Paradigm (9781909490406) (2 page)

The girl nodded.

‘Of course.' She wiped some gunk from her mouth with her sleeve. ‘He got pretty far—almost back to the lifts. I don't see him here though. He's probably…'

Her voice trailed off as the travelator jerked forwards slowly, past a service area carved into the rock wall. Carter looked around for Pablo but there was no sign of him. There was a bin for old bags and a rack with fresh ones and some towels. Carter squared up his empty chuck bag and dropped it into the trench without it touching the sides.

‘It wouldn't have mattered anyway. Lifts only go one way on that side of the Catacombs,' said Carter. ‘Everyone gets caught.'

H
e remembered watching
a couple of the older children attempting to walk backwards against the flow of traffic and how skilfully they were redirected back into line by the security officers. One boy had cried noiselessly, tears streaming down his face in rivulets smudged with a dirty sleeve as he wiped them away. Others had skipped ahead, weaving in between the legs of the adults. Carter was thankful when he'd finally been pushed into a chamber on his own, away from everyone else. Especially Pablo, crying for his wife and daughter.

‘Good system,' said the girl. ‘You can't have people just deciding it's not their time. Nothing would work if we were all allowed to just run around doing what we wanted. It would be like the old days.'

‘Yeah,' said the man, looking around at the cameras overhead. He'd managed to put his pants on during the conversation. ‘And who wants that?' Then they both laughed weakly and the girl pulled back her sticky hair into a ponytail.

T
he travelators took
them to the edges of round room that had a stage in the centre where the Controller General stood, speaking through an amplifier. Her hair was thin and wavy, the colour of tree bark, but her eyes were bright blue and sharp. She didn't look familiar—and she didn't look happy. The job seemed to have aged her beyond her time. She looked like she might even be over thirty but that would be against the rules. Carter could not imagine that it would be too long before the Contendership for her post would begin and that made him excited. There were more people in the gathering crowd than he had imagined there would be. He looked around for anyone like him, anyone who might be like him, in line for the job. The woman addressed the crowd.

‘Good evening. Many of you will have been underground for the duration of my tenure so far, so let me introduce myself. My name is Anaya Chess and I am Controller General. You will each have received your cards from the assistant on duty in your chamber. Anyone who has not received their card should raise their hand now.'

‘Don't feel quite right,' whispered the pale girl with ratty hair to no one in particular. She sat herself on the ground and everyone around ignored her. She lay there for a while as the crowd milled past her and then she stood again weakly, wobbling from side to side. Carter edged in front of her to get a better view of Chess as she spoke again. This time, even the girl looked up.

‘As Controller General, I am responsible for ensuring that you all make your way back to the Community safely. Firstly, for those of you still feeling a little unwell please be assured that this is completely normal. Your bodies will need time to adjust and some of you will still be feeling the side effects of the fluids we have been using to keep you safe. This will all wear off in a few days' time. Remember, each of you has been in a suspended state for between five and twenty years and, while your muscles have been chemically maintained, it will take some time, up to a week, to feel fully refreshed.

‘Secondly, between now and then you may find you have some temporary loss of memory or feel different to the way you did before you came here. You may even experience short blackouts. That, also, is completely normal and will pass within a few days.

‘Finally, you are re-entering our Community at a very special time. Since you have been away, some things have changed—you will discover these for yourselves when you make your way back. We are in a time of...' she stumbled over the word... ‘
exciting
transition, and amongst you this evening are the Contenders for the position of Controller General when I...' she faltered again ‘...
step down
from the position very soon.'

The crowd rearranged themselves and Carter felt his palms grow clammy. So the Contenders were here, in this room—that meant, almost certainly, that he was one of them. He looked around at the mass of faces as Chess continued. ‘The announcements will be made shortly, but until then, may I be the first to say welcome back to you all. As you know, since the Storms, we have had to work hard together to ensure that we have a steady supply of people with the right skills to stabilise our environment. The small sacrifice most of us have to make at some point in our lives is what ensures our survival. You are all, in your own way, our heroes.'

There was a weak cheer from the crowd and Carter could see that two or three other people around him were now sitting down on the floor. One girl stood facing the front, eyes glued on Chess. Carter picked her out straight away—she was bound to be one of the Contenders; she looked alert, different to the others somehow. Anaya Chess allowed the applause to die down before continuing.

‘Your card contains all the information you need about your new homes, families and places of work. And, of course, it has retained the information from your previous time here including qualifications and personal data.'

A man at the front raised his hand.

‘I had two children,' he said. ‘Can you tell me where they are? Are they here or…?'

Chess turned to him, her voice calm and cool.

‘I cannot answer any questions with regard to your individual circumstances. And, as you know, things and people move on. If your previous family are still alive, well, it's likely they will have made their own choices. Any information you need will be on your personal card. Swipe it at any FreeScreen and you will receive all the updates that you need.'

The man looked no more assured than when he had asked the question. He raised his hand with a follow-up but Anaya Chess ignored him.

‘As I was saying, for those of you who have not already had the opportunity to do so, please scan your cards on any of the FreeScreen terminals around the edges of the room. There are four Transporters due to leave in the next fifteen minutes. Please exit through the tunnel that has the same colour as your card; this will ensure you take the Transporter with the drop-off point closest to your designated area of the Community.' She smiled weakly and nodded to the crowd. ‘The Industry thanks you for your co-operation. Welcome to your new lives.'

T
hose who had positioned
themselves on the floor got up and others wandered over to the terminals in the walls. There were four tunnels, each leading out in a different direction: blue, red, yellow, green. Carter headed for the blue tunnel, quickly followed by the man who'd asked the question about his wife and then around two hundred others. They jostled around at the terminals, muttering to themselves as they made their way out.As Carter leaned over to scan his card, a scrawny, smiley boy stepped aside to let him through.

‘After you,' said the boy, who couldn't have been more than nine or ten. When he saw it was Carter, there was a flicker of recognition between them. Harrison Reynolds had lived three doors down from Carter as they were growing up and they'd been in the same year at the Academy—until Harrison had been selected for the Young Freezers Programme. Carter remembered because it was less than six months after his own parents had been killed. It was rumoured that Harris's father had died of a broken heart a few months later. There had been a lot of bad luck in the West Quarter that year.

‘Harrison?' said Carter, but the boy was already turning to queue for another terminal. The last time he had seen the boy had been topside when the latest Freeze lists had been announced. Harrison had taken the news of entering the Young Freezers Programme with jubilation, running circles around Unity Square. Back then, Harrison had been the taller of the two.

Carter watched as the small boy looked at the screen and then sped off down an opposite tunnel. As the crowds swelled forward, Carter didn't bother scanning his card; he knew already where he was going—the West Quarter. The address had been printed on the wrapper of his clothes and on the inside of the paper bag, where he was guaranteed to see it. Clever, he thought—as long as you saw it before you threw up. The Industry at its best.

A
s they filed
through into the blue tunnel, the juddering floor began to move beneath them, swirling them onwards. One boy of about twelve carried another, much younger, on his back. The younger one was howling for his mother who, from what Carter could make out, had died in the twenty years the boy had been underground. The same voice of the Controller played warnings and announcements, although this time her voice was recorded and sounded younger and dainty, like a bird.

‘Handrails are provided for your safety. Please do not push your fellow returners. Transporters will not leave until every returner has exited the building. Please scan all information cards as you leave. Handrails are provided for your safety. Please do not push your fellow returners...'

The voice reverberated around inside his head until Carter found himself reciting the words along with at least half of the others standing around him. He shook his head at himself and started reciting chemical formulae instead.

T
he moving corridor
funnelled out into a series of platforms, each with a full-length Transporter waiting as crowds piled into the carriages. Carter held back until everyone else had boarded and then slipped between the doors before they clipped shut. He pressed himself against the smooth wall while the engines started up, feeling the soft growl of machinery as the Transporter started at a slow glide. Across the carriage, he caught a glimpse of Harrison Reynolds, holding the hand of the smaller boy who had also lost a parent in the years underground, and for a second his chest hurt. He smiled at them both but they ignored him, already wrapped up each other's grief.

Within seconds and without warning, the speed of the Transporter accelerated, swaying the passengers across the carriage, and Carter grabbed onto a support rail above his head. There was a slithering sound that rose to a growl and then, together, the group of returners made their thundering way through the maze of underground Industry tunnels and up and out into the world above ground, a world that Carter, aged fifteen years and thirty-six days, had not seen in a long, long time.

O
n the day
the Storms started, Alice Davenport watched the collapse of her world from nine floors above the city, through her living-room window. She had stayed home from school because she was sick. Or at least that was what she decided she would tell her mother—but as a general rule, her mother didn't bother to ask much. Not since it had been just the two of them.

The real reason Alice stayed home was Jake Anderson. In the last school it had been Ricky Thornton mocking how Alice's teeth stuck out and how her skinny peanut-shell-coloured arms were as thin as sticks. Before Ricky, there had been a James, and before him, a Zak—each with their own particular flavour of unkindness. In this version, Jake was making fun of Alice's mother, which was more difficult to deal with. He ridiculed her cheap, tatty clothes and the way she left a trail of wine in the air when she staggered through the streets in the early morning sunlight as he was doing his paper round. Jake Anderson was a boy to be believed—because Jake had been in the depths of the city with his parents during Hurricane Alison, when Big Ben had toppled. His parents had been crushed but he had survived. His teasing got worse after that.

By the time Jake had started needling her about her mother, Alice Davenport was fed up of the pattern. There was always a ‘Jake'. And the worst part was that there was always some truth to their cruelty.

O
n the morning
that the Storms started, Alice's mother had wandered into the flat just after 5:30 a.m.—and fifteen minutes later was asleep, mouth open and eyes shut on the smoky mattress next to Alice. Outside, the gulls squawked with their bleak, morning calls. Alice thought her mother looked peaceful as she slept; the tough lines on her face had relaxed and she looked younger, though never as young as before.

It was the familiar click and close of the front door and the padding of her mother's footsteps on the old stairs that had woken her. Still half in the clutches of a dream, Alice curled up tight inside the sleeping bag on the mattress and waited. Like most mornings, her mother stumbled into her room, lifted up the mattress and stuffed a ball of notes underneath. Then, as always, her mother settled herself down on the mattress next to Alice and passed out.

Her mother's wet, slicked-back hair leaked thin beads of water across Alice's side of the pillow, the fronds of her fringe like curled-up water snakes. Alice pulled herself further down the pillow, away from the dampness until she was alongside her mother's belly. It was an ugly, skinny grey colour, different to her face that was always scraped with a tan and pink blusher accompanied by a ribbon of red lipstick. The gash of pillar-box was still there, even now, smudged a little at the corners but wildly bright against the drabness of the mattress, slung on the floor in the corner of the dingy hole they both called a bedroom.

T
he bedroom was
one of two in the apartment stacked neatly on the top floor of a block of flats, ten layers high above the city. The wallpaper was old and peeled off the walls in places revealing layers of different-coloured patterns, like the skins of a decaying onion. It was a medium-sized authority-owned flat, set over two floors with a tiny staircase inside that wound upwards to the two bedrooms and a green porcelain bathroom that always smelled of cheap bleach.

Alice and her mother slept in the room with the door that hung lazily off the hinges. Not like the door to the spare bedroom—the only room with a bed—that was always closed tight.

‘You don't ever go in there,' her mother had said soon after they had moved in. ‘Not ever.'

‘Why can't it be my bedroom?'

‘Because it's a bad room. And even when I'm in there, you can't even be outside the door. Do you hear me?'

Alice heard her—and she never went in there and neither of them used the bed to sleep in. Each night, they stayed on the mattress together. When her mother finally got in from work, that was.

Whenever anyone came up to the bedrooms, the staircase creaked with the weight of the world thrown up in the form of a crinkled map of the globe that covered the whole wall. The map had once hung inside a crystal glass frame in her father's study in the days before, but now it had to make do with a rusty nail in each corner, pegging it in place. Alice had put it there herself when she and her mother had first moved in, balancing precariously on a chair with a claw hammer in one hand and a scratch of rusty pin tacks in the other. The glass frame that had protected it was long gone. It had been destroyed, like many other things, in the move to the city. On the evenings when her mother left her alone, Alice would sit on the stairs and look at the map, thinking about the different countries she wanted to visit when she was older. She imagined the crimson and yellow sunsets of Africa and the peanut- and saffron-infused scents of the Far East and beaches where they would dance in the ice-blue waves of Thai oceans, teaching multicoloured birds to talk.

When the realisation sunk in that this would never come true, Alice instead spent some evenings climbing another set of stairs, these ones made of ugly metal that led sharply upwards to the roof of Prospect House. In the twilight, before the teenagers ganged there, she would look out across the flatness of the city that spread out for miles beneath her like a mechanical meadow filled with insects. If there was no work, her mother would sometimes join her there.

‘This place is only a stop gap,' she said as they gazed across the spires and towers in the first week that they moved in. She lit a cigarette and the smoke lingered across the horizon. ‘Don't worry—we'll be out of here soon. We just have to save some money and we'll be gone. We'll be where are supposed to be.'

‘Where are we supposed to be?' said Alice.

‘I don't know yet,' said her mother.

But why do we have to stay here?' said Alice. ‘Why couldn't we just stay in our old house?' Alice's mother bit her lip so hard that a tiny drop of blood leaked out of the corner.‘Because sometimes things have to get worse before they get better,' she said and sucked at the trail of blood on her lip. And there was nothing much else to say after that.

A
s much as
Alice hated their new home, there were days that were brighter than others. Sometimes she would stand on her balcony at the back of the flat, watching the pigeons dive at the fragments of stale bread that she dropped from a bag in the evening sunlight. She wondered who would feed them if she weren't there and decided that probably nobody would. It was her duty.

Other times, Alice would peak on tiptoe across at Mr Hutchinson, the next-door neighbour, who would always stand on his back balcony smoking a pipe. She watched as he drew in hard on his pipe and sucked big lungfuls of smoke inwards, only to heave them out in dirty great ‘O's across the city. Once he caught her looking, but he just smiled and kept hacking out the big puffy circles that floated out over the balcony. Alice watched until they disappeared into the nothingness of the clouds and sometimes she imagined she was bound up in the smoke rings and floating high above everything else, even higher than the flats. Watching the smoke was one of the things Alice loved most.

On the day the Storms started, there was a lot of smoke—but Alice saw none of it. That morning, as her mother curled into a ball of sleep next to her, Alice heard the first echoes of rain on the window; they were only slightly louder than the grumbling in her stomach. The flat was cold with patches of dampness flowering in the corners, and the cupboards were empty except for some stale biscuits. She stuffed them into her mouth and washed them down with a glass of pale orange squash. A white sun eked through the gap in the curtains and threw a sliver of light onto the carpet, barely reaching in from the balcony outside.

While her mother was still dozing on the mattress, Alice wormed her hand underneath the mattress and felt for the wad of notes, a little tacky to the touch. She drew them out carefully and stuffed them into her pocket.

‘I'll go shopping later on,' her mother groaned from the floor as Alice was leaving.

‘I'm hungry now,' said Alice under her breath and slipped on a T-shirt before tiptoeing down the stairs and out of the front door. Shivering in the cold, she felt the world slide sideways and rock her back and forth like a golf ball on a ship deck. Bright lights dazzled her eyes as she made her way towards the lifts. Everything smelled of rotting fruit, even the cold, wet air. Alice was beginning to think that maybe she really was ill after all.

Usually she enjoyed hanging over the edges of the balcony, picking at the peeling paint and watching the city, but that morning the swirl of the wind and pattering of the rain made her feel sick. Something just did not feel quite right.

I
nside the supermarket
shop at the bottom of the plaza that folded into the shadow of Prospect House, Mr Shah was packing things into boxes. He looked her up and down suspiciously. Alice held up the wad of cash and he smiled neatly.

‘You shouldn't be out on your own,' he said. ‘The riots have started again and police are shooting. People are shooting people. Shooting just for standing on the street, can you believe it? I am closing up tonight. No more Shah's Market. We're going back up North. Back to where people are not mad as bats. London is for fools. You should stay inside or else the police will get you and that mother of yours. Scoop you up like sh...' Shah's words came out like a round of bullets, short and painful before he realised that, whatever he thought, she was still a customer.

‘I just need some food,' said Alice in a whisper. ‘I don't care about the police.'

‘You look cold,' he said. ‘You should have put a jumper on—it's very cold outside today. Cold. Cold. And the rains are coming. There's another hurricane on the way. This one's going to be bigger than Alison, you know.'

Alice grabbed a small trolley and started throwing cans into the basket. Tomatoes, tinned meat, dried goods—things for a storm. Cheap things. Things she could reheat. She looked at her arms, covered in goosebumps, as she pushed the trolley and she realised she was shaking. Using the trolley as support, she went up and down each aisle in a methodical, quiet daze.

‘River is up again,' called Mr Shah down the aisle. ‘Going to flood the whole city if this rain carries on. I'll be gone, long gone.'

M
r Shah ran
everything through the scanner at double speed and Alice packed the food into thin plastic bags, matching his dexterity. By the time she had finished there were eight sagging bags of food bulging from the web of plastic. Mr Shah looked at Alice and then at the pile of shopping as she handed over the cash.

‘You want to leave some here and come back for them? Maybe you want to fetch your mother to help?'

‘No,' she said. ‘I'll manage.' She pulled the thin rings of plastic high up her arms, handles biting into her skin in raised pink circles. Four bags per arm, Alice hooked her hands together at her skinny waist and shuffled her body forward. She inched towards the flats, eyes fixed on the bottle-green door and teeth clenched together, bone-hard and determined. It was just as she got inside the sheltered porch that the real rain started.

It was 8:35 a.m. on 17
^th
September, 2015.

F
rom the porch
, it took two runs to get all of the shopping back into the flat. A tall man, hands covered in oil and smelling of smoke, got in with her and stood very close as the doors pulled together. Alice pushed the shopping forward with her legs, forming a barrier between them. The man grinned, gappy-toothed, and as the doors opened at his floor, he bent down and fished into one of the shopping bags. He picked out a bar of chocolate.

‘Cheers,' he said and slipped onto the sixth floor, flashing broken teeth in a sneered black smile as he went. Alice shivered and pulled the shopping close to her as the lift creaked upwards.

W
hen she got back
to the flat, Alice found her mother sitting on the stained sofa looking out at the rain.

‘Why aren't you at school?' she said, turning around. Her skin looked worn and sleepy and above her eye was the metallic shine of a new bruise.

Alice felt a pain hit her somewhere in the chest. ‘I don't feel well,' she said. ‘It's the rain.' Her mother held out her hand and Alice went over to her. Thick wheals lashed her arms where she'd been carrying the bags. The sick feeling came lurching back.

‘Did you take my money?' said her mother. ‘That's my money.'

Alice hesitated then nodded, pushing her hands into her pockets.

‘I did the shopping, Ma, all of it,' she said. ‘We don't need to go out today; you can rest. Get some sleep.' Alice's mother looked more relieved than annoyed and she put her arms around Alice.

‘Don't take my money without asking—I told you. Some of that was for the electric people.' The rain drummed heavy on the window outside and they sat there together, watching as it came down in torrents. It beat harder and faster until the window front was a stream of water and they couldn't see anything more than the slight outline of the barrier on the balcony. The rhythmic chord strummed with enough regularity that eventually they both fell asleep on the sofa.

A
s she drifted
in and out of consciousness, Alice heard the pattering of rain and her mother moving around the flat, lifting and carrying things. She dreamed of waterfalls and swimming pools and being deep inside a submarine watching fish writhe past in cloudy portholes in giant tidal streams. She wanted to get up and help her mother but each time she opened her eyes, the sickness rose up from her stomach. She turned over and looked at the swirls in the carpet but that made her feel even worse. She closed her eyes again and put a cool palm on her own forehead that seethed red and angry. Through the red-blackness of her eyelids she could see shapes and crowds of people dancing across the wall, through their front room and out towards the balcony. Outside there were lights and bangs like fireworks.