring hues.
And then there were the humans, the boys and girls, darting between them or trailing behind them, invisible in their drab outfits of white or pale pastels. That sense of wrongness grew in me, but I still couldn’t pin down what it was.
Corina sent me down a flight of stairs, and at the bottom was a railway station. Admittedly, the trains were elongated bubbles that floated a couple of inches off the ground, but that’s what the place undeniably was. Four ‘tracks’ stopped in the middle of an open concourse while another two ran right through at either side. It reminded me a lot of the corpse of Liverpool Street.
‘The track directly in front of you,’ Corina said. ‘If you hurry you can get that one.’
I didn’t think it would be right to run, but I walked a whole lot quicker. The sooner I was away from this place the better I would feel — safer, anyway. As I drew level with the first door I veered towards it.
‘No!’ Corina gasped and I turned away. ‘Not that one. Not a blue door. Unaccompanied aides can only travel in cars with white doors.’
I rushed along the train, looking for a white door. A noise like a bird chirping and a flashing light above the door made me step smartly through the first one I found. The door hissed shut and I looked around at a carriage full of kids. There weren’t any seats or benches, just lots of poles to hold onto. I was sure I had seen seats in the other car.
My chest was tight, and I realised I was angry. Who did these people think they were that they could travel in more comfort than us?
‘Close your eyes,’ said Corina. ‘If you close your eyes nobody will speak to you.’
‘Why not?’
There was a pause. ‘That’s the way things are.’
I took one last look around before I closed my eyes. Everybody else already had their eyes shut. Most wore white, and everybody had a halo with a red thread. And nobody looked happy. All the faces were blank, like there was nobody inside. I shut them all out.
‘How do they know where they are?’
‘The train tells them, through the halo.’
‘How come I didn’t hear anything?’
‘I have you on... a different channel. Otherwise you might give yourself away to the system.’
‘System?’
‘It monitors all the halos inside the dome.’
I wanted to ask for what but I was afraid of the answer.