When We Wake (6 page)

Ringo is my favorite Beatle. He wasn’t the best drummer in the world, and he definitely wasn’t the best singer or songwriter. He was the last one to join, when they kicked out their original drummer, and he was sure they were going to replace him, too. And he was left-handed, playing a right-hand drum set. The other Beatles laughed at most of his compositions because they sounded like other popular tunes. But he stuck with it, with all of it. He invented lots of incredible fills to get around his hands, and he wrote “Don’t Pass Me By” and “Octopus’s Garden,” and he sang “With a Little Help from My Friends,” which is one of my top-ten favorites.

At his funeral, everyone talked about what a great musician Ringo was. And he really was. Not because he was particularly gifted, but because he never gave up.

I’d learned to be good at the guitar without any of the natural musicality that Owen had, and I’d gotten decent marks at school without being supersmart like Dalmar, and I’d kept going with free running, even though I wasn’t naturally athletic like Alex.

Talent is great, but persistence is totally underrated.

“I want to live outside the compound,” I said. “I want to go to school.” My voice was cracked and scraggly from disuse. I sounded at least seventy years old. Or a hundred and seventeen, ha-ha.

A muscle in Dawson’s jaw jumped. “Your demands are unacceptable.”

“I’m going back on my hunger and talking strike, effective—”

“I need to talk to some people,” he said furiously, and marched out. He sure looked like a military guy then, back straight, jaw set.

Marie lingered, under cover of checking the IV. She bent over me and fluffed my pillow. “I hope you know what you’re doing,” she whispered.

I gave her the faintest ghost of a wink.

She carried a tiny smile out with her.

I lay there and contemplated my toes. There was a limit to how far I could push this. I didn’t want to make them so angry with me that they gave me up as a dead loss and tossed me out into this strange new world. And I really didn’t want to sabotage
or delay Operation New Beginning. Bringing back soldiers was good work, and helping out was the right thing to do, even if I didn’t want to do it at the expense of my freedom.

It was so nice to have energy and a clear head. If I was honest with myself, I wasn’t positive I could go without food again.

Dawson came back after a couple of hours, Marie beside him.

“I have a counterproposal,” he said. “You will continue your participation in Operation New Beginning as an outpatient, undergoing daily interviews and testing. You will give us your full and complete cooperation. You will go to a school that we select. You will take part in carefully selected media opportunities, which we will supervise. And until you become a legal adult, you will live with Dr. Carmen.”

I sat up in bed and looked at Marie. She nodded, that tiny smile hovering at the edge of her lips.

“Dr. Carmen has generously offered to take this role as your guardian, and you will be under her supervision and authority, which you will respect,” Dawson continued. “I want you to understand just what sacrifices taking you into her home will entail on her behalf.” His expression said, quite clearly, that he would never let me within five hundred meters of his home.

“I don’t want to get tested every day,” I said.

“Twice weekly,” Marie said before Dawson could open his mouth. “We do need that data, Tegan. I know you don’t want to imperil the project.”

“No, I don’t. Twice weekly is okay. And I want to be able to talk to the media by myself.”

“No unsupervised media,” Dawson said. Not like he was an
adult telling an unruly kid what to do. Like someone explaining something to—well, not an equal, but a not entirely stupid subordinate. “Sections of this project are highly classified. If you don’t agree to this condition, I can’t let you out.”

I paused, thinking of the blank man in his hospital bed, but for only a moment. After a month underground, I needed to get out. I needed to see sun and breathe unrecycled air, or I wasn’t sure what would happen inside my head.

I needed to see what this new life had in store for me.

“Agreed,” I said, and held out my hand.

Dawson shook it with no hesitation. “I’ll get the lawyers to draw up the contract,” he said. “And you will not pull any stunts like this again, however justified you think your actions are.”

“Hey, that wasn’t part of the deal,” I said, and smiled at him.

Wonder of wonders, he smiled back.

And that’s how I strong-armed the Department of Defence into letting a girl with no legal existence have a life.

I’m pretty sure they’re regretting that now.

When they find us, I imagine they’ll make me pay for it.

It turned out the army base was in Williamstown, where there’d been a smaller navy base in my time. I’d lived in the next suburb over, in Newport. I’d walked along Hobsons Bay and
tossed spare bread for the ducks and black swans. I’d watched the huge container ships drift past, and smiled at the gray navy ships bristling with radio masts and gun barrels. There had been pleasant houses with big gardens and lots of glass windows to let in light and air and a view of the bay.

Now the houses turned inward, windows smaller and shaded. The green colonial vegetation was gone, too delicate for the harsher sun and strict water restrictions. What gardens remained were Australian natives or gene-doctored plants, made to withstand the droughts. The sea was higher, swallowing the estuary and a good chunk of what had been the waterfront.

And the black swans were gone, another great extinction that humanity added to the list.

You’d think the changes would make me sad, but, except for the heat and the swans, it was okay. It’s easier if you treat the past like another country. You can tell yourself you’ve moved, and it’s just been a while since anyone got in touch. And after so long underground, the freedom was exciting. I felt like someone in a fairy tale who’d won herself a prize through her own bravery and perseverance. And I was going to help people. I was going to bring soldiers home.

We drove past all of that and went on, over the bridge that had replaced the West Gate, closer to the city proper. The houses there had changed, too, gleaming with their own newness.

When I first saw Marie’s house, I had no idea where she was going to fit me. It looked as new as the others on the block, and
really, really small—a little one-story building that was maybe about the size of my old living room, in the middle of a largish section.

She pulled out keys for the security door.

“People still use keys? I was expecting some infrared wand thingy.”

“It’s hard to hack a physical lock,” Marie said, which just went to show that she’d never had a best friend like Alex teaching her the lock-picking ropes. “But the house is electronically protected, too.” She whispered something under her breath, and the inner door swung open at her touch. “There. The house computer will recognize you now.”

It turned out I didn’t have to worry about Marie finding a place for me. The visible part of the house was only the hallway and the kitchen. A pretty big kitchen, with a lot of shiny equipment that my mum would have loved. To the side of the door was a flight of stairs leading down to the rest of the house underground, where Marie and I would live like wombats in a burrow, hiding from the sun.

That was my first clue that this new world was even more different than I’d imagined.

For the next fortnight, I did my psych interviews and checkups like a good girl, and the rest of the time, Marie put me through an intense catch-up curriculum on history and technology and social customs.

I’d wanted to go to school right away, but I didn’t know enough about really basic things, like how to use a “computer,” which is what all those plastic sheets were that the medical staff had been scribbling on. Yeah, I know, you were laughing at me the whole time I was describing them, right? Well, whatever. To me, a computer was a bulky screen with a processor inside and a mouse and keyboard, or maybe a book-sized thing you flipped open and rested on your lap, or, if you didn’t mind a tiny screen, part of your phone.

It definitely wasn’t a thin sheet you could fold or crumple into your pocket, or open to full size and shake rigid and then scribble all over with a stylus, or type on with a keyboard application, or gesture at. Marie taught me the most basic universal signs and then let me train my computer in how I wanted it to work. It occasionally suggested new moves, and I nearly always took its advice.

I named it Koko, after that gorilla that talked in sign language, and if it’s possible to love an inanimate thing, I loved that computer. Koko put me back in touch with the world.

Here’s another thing people ask a lot: What happened to your friends and family after you died?

They assume I just looked that up right away. I mean, why wouldn’t I? Information is everywhere, and even in my time, there was a lot available. But you’re forgetting that formats change, files get corrupted, servers crash, and data goes
missing. And there’s so much information that it can take a while to unearth anything, especially the lives of ordinary people from a hundred years ago. I didn’t have a lot of spare time, and I didn’t have much inclination to search. I had moved to another country, and people from my old home didn’t get in touch anymore; that was how I wanted to handle it.