The Whisper (2 page)

The Whisper was the sound of thoughts, they realized.

The Roar was the sound of emotion.

They realized this as they gazed through the fence.

The wind whipped their gowns and they listened to each other.

We have to stay calm so we can hear this
.

We have to accept what they’ve done to us so we can work out what to do about it
.

We shouldn’t have run out of the fortress like that
.

Now we’re trapped
.

And we’ve left something behind
.

What have we left behind?

As they focused, the answer began to take shape. It had almost reached the tip of their tongues, when a noise ripped through the sky that left claw marks in the clouds. Immediately, the children felt the blood jump in their veins.

Pod Fighters!

They looked up, all at once, as if their heads were jerked on strings. Then a single thought flashed through them all, as fast as the electricity running through the fence.

“What are they doing?” Gorman asked.

He couldn’t hear the Pod Fighters through the thick glass of his window.

The engineers gathered and they watched the children gaze at the sky. The children looked like a pale ring around the fortress.

“They’ve seen something, sir.”

“Well, yes,” Gorman sneered. “But what?”

“Pod Fighters. A squadron of Pod Fighters has just returned to the fortress.”

Gorman laughed.

“Brilliant!” he mocked. “So they’ve only just realized there are Pod Fighters in the fortress! Did they think I was going to
send them to war in their parents’ hover cars? They’re even more stupid than I thought….”

But as fast as the children had frozen, they became a fluid mass again, surging toward the fortress like a noose closing on its throat.

The green worm of Gorman’s heartbeat began to bolt across a screen.

“Lock the doors,” he said. “Don’t let them back in. If we let them back in, they’ll go for their Pod Fighters. They’re going to try to get their Pod Fighters and escape.”

“Yes, sir.”

Gorman watched the children swarm toward the fire doors.

“How are they communicating?” he asked. “They look as if they’re communicating, but they can’t, spread out like that. It’s not possible.”

The children reached the fortress and pressed hard against it.

Now Gorman felt afraid. All at once he felt as if he were watching aliens instead of children. That he’d harvested a crop of aliens to fight his war. He’d felt this unsettling sensation in the past, in the company of the mutants like Mika and Ellie, but never with these normal children.

“I don’t like it,” he said. “They’re being weird.”

“The doors are locked, sir. They can’t get back in.”

“That’s not the point,” Gorman said. “I’ve had enough of this now. I want these children under control. I told them to sleep until they were needed, and they’re trying to run away from me.”

He continued to watch them. Suddenly he felt vicious, as if he wanted to slap them down in the hardest, cruelest way.

“Release the Creeper Nets,” he said.

The engineers looked shocked.

“The Creeper Nets, sir?”

“Yes, the Creeper Nets.”

“But the Creeper Nets are weapons. The children will be injured.”

“Good,” Gorman replied. “They need teaching a lesson. Perhaps when they’ve felt the stab of a Creeper Net, they’ll remember who’s in control. I want my army back in bed.”

The children pressed against the fortress, tugging on the wet bars of the fire doors. Their connection was faltering again. They were killing it with panic.

They’d left their Pod Fighters behind!

How could they have made such a terrible mistake?

It was difficult to accept they’d done it, and they continued to tug on the doors long after they realized they were locked.

But after a few minutes, they heard the grunt and grind of heavy metal. Startled, they backed away, not sure where the noise was coming from. Then they saw holes appear in the walls of the fortress where it met the rock of Cape Wrath. For a moment they considered using these as another route back in, then they heard a metallic scuttling sound and realized there was something in them.

They pulled back slowly, still reluctant to leave, but when they saw the Creeper Nets reach the mouths of the tunnels, they turned and ran in terror.

The Creeper Nets erupted in a spindly black mass and spread up the wall of the fortress. Then they spilled over the rocks, scuttling madly on hard, spike-tipped feet. It was difficult
to see them through the darkness and the rain, but they looked like something hatching. Something made of scorpions and bats and spiders with some of their legs pulled off.

Each Creeper Net had five barbed legs with a black wire net stretched between them. When they reached the children, they rose and bloomed like black flowers ready to strike. They struck hard, with one leg that arched back and came down with the speed of a paintbrush stippling canvas. The attacks were so fast and brutal, the first children fell without even seeing them — jerking like starfish, collapsing like puppets, paralyzed by venom, and cocooned by a net and barbed legs before they ever hit the wet rock.

This was child control of the severest kind.

But as Gorman watched them fall, his fear subsided. He’d caught a glimpse of something he didn’t like, and he didn’t want to see it again.

W
hen Mika and Ellie touched, only one adult realized something strange had happened. The man with the gun, who was guarding them. He’d thought he’d seen them
glow
when they touched. As if all the energy they’d used missing each other now fused them together into something new, something even more powerful and strange. Now he was trapped in a pod with them, flying toward London.

Something bad had happened when they touched, he was sure of it. The Northern Government knew these mutant children were different, but how different? What exactly were they? Mika was born with webbed feet. Ellie was born with webbed hands. And many other children had been born with animal mutations, but no one understood why.

Mal Gorman had taken Ellie a year and a half before the others so he could explore her mutant power. But they were still a live experiment, and the man with the gun did not want to
discover the outcome of that experiment while he was alone, up in the air, with them.

Ellie moved suddenly, reaching across the seat for a bottle of water, and the man with the gun almost jumped out of his skin. But Ellie didn’t even look at him. She opened the bottle quickly and passed it to her brother, with her eyes still fixed out the window. Mika was thirsty, not her. The man wondered how she knew.

“Thanks,” Mika said.

The man watched them carefully. He understood why Mal Gorman found them fascinating. They were beautiful beyond their blend of Italian and Indian bloods, with their long limbs, black hair, and eyes as sullen as night flowers. Their beauty was startling and unfathomable. Looking at Mika and Ellie was like staring at a wormhole in space and trying to see what was in it. But mutant beauty was deadly beauty. These children could kill with their eyes. This seemed like a useful talent to a warmongering corpse machine like Mal Gorman, but it frightened this man with the gun.

Please don’t kill me
, he thought.

Children don’t glow, he told himself. Glowworms glow, the sun and moon glow, but children
do not
glow, even mutant ones.

We’re just flying to London to visit their parents
.

Nothing bad is going to happen
.

This trip home had been arranged by Mal Gorman to make Ellie safer to work with. She’d been difficult to handle because her parents believed she was dead, so this was a calculated act of weapon management. When she returned to the fortress, Gorman hoped, she’d be as calm and obedient as her brother.

The man wiped his free hand on his trousers and tried to admire the view. The passing towns looked prettier when darkness hid the mold and the pylons.

Surely, there was nothing to worry about.

They were, after all, just children.

The Golden Turrets appeared on the distant horizon. The air roads rose like ribbons attached to the glittering domes, and Mika and Ellie felt their hearts swell with happiness. This was the journey they’d longed for since the day Ellie was taken. Their parents were about to discover she was still alive.

They watched the city, full of love. It was even more beautiful viewed through mutant eyes. Every pod that flew ahead of them on the air road toward London had a trail of light the man couldn’t see. Blue light streaming from the craft, gold light streaming from the people within, fluid as water, bright as sea and sun, a startling blue, a brilliant gold, buzzing and throbbing with meaning. And the traffic moved at such speed on its gentle curve toward London that all these streams wove together into a silk of inanimate and living light that was mesmerizing.

As Mika and Ellie absorbed this beauty, with their hearts so full of happiness, it didn’t feel as if anything could go wrong.

But as the pod reached the first glittering dome on the outskirts of the city, the man’s com began to glow.

Immediately, Mika and Ellie turned and fixed their eyes on him.

He listened and nodded.

Red spots appeared on his cheeks.

The call was brief, but by the time it ended, the golden light emanating from his body was darkened by streaks of dread.

“What’s wrong?” Ellie asked.

“Nothing,” the man replied. “Look, we’re nearly there.”

They knew he was lying. Sometimes these adults forgot what mutant eyes could see. The emotions they tried to hide with false expressions and words pulsed through their light, clear and true. It was pointless lying to a mutant child. And the pilot had begun to fly faster, nudging through the traffic on the air road. Something was clearly wrong.

Mika and Ellie looked away, reaching. They stopped thinking about their parents and let their minds drift toward the fortress. The city and its streamers passed, forgotten.

It was their turn to connect.

They felt a tug and a split second of uneasiness as they fastened. Then, as if a pipe had burst with a million gallons of water behind it, their minds were flooded by the thoughts of twenty-seven thousand stricken children.

Blood, fear, darkness, rain. The Creeper Nets bloomed like black flowers around them. All at once they were not in the pod, they were running on black rock, dressed in thin, white gowns, with lumps of metal in their heads. And all that fear, pain, and confusion was like a sudden, deafening onslaught that they could not control. The Roar rose up without a hope of suppressing it. And what remained of the sound of fierce emotions in the old human mind became a weapon in theirs.

“MIKA!”

Mika looked up and realized that the man with the gun was shouting at him. Then he looked down again and saw that the pod seat was on fire. He’d set it on fire. It caught the sleeve of his jacket and licked up his arm. Ellie grabbed him and yanked him away, slapping it hard with her hand.

“What the frag are you doing?” the man yelled. “You just set the seat on fire!”

The pod began to fill with smoke. Ellie dragged Mika’s jacket off and beat the flaming seat. The man with the gun shouted frantically at the pilot, telling him to land as quickly as possible. Then they heard a click and a shunt, and a rush of air filled the pod.

“The pilot’s ejected!” the man with the gun yelled. “He’s left us! We’re going to crash!”

Then the pod began to fall like a stone from the sky.

It was quiet.

The man with the gun thought he was dead.

It occurred to him that it hadn’t hurt. Then he began to cough violently and he felt his eyes sting. When he opened them he saw Ellie and Mika through a haze of smoke. They were standing over him. Their white armored boots and trousers were smeared with soot from the fire, and Ellie had his gun in her hand. He panicked for a second, but all she did was hold it out so he could take it back again.

“Thanks,” he said.

“Mika landed the pod,” Ellie told him.

“Did he?” the man replied. “Where are we?”

“In the Golden Turrets, in New Hyde Park, in front of our parents’ turret.”

“Oh,” he said, sitting up.

He tried to gather his thoughts. Only seconds ago they’d been in free fall. Now the fire was extinguished, the pod had been landed, and Ellie and Mika were watching him steadily. As if it were an everyday occurrence to set fire to yourself,
scare the pilot so much he ejected, then land a pod in exactly the right place, seconds before it crashed … and give him his gun back.

The children looked different. Their black eyes now shone with a mercurial gleam. He didn’t like it.

“We’re surrounded by soldiers,” Mika said. “Why are they here?”

For a moment the man was confused. He’d forgotten the call he’d taken in the pod and the message he’d received from the fortress. Then through the window he saw black helmets and guns and remembered what was happening. For a moment he considered opening the door and running away so someone else would have to deliver Mal Gorman’s message.

“Tell us,” Mika urged.

They stood so still he could hear his heart beat.

“There’s a problem in the fortress,” he began. “It’s nothing to do with me, I’m just following orders. I had no idea this would happen….”

“What?” Mika asked. “Just tell us.”

“Promise you won’t blame me.”

“OK,” Mika said.

“The implanted army is awake and trying to run away. Something’s wrong with the implants … and you know what Mal Gorman’s like when things go wrong. He gets angry and he changes his mind about things. He wants his army under control … and that means you as well. He wants you in the fortress while the implanted children are returned to their beds. I’m sorry, Ellie, but you can’t see your parents today. He’s sent these soldiers to escort you…. Please don’t blame me.”

Ellie flinched and he saw a split-second spark of pain in her
eyes. He waited for it to morph into anger and to feel that anger turn on him, but to his astonishment, she said, “OK.”

“Wh-what?” he spluttered.

“OK,” she repeated. “We’ll go back.”

“Really?”

“Yes,” she said.

That was not what he’d expected her to say. She’d almost killed Mal Gorman the last time he tried to stop her from going home; she’d spent a year and a half crying for her parents, grieving and longing to end their suffering. But he didn’t want to waste time wondering why she was so willing to return to the fortress. He just wanted to get away from her as quickly as possible.

He stood up and reached past them to open the door.

It opened to reveal a landscape of helmets, guns, and gold. New Hyde Park was in the center of London, surrounded by a ring of turrets. An army freighter hung above the glittering fountain pools, and hundreds of soldiers stood around them. The man with the gun stepped down from the pod, but the children paused as they realized something within them had changed. Everything they focused on was brighter and more meaningful. As they stepped down from the pod, they watched the soldiers react and saw patterns of emotion spread through their light. Those closest to them felt hyperalert and anxious, those farther away wished they had a better view, and those in between felt a mixture of both. And they could see the people in the turrets too, standing on their balconies and looking down. Their lights shimmered with curiosity as they watched the scene in the park.

Someone barked orders, and the children began to walk
through the soldiers toward the army freighter. Ellie didn’t look back until they reached it, then she couldn’t resist one glance.

There!

Behind them on a balcony, she saw a pair of lights glowing brighter than all the rest. As her face tipped up, they expanded with a sudden pulse of shock.

Mum!

Dad!

They were far above her, thirty floors above her, but she could see her mother’s sari flicking in the wind. Her father’s hand raised, as if to wave. They shone with a great, pure love that radiated into the park.

They’ve seen you
, Mika thought.
At least they’ve seen you
.

The men moved forward, urging them toward the freighter. Ellie took one last look, her heart convulsing with longing, then she turned and followed Mika to the freighter.

Their army needed them.