The Rainbow Maker's Tale (31 page)

“Do you ever feel that
thing
? That there’s something not right with how we live
here?”

“How do you mean?”

I turned back to face her.
“Like when you and I are talking about things like this – you hit a
point where there is no reasonable answer only more questions… How
would Father get metal in his toolkit and why would he lie about
where he works? Why is the population of the space station not
shrinking with the one-child policy, when simple maths tells us
that it should be? Why can’t we pass between the Married Quarter
and the Family Quarter? Why do the viewing screens have a secondary
transmitter?”

Cassie just stared back at
me.

“I can’t find reasonable
answers, no matter how hard I look.”

“Don’t you think we might feel
like this because there
is
something missing?” Cassie
suggested. “We don’t live like humans were meant to. Surviving in
the space station, in such a controlled environment, we’re bound to
feel something’s missing.”

“I can accept that. But, I
don’t see why The Council and our parents need to lie to us. It
seems to me that we have enough information to make general sense
of the world surrounding us, but when you look any deeper it begins
to unravel.”

Cassie gazed at me for a long
while, not offering anything else, until she bluntly demanded:
“Tell me something else. Tell me something I don’t know.”

I was taken aback by the
frankness of her question, and so I answered without thinking about
it too hard. “It’s not just the screens that are monitoring us.
Every time a scanner records our mark a second measure is
taken.”

“What kind of measure?”

“A full body scan is completed,
detecting your body heat, heart rate, heightened brain wave
activity. Each scan is designed to monitor your emotional state;
looking for extremes of mental agitation. The scans become more in
depth for everyone between the ages of twelve and twenty-one.”

“And it’s some form of social
control?” Cassie guessed.

“I think so.” With our
society’s abhorrence for violence and aggressive behaviour, I had
come to the same conclusion. “The data is fed into a monitoring
system that looks at virtually every aspect of our daily lives.
There are other less pleasant areas where monitoring is carried out
– you’ll notice there’s a scanner outside every toilet you can
access?”

“Urgh!” Cassie’s lip curled in
disgust.

“
Exactly
,” I nodded.
“Your
vitamin supplement
is as much hormones as vitamins and
other chemicals, used to restrict your emotional range as is seen
fit. That’s why it quite often changes.”

It was hard to resist telling
Cassie what I’d found in her files, but without any explanation for
why it was being done, it would sound crazy. I didn’t want to scare
her, especially not when she was taking everything so well.

“Yesterday you didn’t take your
tablets with dinner,” she recalled.

“No,” I agreed, deciding that
even if I didn’t reveal her issues, I would quite happily share my
own. “I have elevated testosterone levels, according to my data
feed, and they’re trying to bring them down to
normal
levels. High testosterone levels are connected with a proclivity
for violent behaviour in the system.”

“What will happen if you don’t
take them? Won’t it show up in the monitoring?” Cassie looked
worried.

“It would show up… But, only if
I stop hacking the system and changing my data feeds.”

“You’re doing WHAT?!” Cassie
exploded, her voice reaching a high-pitch squeak. “You’ll be
brought up before The Council if you get caught!”

“You don’t need to worry about
that.”

“But –”

I held up my hands to interrupt
whatever she was going to say. “It’s OK – you
don’t
need to
worry.”

Cassie fell silent and stayed
that way for a long while. I could tell that she was trying to
process everything I had thrown at her during that last few
minutes, and so I stayed quiet and left her to it. Finally she
spoke.

“You’re right,” she said,
reaching over to me and taking my face in her hand.

In the face of all my
questions, all my frustrations, this one small gesture gave me
hope. My mouth twitched into a small smile, as I allowed myself the
fantasy that I might not be alone any more. Cassie’s face loomed
before mine, filling every space I could see with
her
. As
her eyes burned into mine, she leaned forward the last few inches
and brushed her lips over mine. And then she spoke the words I
longed for.

“You’re not alone anymore. You
have me.”

I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t
speak. I had been alone for so long with my questions and theories
and anger – and now this beautiful, fantastic girl was saying she
believed me.

When she closed her eyes and
kissed me, I finally let go of myself. Everything I had held in
before, didn’t have to be hidden anymore – not from Cassie. My eyes
drifted shut as she kissed me harder, her arm winding around my
shoulders to pull me close.

Without her having to say
anything more, I just knew – maybe part of me always had – that
Scarlett was right. Cassie was the answer…

“I’ll come with you!” I said
again, shouting my offer this time. But, Cassie’s steps didn’t
falter. Before I’d even had time to collect my belongings to
follow, she had already gone. It was obvious she couldn’t wait to
get away.

What just happened?

My internal voice sounded just
as confused as my conscious mind. And it raised a good question. I
had no idea what had happened to make Cassie behave the way she
had, just now. As I muddled over the last few minutes of our
conversation, I began to gather up my things from the ledge and my
training spot. I bent up and down slowly, exaggerating the process
of picking up a few items and stuffing them into a bag: more
focused on what was replaying in my head, than what I was
doing.

Cassie had just told me
everything: about her problems hearing voices inside her head, the
disturbing dreams, what had happened between us… And she had seemed
fine – better than fine, even – she had seemed relieved, to be able
to talk to someone about what was happening to her…

What had she said just before
she freaked out?

We had been talking about her
talent getting stronger, hadn’t we…maybe that had scared her?

I shook my head, dismissing the
idea. It didn’t feel like the right answer. She seemed scared
because of something else, some connection she made after we’d
talked about that.

What was the last thing she
asked me?

Something about her dreams
being real, other people’s thoughts drifting into her head, when
her conscious mind wasn’t in control. Then she’d said something
about it “being Ami, not me,” and had run off.

Having picked up everything I
could see from the ground, I patted my pocket out of habit, to
check that the wristband was there. It wasn’t. I realised that
Cassie must still be wearing it, from when I put it on her. I only
hoped that she had remembered to take it off before leaving the
park, otherwise I’d be claiming a system malfunction much sooner
than I’d been anticipating.

Looping the strap of the bag
across my shoulder, I set off at a brisk jog, hoping I might catch
up with Cassie. From what she’d said, I guessed she would be
heading home or to Ami’s – maybe she’d forgotten they were meeting
up – and so I headed in the direction of the Green Zone.

In frustration, I slammed my
palm onto the panel at the entrance to our apartment. It took a
moment or two, longer than usual, to register my mark and open the
door. Once it was halfway open, I shoved my way inside, scraping my
arm as I went.

“Hello?” I called out.

As I expected, silence was the
only answer I received. Mother and Father must still be at work.
Slipping into my bedroom, I pulled the bag from my shoulders and
began peeling off my sticky day-suit. I’d ended up running all the
way home from Park 42, not seeing any sign of Cassie. I could only
assume she’d taken a different route back…either that, or she’d
sprinted all the way!

Letting my suit fall into a
heap on the floor, I walked across the hallway to the bathroom, not
bothering to cover my body as I would normally when my parents were
home. They were not big on nudity.

The water in the shower was
warm as I got in. I turned it down as low as it would go, and
within a few seconds it had cooled. Sticking my head into the
spray, it washed away my sweat and irritation. As I relaxed, I let
my thoughts drift back to Cassie, and the secrets she had told me
that afternoon…

* * *

We had been silent for a while,
but that seemed to be OK. Cassie had accepted everything I’d told
her about the scanner systems and how I used the band to get around
them. I’d given her a lot to think about; it was her turn now.

I rolled closer to Cassie,
interrupting her quiet musings. She turned towards me and I cupped
her cheek in my palm, making sure I had her full attention again.
“Don’t think I’ve forgotten that you have something to tell me…” I
let my thumb trace the half circle beneath her eye, where the skin
was darker than usual. “You still look tired you know?”

“Thanks!” She spun away
immediately.

“I’m just concerned,” I said,
rolling after her, so she couldn’t avoid me. “And you can’t exactly
tell me that there’s nothing wrong. I already know you’re hearing
things that no one else can!”

“That makes me feel much
better,” she grumbled, still avoiding eye contact.

“It
should
make you feel
better.”

I pulled her back to face me,
despite her resistance. I already knew enough about her secret that
she couldn’t deny it, so why was Cassie so against us finding out
more? I tried to encourage her to see it the way I did.

“What you’re able to do might
be a new step in evolution for mankind…or something special to
you…or a result of living on the station…”
Or caused by
something they had given us, disguised as vitamins…

I decided to store that last,
random thought away for later. It was something I hadn’t actually
considered, before it popped into my head just now, but it sounded
plausible. Or, as plausible as anything else! I knew it must be
scary for her, but how could she not find this exciting? Just a
little bit?

“Are you trying to tell me that
I’m hearing what people are thinking because of cosmic radiation or
exposure to some unknown chemical?”

They were certainly
possibilities.

Cassie scoffed at her own
suggestion. “To be honest I think that’s the least likely
explanation of any!”

“Really…? So, you
have
given this some thought already.”

“A little,” she conceded,
“maybe…”

“You’ve heard my guilty
secrets.” I pointed out. “It’s good to share and I’ve got the time
right now. Why don’t you start at the beginning?”

And she did. Cassie told me
that it had started with her dreams, several weeks ago – I made a
mental note to go back and check her records to see if anything
specific had happened around that time. At the beginning it had
been snatches of words and sometimes images of places around the
space station: very normal and familiar, but not hers.

Cassie had put this out of her
mind, but when the examinations started and she began using the
automatic discourse headsets, it got worse. Although she hadn’t
fully guessed at the time, it sounded like she had been picking up
on other people’s thoughts and answers to the exam questions.

The headsets had been the main
factor today when Cassie had heard me. Perhaps there was something
in their construction, or the way they extracted information
directly from our minds, that Cassie was picking up on…

I sat back when she finished
speaking. There had been a lot of information to take in and it
would take me some time to process it. To help me along, I wanted
to clarify some things.

“From what you’ve said, there’s
been a complete shift from this being something that affected you
subconsciously – you were always asleep – to now, when you heard
me, and that woman today. You consciously tuned in to what we were
thinking.”

Cassie shook her head. “I
wasn’t
trying
to hear anything from you today, remember? The
first time I heard you was just because we both had the headsets
on. But, the woman on the way over here…”

“You said you felt like she
tried
to hear you? As if she was able to do something
similar – consciously – that you’ve been doing by accident?”

Cassie nodded.

That was interesting. If Cassie
was right, then it made this much bigger than something that only
affected her… The key elements: the effect of the headsets;
subconscious and then conscious ability to do this; maybe other
people being able to do it… It couldn’t all be a coincidence, could
it?

We lapsed into silence for a
while. In the quiet I turned over ideas in my head and wondered
what possible options there were to connect the strange things
happening with Cassie, to everything else I thought was wrong with
the station – perhaps the link was there?

“So…what do we do?” Cassie
asked, eventually interrupting my thoughts.

What could I say?

When I looked at Cassie I saw
fear in her eyes, and I hated that. It was even worse that I had no
real answer for her.

“What can we do, when we don’t
really know what’s happening?” The question was more for me than
her, but Cassie answered anyway.

“Perhaps we need to pay more
attention – to try and figure it out.”

I tipped my head to the side as
I considered her suggestion, before concluding that it was the only
choice we had right now. “I’ve done this for a long time already,
but you’re right. We need to think about everything we know,
everything we’ve been told – there must be some clues in that to
what’s happening with you.”