Paradigm (9781909490406) (12 page)

As he walked, Carter could feel he was getting closer to the Black River. It was still a long way off but he could smell the darkness rising above the treeline. Birds scattered overhead and darker clouds peppered the early evening sky. He hoped it wouldn't be too far before he found the twins' address.

When he reached it, he found that the house was one of the older reclamations from the early days with a sturdy metal roof and solid brick walls. Carter guessed that when it rained, it would be almost unbearable to be inside due to the constant clattering of ice-balls on the lid, but the houses were bigger than all the others and it meant that for the few families that wanted to grow and stay together, these houses were the only accommodation. Carter's father had taken him to see Isabella in a house like this once, where she had lived with her uncle, in the far north of the Community.

‘Sit here and do your homework,' Carter's father had said, tucking him onto a stool in the kitchen. But Carter had crept downstairs, as he so often did, to see what his father was doing. He watched from a crack in the door while his father's friend forced up a small door in the kitchen floor, covered by a large, smooth stone that led down a flight of stairs to a tiny room. From where he hid, Carter could see something so terrifying, so alien that he ran back to the bedroom he'd been placed in and did the same piece of homework over and over until his father came to collect him. It was chemical mathematics. And he counted and counted and counted. He didn't even have to listen to the conversation between his father and Isabella's uncle to know that it was something frightening.

‘This is dangerous,' he heard his father say. ‘You can't tell anyone about this.'

Carter imagined that the friend hadn't had much chance to say a word to anyone as he'd been called for freezing that same week and the house was deemed unsafe and demolished. Luckily, anything dangerous that had remained in the house was probably destroyed too.

C
arter looked
up at the house. From the window, a flickering of light gave way to a shadow that quickly disappeared. There was someone watching him.

Above him, the soft patter of rain had started and already a film had gathered over his clothes. He moved towards the door. Before he got as far as the step, it opened and he was bundled inside the house and up a set of creaking stairs. A boy with the same white blonde hair as his pushed him into a room and down on one of the resters without saying a word, then checked the window covers and stood by the doorway, listening.

A shrill voice trailed up the stairs and through the open door into the room.

‘Lucia? Was that Lucia? Is she back?'

The boy creased his forehead and held a finger to his lips. Carter could see that his hands were shaking too but were quite discoloured; the mottled green brown of dirty water.

‘No, Jescha, it was just the rain on the door.' The boy's voice cracked a little as he spoke.

Carter looked around; although the house wasn't typical Community accommodation, this room—more than any other he had even seen—was incredible. One of the walls was covered in coloured drawings; landscapes, animals, impressions of the Catacombs. The landscapes and the Catacombs, he could confirm with certainty, were fairly realistic but the rest was fantastical. A bowl of water, full of ragged cloths sat on the floor. Carter could just about tell that the other walls had been scraped clean of script and designs.

The boy plugged the gap where the door didn't quite reach the floor with the remaining clean rags that lay scattered around. He worked quickly and silently but when he eventually spoke, his voice was tuned with an urgent concern.

‘Did she find you? Where is she?' The questions forced themselves out in a mouthy torrent as the rain outside increased to a gentle tap on the windows and the roof.

‘Ariel?' Carter spoke slowly and softly, mindful of the effort that the boy had made to ensure that whoever was downstairs did not hear them.

‘Yes, of course I'm Ariel,' he said with irritation. ‘Did you see Lucia?'

‘You're my son.' Carter puffed out his chest. They sat there, fairly equally proportioned with less than twelve months between them.

‘Where's my sister?' Ariel's whisper gained in gravity and he grabbed Carter's arm. ‘I need to know where she is. She's in danger.' Outside, the tap of rain increased to a thick, regular thud and there was the tinny sound of rain against metal above them.

‘I don't know,' said Carter. ‘I've been away. Underground. I didn't even know about you until last night.' Ariel dismissed him with his hand.

‘We all know where you've been. She went out last night to find you. She didn't come home. Something's happened to her. I can feel it.' Ariel's voice was swallowed by the tap-tap of rainwater that was beginning to turn to ice.

The girl at the shelter. Carter's heartbeat quickened.

D
ownstairs there were raised
voices followed swiftly by the rise and fall of a woman crying. Carter wondered whether the girl with red hair was in the house. One of the pictures on the wall was of her; long fire-flames of auburn flashing out of the wall towards him, although one arm was part way through being removed. Underneath the missing arm, careful script had been etched into the wall:
Veritas liberabit vos
. The words swam and bulged out towards him. The pounding of the hail on the metal room clattered towards its crescendo and the house seemed almost to shake as it reached its heaviest point.

‘Her.' Carter heard his voice, small and distant, disappear into the ice storm. ‘She was there at the Transporter drop-off.' Ariel locked his eyes and offered his palm upwards.

‘How was she?'

‘Tell me everything you know,' said Carter.

‘I will,' said the boy, ‘but we need to do this quickly. The Industry will be here soon and anything we might have been able to do to help my sister and your daughter will have been lost.'

T
he rain relaxed into a soft
, steady slap against the windows as they talked and Carter helped Ariel rub the last traces of brightly coloured paint from the walls.

‘She made these colours herself?' said Carter.

‘Yes,' said Ariel. ‘I don't know how she learned to do it but she used flowers and plants that she found out near the Barricades. There's a lot I don't know about her. Or the people she seems to be spending her time with.' His hands were still shaking and his face was smeared with paint residue and tears.

‘She was still alive when I saw her,' said Carter. ‘And whatever happened with the Transporter—and I can't be sure—but she wasn't there when I woke up. I should go and look for her.'

‘Well you could, but if we don't clear this mess up there won't be any reason for her to come back. They'd lock her away for disruption—if they saw any of this…' Ariel gestured towards the last pictogram—an orangey-yellow creature like the last vestiges of an autumn sun. Its mouth was open showing clean, white teeth in a bright-red maw. Carter ran his fingers over the colours and shapes.

‘This is incredible,' he said. ‘And illegal.'

‘She was beginning to go crazy in here,' Ariel said, changing the subject. ‘Her ideas got wilder and wilder. We tried to stop her. She talked about revolution. About an uprising. It was contagious. Some of the other stuff she drew,' he paused. ‘It was like she was deliberately trying to get herself punished. You know they could expel her? Force-freeze her? Anything. There are people here who are trying to cause trouble, who deserve it. But not her.'

Carter shrugged and thought of Isabella. ‘Things are different. Wrong.'

Ariel grunted. ‘You finally worked that out? Of course people are different. The cracks started to appear after Chess came into power. Her Contribution was a failure—people have been starting to doubt the Industry. That's why you're here. The rumour is that you're going to unite people.

‘That's the plan.'

‘You have to. Otherwise we could find ourselves going back to the way things were before, with all this…' Ariel waved his arms towards the murals on the walls. ‘People turning on each other—it's like before. We know a better way and this, what we have now, is it.' The boy was calm and eloquent despite being visibly upset.

‘But what does this have to do with Lucia?' he said. ‘Where does she fit into all of this?'

‘She had ideas that there were others like her,' said Ariel. ‘And it's not just her; there are lots of them living here in the Community. Her ideas would have got us
all
killed. So about six months ago, Jescha took her to a Clinician and people started to ridicule her, saying she was just like her mother. She got some attention, bad attention. So we told people she had been cured.' He turned away from the paintings.

‘What do you mean, like her mother?'

‘Iseult, my mother, is special—she's different. I guess you were too eager to see that.'

Carter felt his cheeks flush red.

‘So what happened next?'

‘Lucia was under home curfew,' said Ariel. ‘And I knew that she was going to do
something
. Not what exactly, but something. When she knew you were going to be released, she said that she thought that you would be the one to help her. And then, yesterday evening, she disappeared.'

Carter crushed up his forehead in confusion.

‘What do you mean she disappeared?' he said. ‘From where?'

‘She was locked in this room,' said Ariel. ‘So somehow, she had help.'

D
ownstairs
, the wailing had given way to silence and Ariel pulled the rags from under the door, putting his ear to the ground.

‘When it's been twenty-four hours, we have to formally report her as missing presumed absconded,' he whispered. ‘Jescha and Ailsa are waiting until the last second of the twenty-four hours has expired before they call. They haven't slept since the door log said she'd left before nine last night. She has half an hour left to come home.'

He looked at Carter. ‘If the Industry finds her, and she's been doing something illegal, she'll be charged with treason.'

Ariel's eyes pricked with tears. Carter gently laid his palm upwards and they touched in a familial bond. He thought about the girl with the red hair. Whatever had happened to the Community, to Lucia and to Isabella, he knew it was his time to make things right.

‘Who are Jescha and Ailsa?'

‘Jescha is our biological grandmother and Ailsa is her partner; they're our guardians. They've brought us up since, well, since we were born when it became clear that Iseult couldn't take care of us. They wanted us to stay here in their home rather than board at the Academy like the Industry wanted.'

‘But what about Iseult?' Ariel bit the finger of one hand nervously and rubbed at the last corners of the painting with a rag in the other.

‘Iseult? If she hadn't given birth to us I imagine she'd be in the Clinical Quarter or underground. Jescha was allowed to keep her here because of us. In her condition, she didn't react well to being a mother. We were the first set of twins to be born since the Storms and the attention was too much for her.' Ariel looked at the floor. ‘They didn't pick up her differences when she was younger. At least, Jescha never reported it. If they had, she'd probably not have been allowed to reproduce and we'd never have been born. No one even quite knows how she got herself to your going-away party, although one of the tutors at the time took her along to the Medics for a test and, well, the rest is history.'

Carter wished he could remember the details. But there was no mistaking that Ariel was his son. Sitting there on the rester, their faces reflected in the dirty water, they could have been mistaken for twins themselves.

‘I'll make this right,' he said, ‘when I am Controller General.'

‘You're confident it's going to be you?'

‘I am. I've seen what the other Contenders have to offer and it's not enough. Nothing is more important to me that getting the Community back on track. We can't have things like they were before.'

‘People have put all of their hopes into your return,' said Ariel. ‘Much more than the other Contenders. It's because of us, you know. Nobody believed at first that it would be possible—they believed that there would be something wrong when we were born, but there wasn't. People saw it as a sign. Elections aren't even properly due for another two years; Chess has only been in position for ten years. They're going to vote her out once the successful Contender's Contribution has been proved and they're ready to take office. People say you're the one to end this talk of rebellion. You can't mess this up. '

Carter thought about the people he'd met so far—not all of them had been as happy to see him as Lily and his son.

‘And I'd steer clear of any vocal dissidents if I were you,' said Ariel. ‘As you can imagine, they're not exactly excited to see you back.'

‘I need to help Lucia.'

‘Did Chess make you take those tests?' said Ariel. ‘You know what's important, don't you? More than anything, you need to think about the Community—that's the best way to help her. But you can start by helping me clean this wall. We don't have much time to finish this before Jescha calls the Industry and they'll be in here checking for evidence of my sister as a dissident. You'll want to be gone before then. And with any luck, they'll find Lucia before daybreak. Better they think she's missing than a revolutionary. The Industry are the best people to help her now.'

W
hen it was
time to leave, Carter pulled the door closed silently. Without the pale light of the moon, the blackness of the shadows cast slippery shapes across the path that crunched through the broken tarmac in the forest, towards the city. Carter took the path back towards the north, treading quietly through the pine. After less than a minute, there was the thump of heavy feet hitting the ground, and a slip of torchlight in the darkness shone out from the trees. Momentarily, Carter was blinded by the light.