One of Us (4 page)

“You know something?” Oskar looks sideways at me. “Not everything about my job is secret.”

“No?”

“The police can't fight terrorism without the public,” says Oskar. “All kinds of people are involved, one way or another.” He stops, looking over the wall down into the churning water.

I lean against the rough parapet, its damp chill spreading through my thin jacket sleeves. “Then how do you keep it secret?”

He laughs, tapping the side of his nose. Then his face turns serious again. “Because each person only knows what they need to know.”

We start walking again, toward the bridge. A tram rattles over it, full of standing Brotherhood people going home from their jobs in the New City. On the
other side—their side—a Brotherhood bar has its doors wide open, in spite of the cold, and people have spilled out on to the riverbank, their clothes bright red against the monochrome of the concrete bridge and the dark river. An angry murmur rises from the crowd. They look like they're gathering to head down to the square.

“Let's cross the road,” says Oskar, his voice quiet beside me. He takes my elbow and leads me to the other side.

We turn into a narrow road away from the trouble, and Oskar starts speaking again. “It's a network of informants, K,” he says. “We need all kinds of people, all ages, all backgrounds.” He looks into my eyes. “But there's one thing they all have in common. You know what it is?”

I don't say anything, because I'm not sure what he means.

Oskar leans closer. “They all have a reason.” His voice is low but full of feeling. “Like you and me. People who'll go the distance. If we don't stop it, who will?”

My heart starts beating faster again. How far would I go to stop the Strife from coming back? Is that what he meant? But why would he think I could do anything?

We walk in silence until we reach the blank and ugly face of the halfway house. I wish I didn't have to admit to Oskar that I live here. “This is it.” I stop. “Thanks for walking me back.”

Oskar smiles his kind smile. “Good luck,” he says.
“Don't look so worried. I think things are going to work out for you.”

“Thanks.” I hesitate. I don't know how to say good-bye. I wait to see if he'll say anything more.

He says, “There's something about you, K. You'll go far.”

But he's wrong. I'm nothing but a loner and a loser. What can I do to change anything? I can't even get myself to school. Nobody cares what I do.

“Listen, K.” Oskar puts his hand over mine before I can press the entry buzzer. “Why don't you meet me tomorrow? Outside Central Station at two o'clock?”

“Central Station?”

“It's just that there's a parking lot there. And I've got to go away soon. But if you'd rather not . . .”

“No,” I say quickly. “I'll be there.”
Don't go, Oskar, please don't go.

I press the buzzer and wait for the doors to release. Oskar turns away, walking briskly toward the station. I watch his back disappear.

Then I turn back to the door and step inside, only to see my social worker, Sue Smith, watching me through the glass of the inner doors. Too late to backtrack. The street door behind me has clicked shut already.

“K,” she says, opening the inner doors. “We need to talk about this.” She waves a folded piece of paper.

She waits for me to collect my key and then passes me the paper. It's a printout of my attendance record. I crumple it up in my hand, shrugging.

“K.” Sue's voice is brisk. “I've tried to fight for you, but unfortunately you missed an exam.” Her
teeth flash in a smile. “You're obviously an able girl, but things just haven't worked out. And I'm sorry, but I'm being taken off your case, so there's really nothing I can do. Why not forget about staying in school and start thinking about finding a job? After all, in five months' time you're going to be sixteen. Your government funding will run out. You'll have to leave this halfway house and pay your own way.”

Panic flutters around me. I open my mouth to speak, but then stop and look at her, in her black office suit, her short hair as tidy as a doll's. She throws me another mechanical smile. What's the point in saying anything? I turn away, and I'm through the swing doors to the corridor before she has time to speak. She doesn't follow me.

I
RUN UP
to my room and throw the newspaper I picked up outside the bus stop on to the bed. It falls open on a double spread about the Brotherhood bomber. I turn over and forty-nine faces look back at me. I sit down and spread it out, read each name. Some of them are wearing Brotherhood hats and checked shirts. The bomber even killed his own. And then I see it. The little boy's daddy, on his face the same expression he wore as he picked up the bag of cupcakes.

After that, I can't look at the pictures anymore. A trapdoor below me has opened, and I need to shut it again before I fall in forever.

I open the drawer where I keep my father's paintbox and a pair of folding scissors that were my
mother's, and I fold the sheet of newspaper carefully and put it in there too. Because they're not really strangers, are they? Not in their own lives, to the people who love them.

CHAPTER 4

I
KNEW I
'
D
go to meet Oskar, even though I haven't been back to Central Station since the bomb last week. Yellow police tape still encircles the entrance and only one door is open. Next to it, I see Oskar leaning against the wall, wearing a motorcycle jacket. Does that mean he's going away right now? I almost turn around, run away rather than have to watch him leave. But I can't let him go like that. If only I didn't have to say good-bye.

I wait for the traffic lights to change. What will I do, in the long days, without the hope of seeing Oskar again?

He sees me and saunters toward his motorbike.

I hurry to reach him. “Are you leaving, Oskar?”

“Not exactly,” he says. “But you could be.”

He wants
me
to go away? I stop.

“It's only a proposal. You can always turn it down.” He fastens his helmet under his chin, smiling at me. “I want to take you for a ride. OK?”

“All right.” I've never been on a motorbike before, but it looks fun.

Oskar pulls the spare helmet over my hair, silky from washing. He leans down to adjust the catch. I can smell his aftershave and the mint on his breath.

“That should do,” he says. “I want to show you something.”

He straddles the bike and I climb on, desperately gripping the bar behind me as we shoot forward.

Oskar brakes and twists back toward me. “If you try and stay upright, we'll go over,” he shouts above the motor. “It's easier if you put your arms around my waist and lean the way I do. You can put your hands in my pockets, if you like.”

I can tell from his voice he isn't flirting with me, just looking after me. I put my hands on Oskar's leather sides, and he's right, it feels much safer. But it's hard to hold on to the smooth leather until I push my hands inside his pockets. It's warmer too, with my face pressed against Oskar's back. Now when the bike veers to the side, so do I. The wind sucks my breath away, whipping the ends of my hair against my neck.

And now we're roaring up the hill away from the square. But Oskar doesn't turn left at the bridge. He slows down and drives on to it, straight into the Old City.

“Oskar!” I shout. “Where are we going?” But the wind steals my voice away.

I've never crossed the river before. In spite of its name, so many buildings here are new. Half-crumbled tenements sit next to hastily built blocks whose wooden paneling runs green with mold. Only the Meeting Hall rises proud against the heavy sky, its turrets and spire black with soot, sharp as thorns, like the evil twin of our Town Hall.

We're on the wrong side of the river. Am I imagining hostile glances from people on the pavement as the bike slows down for traffic lights?

It doesn't take long to get out into wooded hills, hazy with the greenish fuzz that promises leaves.
You could draw them with a fine pen, against a watercolor wash
, I think. We're getting farther and farther away from the New City. Where are we going?

“Not far now!” Oskar shouts. “Look to your left.”

We purr along, past a stone mansion fleetingly glimpsed through the trees. It's the building I can see from my room, I realize suddenly. It has a huge sign, proudly announcing
The Institute
. I've heard of the Institute because it's the oldest school in Gatesbrooke. Everything about it seems to shout “Keep out!” from the high perimeter fence with its loops of barbed wire to the cameras trained on the road. It's nothing like the school I went to. Of course, I've never been to a Brotherhood school. They keep themselves apart, in the Old City. We've had five hundred years to practice being separate, and only months, since the Reconciliation process began, of trying to integrate.

Oskar pulls up on a path leading into the forest and turns the bike around. “That's what I wanted to show you!” he shouts over his shoulder. “We'll go somewhere we can talk now.”

Before I can reply, we roar off back downhill toward the Old City. I turn my head as we pass the Institute gate. From this side of the road I glimpse a long drive with high fences and another gate at the far end. A security guard is patroling the fence, behind a row of tall narrow trees. Beyond him tiny figures run on the grass, little splashes of red against the green. It looks like a place from someone else's life.

Oskar slows down as we approach the Old City. I wonder why they never clean their old buildings. Up close I can see that they're the same pink granite as ours, but black with grime. I hope we're not stopping here. But we shoot over the bridge toward the square and Central Station. Oskar turns left, following the river Gate as it passes Jubilee Park and the fish market and then widens out into the estuary. Ahead of us are the derricks and cranes of the port.

But we don't go to the port. Oskar swerves across the road and pulls up beside the gate into Jubilee Park. “We can talk in the Aquarium,” he calls back to me as he climbs off the bike.

My face is so cold that I can't move my mouth. My hair smells of the helmet and the wind. We walk into the park toward the Aquarium, a low stone building near the gate. I follow Oskar inside and down the stairs into the first room. He stops in front of a tank full of seaweed. We sit down on a bench, Oskar's gloves between us on the light wood. Fronds of dirty brown seaweed twist and sway in front of us and the coarse sand shifts suddenly as a camouflaged flatfish stirs, only its black button eyes clearly visible.

“I won't be based at Gatesbrooke for much longer, K.”

Oh, Oskar. You are leaving.
“Where are you going?”

“I can't tell you that.”

I stare into the murky tank. “But then, how can I . . .?” I stop.

“Keep in touch?” Oskar smiles at me.

I look into his kind eyes that make me feel as if I've known him forever. But I can't tell him that
he's my best friend, my only friend. That when I'm with him I feel as if my life matters. So I look away.

“K,” says Oskar. “If you were one of us, things would be different.”

One of us? One of who?

A family comes in, the two little boys running to get stools and clattering them down next to us. Oskar touches my arm lightly as he stands up. I follow him into the next room, where the light is dim. I stop in front of a gravel-floored tank full of dull green water. Oskar leans toward me, so that his head almost touches mine. “The Institute,” he says. “How would you like to finish school there?”

“What do you mean? I'm not Brotherhood!” Surely Oskar doesn't think that?

“Of course not,” says Oskar. “But what if you had papers that said you were? That gave you a Brotherhood identity? You could study Art at the Institute.”

I know. The New City Art Gallery is full of old paintings from when the Institute was an Art school. In citizen schools Art isn't a subject, and I wonder what it would be like to be able to do it.