Zizou Corder Read online

  He felt a strong twining furry thing around his ankle and looked down. It was one of the skinny, tough, big-eared cats from the ruins. He bent down to talk to her, because you don’t pick those cats up. Cuddly they’re not.

  “Hey, Petra,” he said.

  “She’s gorn,” said the cat in her scrowly voice.

  “Gone where?” said Charlie immediately.

  “Dunno,” she said, her yellow eyes large in the dimming light. “Gorn orf downriver. It was some of them half-wits saw it. Least they arksed the river cats to keep an eye out for ’em. Ain’t ’eard nuffin yet.”

  The cats were always having feuds, so Charlie wasn’t concerned about the “half-wits.”

  “Who’s ‘them’?” he asked.

  The cat stared at him unblinking.

  “Your mum,” she said. “And some humans.” And she leaped up onto the wall out of Charlie’s reach, a gray arc flying through the dusk. Her tail flicked. “Humans,” she hissed again, and disappeared.

  Charlie sat down on the back step and felt sick. Why would his mother go off with people the cats didn’t recognize?

  Marshall your thoughts, he told himself. Marshall. Charlie couldn’t even get his thoughts to line up and keep still, let alone stand to attention so he could inspect them. Only two thoughts stood out: One, he didn’t like this one little bit, and two, Dad would know.

  Charlie reached down into his tutorbag, and as he rummaged his little phone lit up, clear and turquoise like the sea in summer. He pulled it out and dialed his dad’s number. A computer voice with an Empire accent answered: “The apparatus is not functioning. Please try later. The apparatus is not functioning. Please try—” Charlie cut it off and huddled down into the step. It wasn’t that warm either.

  Dad’s probably on the train and that’s why his phone’s not answering. That’ll be it. I’ll go up to the station and probably meet him on the way. Otherwise I can wait for him, and he’ll know what’s going on.

  Charlie leaped up before the comfort of this version of things deserted him, and raced around to the front of the house, out of the yard and onto the street. There were a lot of people, all coming the opposite way from him: a tide of people returning from work, coming down from the station. He forced his way against the tide up to the marketplace, where the stalls and tents were still up and open, festooned with fairy lights, selling last-minute treats to tired commuters. A handful of sheep were still in the pen beyond the fountain, and their plaintive cries added sadness to the bustle. In this darkness everything familiar was different, and he didn’t really like it. He hoped he wouldn’t bump into any alcoholguys—the loud lurching ones who made no sense and smelled so bad, and could appear at any time.

  Up by the station he parked himself in a pool of yellow light under a lamppost. People flowed around him: all sizes, all colors, but no Dad. Charlie didn’t want to try phoning again because someone might see his phone and steal it, like the big schoolkids do off the little schoolkids, even though it’s useless because as soon as the little kids’ parents find out they cancel the phones anyway so they can’t be used. Pathetic, Charlie thought: people trying to prove how cool they are by stealing something useless off a tiny kid.

  Come on, Dad.

  Perhaps he came by bus. The bus stop is over at the other side of the market.

  Perhaps I missed him in the crowd and he’s gone home and found neither Mum nor me.

  Or maybe he’s working late—maybe I could go to his office at the university. But Charlie knew that was dumb because he had no idea where Dad’s office was, except that it was by the river, a long way from here. Up there, across the city, the river was twice the size it was here. There were huge ships and warehouses, and great shiny buildings full of people making money, and it smelled of the sea because the sea tide came flooding up, bringing wet fogs and gulls and the heavy salt smell. Here, the riversides had only the ruins and the cats and the fisherguys with their small painted boats, and it smelled of frogs and slimy weeds. Perhaps I should just go to the riverside and walk along until I get to where Dad’s office is, he thought. I’d probably recognize it. Probably.

  No, that’s foolish. Dad wouldn’t be there at this hour. Better to go on home.

  Charlie dived into the flow of people and let them sweep him back to where the houses were, and peeled off at his street. He didn’t look forward to seeing his house still dark and silent and empty . . . but maybe Dad would be there and the lights on and dinner on the stove.

  The lights were on, but Dad was not there. Instead, framed in the lit-up doorway, stood Rafi Sadler.

  He held the door and invited Charlie in, for all the world as if it were his house and Charlie were the guest.

  “Hey, Charlie boy,” said Rafi. “Come on in.”

  Charlie was surprised. “Hi,” he said warily. And went in.

  He looked swiftly around the kitchen. Mum’s lab keys were not hanging in the small tree where they normally lived. Rafi’s big gray dog, Troy, was panting at his feet. Troy’s tongue always hung out of his mouth, wet and slathery like a flat pink slug.

  “Where’s my dad?” asked Charlie.

  “There’s been a change of plan,” said Rafi.

  “What plan?” said Charlie. “Mum—” But he didn’t finish the sentence because he suddenly caught sight of a flash of yellow eyes outside the kitchen window, and a clear warning in them as a dark arc flicked beyond range of the light, and Petra was again invisible in the gloom. Perhaps she’d heard something.

  “Yeah, I know, it’s a drag,” said Rafi. “Mum asked me to come around and tell you. Your mum and dad have had to go on a trip or something. Some new job. They left a note. Here.”

  Rafi held out a folded piece of paper. Charlie looked at it. Rafi’s hand was strong like a man’s.

  He reached for the letter. Mum and Dad? It was in Mum’s writing.

  “Dear Charlie,” he read, “I’m awfully sorry but Mummy and Daddy have had to go away for work business, would have let you know sooner but we couldn’t. You’re to go and stay with Martha and we’ll be in touch as soon as we can. Be a good boy and do as you’re told and we should be back soon. Tons of love, Mummy.”

  Charlie nearly laughed. He hadn’t called her Mummy for about five years, and she never called Dad “Daddy” like that. She called him Aneba, because that’s his name, or sometimes “your dad.” “Work business” was a stupid phrase she would never use—she called work, work, and hated the word business: She said it made her think of rich people in horrid suits working hard to get even richer. As for “be a good boy and do as you’re told”—she always said she couldn’t care less about his being a good boy in the “doing what you’re told” sense: She said people often told you to do foolish or harmful things, so it was much better to get in the habit of working out for yourself what you should do. “Imagine if you bought every single thing that advertisements told you to buy,” she said. “Or—for example—there were times and places where black people and white people were told they weren’t even allowed to be friends, or to work together, let alone to love or marry or have babies . . . so where would that leave us?”

  “I’d have to cut myself in half,” Charlie had said, unhappily, at about age five. Mum had dropped a kiss on his head and her face had turned a bit sad.

  Clever Mum. She had let him know so clearly that this letter was a sham.

  Charlie looked up at Rafi.

  But if the letter was a sham, then what was going on? And why was Rafi here?

  Rafi was smiling at him, in a bored way, as if he had to.

  “Come on then,” he said, a little impatiently, in the way a big kid would to a younger kid who’s been foisted on him.

  But Rafi was far too cool to have kids foisted on him by his mum. Rafi never did what his mum said—he’d been ruling himself since he was eight. Charlie had seen Rafi ignore his mum in the street. A long, long time ago Rafi had come over to Charlie’s house. He’d said—and Charlie had never forgotten
it: “Your house is really nice, isn’t it? And your mum. And your dad.” He’d said it in a way that made Charlie think he wanted to set fire to all of it.

  Charlie didn’t believe Rafi. His mum’s letter proved that he was right not to.

  Or perhaps he was in shock. All he’d done was come home for supper, and . . .

  Anyway, all he said was: “Shall I go and get a bag then?”

  “Good boy,” said Rafi, smiling nicely. Charlie felt a surge of strength knowing that he was being a good boy the right way—clever and brave, not the way Rafi thought—dim and obedient.

  He was a little angry that Rafi seemed to think he was so young and dim. He wanted Rafi to know he was more clever than to fall for this. But the clever thing now was to play dumb.

  He went up to his room thinking quickly. He had no idea where he would go, but he was pretty sure he wasn’t going to be staying at Martha’s. He had to get himself ready for anything. Picking up his strong leather backpack, he put into it his Swiss army knife, a pair of socks, the little solar panel that would recharge his phone, and—after a moment’s hesitation—the big furry toy tiger without which he found it hard to sleep. He hoped Rafi wouldn’t notice it.

  From the bathroom he got his toothbrush, his asthma medicine, and a small bottle of Mum’s Improve Everything Lotion (42 Green), which should have been in the lab, but was inside because she was trying it out on his asthma. It hadn’t really helped with that, but it was great for everything else—even your mood, though Mum wouldn’t let him use it for that. Then he went into his parents’ room and took two hundred dirams that he knew his mother had in the back of her lingerie drawer in case she needed it. “Well, I need it, for her,” he said. Her handbag was sitting there on the bed. Normally he wasn’t allowed in her bag, but . . . he emptied it out. There was her wallet, with its library cards and pictures of him and Dad, her phone, her lipstick, and some other things. Two little glass pill bottles full of pills. A small, polished sphere of lapis lazuli, deep blue and gold, like a little world from a long way away.

  In a quick gesture, almost as if he were pretending he wasn’t doing it, Charlie scooped all these things of his mum’s into his own bag. Then he hurtled downstairs. Rafi was leaning on the wall by the front door, waiting.

  “Be with you in a moment!” Charlie called. In the kitchen he grabbed a couple of apples, and his leather water bottle, then stuck his head out the back door into the yard. The lab door was shut. Checking over his shoulder swiftly to make sure Rafi was not looking, he stepped out into the dark and tried the door. Locked. And the keys missing. So someone had locked it since he had last been here, and so that someone had the keys. Rafi probably. Charlie suddenly and very strongly wanted to punch Rafi. How dare he be locking and unlocking his mum’s lab?

  The furry twining around his legs that indicated a cat distracted him—which was just as well because punching Rafi would have gotten him nowhere. It was Petra.

  “They’re gorn down toward the sea,” she hissed. “River cats ’ave put the word about round the sea cats. We’ll see what we see. Where you off to?”

  “Martha and Rafi’s, only I’m not going,” Charlie whispered into the dark. “I don’t know where I’m going, or how. Did anyone see my dad?”

  “Dunno,” came Petra’s voice, light and rough. “We’ll see. Off you go. You need anyfink, arx a cat. One of us. Don’t worry—there’s more to this ’n you know.”

  “What?” said Charlie. “Petra, what?”

  “You ain’t alone,” she said, but he couldn’t see her, and some change in the air told him she was gone.

  Well, that’s good, I suppose, he thought to himself.

  “Hey!” Rafi called from the front of the house.

  “Coming,” Charlie called back. “Just locking up.” One more thing, he thought as he pulled the kitchen door closed. He looked up to the top shelf and sure enough there it was, tucked behind the honeymoon photograph where Mum had put it: the letter, or whatever it was, written in her blood. He leaped nimbly up onto the hutch, smiled briefly at the photograph, slid it and the piece of paper into his pocket, and then, gripping his bag in one hand and his courage in the other, he went out to join Rafi.

  CHAPTER 3

  There was a long silver car waiting in the street. Charlie looked at it and sneered to himself. When his parents were young everybody had cars. Nobody had ever thought they’d have to be banned, even though they knew they were dirty and that the oil that makes the gasoline that makes them move would run out sooner or later. Sooner, as it turned out.

  Ever since the great asthma epidemic of fifteen years before, when so many children fell to wheezing and creaking and coughing all at once that the schools had to close, and the government finally realized it had to act about car pollution, cars had been banned from the housing areas. The Empire, which loved cars, had tried and tried to convince everyone that cars and asthma had nothing to do with each other (they said cats were to blame, and certainly more and more people seemed to be allergic to cats), but for once the government had stood up to them and said, in effect, you can poison your own children, but you can’t make us poison ours. So now most people used electros—little scooters and vans that ran on the electricity from the sun or the windfarms. There was very little oil left (planes couldn’t fly at all, because there was no fuel for them) and very few people had cars with gasoline engines. Even fewer had permission to use them in the housing areas. Usually it was only government people, or really rich people—Empire people, mainly.

  But the car was beautiful—long and low like a shark, and inside it smelled so sleek and leathery (not rough leather like Charlie was used to, but smooth and expensive). It was peculiar—tempting but sickening at the same time. Charlie knew it was these things that made him sometimes unable to breathe, that made his chest so tight and his shoulders high, so that he would cough and cough to try to get some air into his lungs and oxygen into his blood. But sitting inside one as Rafi pulled out and the car sped off down the road, he was amazed and delighted by it: so fast, so smooth, so powerful. It would be fantastic to drive one of these.

  Troy, in the back with Charlie, slobbered on him.

  “How come you’ve got a car, Rafi?” Charlie asked.

  “Did someone a favor,” said Rafi. “He lets me use it.”

  Up on the main road the low lights cast their orange pools on the dust as the car slid through town. Charlie stared out the window. He felt very separate.

  Rafi drove to a housing tower a mile or so from home. The apartment was on the tenth floor and had no curtains.

  “Sorry it’s not very homey,” said Rafi. He looked amused.

  It was cold and empty with old tack marks on the walls where there might have been posters once. There were two small bedrooms with two small beds, a sitting room that they didn’t go into, and a small kitchen with nothing in the fridge. There was no sign of Martha and it was quite clear that nobody lived here.

  “Your supper.” Rafi gestured to some damp fish sticks sitting on a plate. They’d obviously been there for hours.

  Charlie was only interested in the locks, the doors, the windows.

  “My room, your room,” said Rafi, waving a hand lazily. “Mum’ll be along later.”

  Charlie knew perfectly well that this was not Martha and Rafi’s home. He wondered exactly how stupid Rafi thought he was. He could see that a guy like Rafi wouldn’t give him much credit, but really—did he think he was a baby? But then if Rafi didn’t think he was clever enough to escape, he might not bother locking up very thoroughly.

  “Great,” said Charlie with a smile. He tried to look a little confused and very accepting.

  In his mind, his plan was already falling into place. He would pretend to go to bed when sent. He would escape when all was quiet. He’d have a head start and not be missed till morning.

  “I can’t believe I let this happen,” Magdalen was muttering. “I can’t believe I was so dumb.”

  Aneba was
looking at her irritably. “No,” he said. “It’s not your fault.”

  “I should’ve known,” muttered Magdalen.

  “No,” said Aneba.

  “Yes,” said Magdalen. “I was stupid.”

  “No,” said Aneba.

  They were sitting side by side on a metal bunk in a cramped cabin—more of a storeroom, really. It was very small and smelled of wet metal and salt. The furniture—two skinny bunks, a tiny metal table, a tiny metal sink, and a metal toilet with no seat—was all built in. There were no windows. The door was locked. There was no way out.

  One whole wall (that makes it sound big, but it wasn’t, because the cabin was so tiny) was made up of a brownish mirror. In the slightly more comfortable cabin next door, on the other side of the mirrored wall, two men—one big and fat, the other skinny and snivelly looking—were staring at it. Or rather, they were staring through it, at Aneba and Magdalen, for from this side the mirror was a dark-looking window.

  “I thought they were, like, meant to be like really clever,” said the big fat one.

  “Yeah,” said the skinny snivelly one.

  “So how comes she’s saying she’s stupid?” asked the big fat one.

  “Yeah,” said the skinny snivelly one.

  (The big fat one was called Winner; the skinny snivelly one was called Sid.)

  They stared a little longer.

  “If I’m not stupid,” Magdalen was saying, “then how come I went with that slimy yob Rafi Sadler in his horrible car?”

  “Because he said Charlie was hurt,” said Aneba. “Anybody would have done that.”

  “How come I drank his drugged drink?” said Magdalen. “In the old days, the first thing a girl learned was not to get in a car with someone you don’t know. The first thing! Stupid. And the second was not to accept drinks from strangers.”

  “Yes, but we know Rafi,” Aneba replied. “What kind of parent wouldn’t go in a car with someone they know who says that their child has been knocked down? Who wouldn’t accept a drink from him? Stop it. Stop blaming yourself. Also, you may remember I fell for just the same trick with Martha, so you’re calling me stupid too.”