“THAT FUCKER SHOT me. Shove a knife in his throat, would you, Nine Lives?”
I ignored the voice in my head as I approached Green, who sat on his own at the point where the fire’s warmth ceased to give protection against the frost that was settling on the hard ground.
“Hi,” I said. “You mind?” I indicated that I’d like to join him, and he waved me forward. I sat down next to him, watching the crowd mingling around the fire.
“You want to know what made me change my mind. Why I picked up a gun again and joined the team,” he said. It wasn’t a question. “Honestly, I don’t know.” There was a long pause as he considered.
“Partly it’s because I feel like a grown up now,” he said. “I know I’m strong enough that no-one could make me do the kind of things Mac made me do when I was part of his team.”
“That was what you were afraid of?” I didn’t know whether to be insulted or not. Did he really think that Jane or I would ask him to do something he didn’t feel okay with?
“You don’t know what it was like,” he said, staring off into the distance. “You always played things your way, but I liked being a follower. It made me feel safe. It’s attractive, you know? Allowing something else to make all the decisions, ceding your free will to someone else.”
It wasn’t attractive to me. In fact it was baffling. But I’d seen enough cults and armies to know that what Green was describing was more than simply common.
“If you do that,” he continued, “then the person who’s in control can make you do anything, anything at all, and you never think about the morality of it. You rationalise it away and say that it’s their fault. You’re just following orders. No blame attaches. It insulates you.”
“But you did question it,” I pointed out. “You turned on Mac. You shot him dead, mate.”
“Not soon enough.” He sighed. “But afterwards, when he and the school were gone and we’d relocated, I decided to treat it like a drug. I though I had to go cold turkey. No guns. No power to give orders. No clique or gang. I would be completely independent. That way no-one could ever get their hooks in me again. I couldn’t fall off the wagon, be seduced into letting someone else tell me what to do.”
“So it wasn’t fighting you were afraid of, it was following orders?”
He nodded.
“And you don’t feel that way any more?”
“No. I trust you and your Dad, and Jane and Tariq. You’re good people. Plus, I know now that it wasn’t a drug. I won’t have a relapse because I changed when I shot Mac. It’s taken me a while to realise it, but I’m a different person now. There’s nothing left of the boy I was. His vices aren’t mine. His weaknesses, either.”
He turned his head and looked me in the eye. “Think back, Lee,” he said. “To who you were before The Cull. Is there anything about that person that you recognise when you look in the mirror?”
I shook my head. “No.”
“Me neither. I’m a man now,” said Green, turning back to the fire. “I know my mind and I know I’m capable of choosing for myself. And right now, I choose to fight. I owe it to Matron, and to all the kids I teach.”
“No, really, just stab him would you?” said the voice. “Pious little shit.”
“Thank you,” I told Green, pretending I didn’t hear a dead man whispering in my ear. “I won’t betray your trust.”
Green smiled into space. “You’d better not,” he said.
EVENTUALLY EVERYONE ELSE left to spend the night in the beds at the nearby hospital. I stayed put and watched the fire burn. I knew I should try to sleep, that going into battle tired is suicide. But there was no point even closing my eyes. Ferguson hadn’t made contact, Dad was missing and Jane was captured.
I didn’t know what to worry about most — my Dad fighting off a besieging army, Jane being tortured by a monster who treated people like dirt on his shoes, or our chances of getting cut to ribbons by landmines and gun towers sometime around teatime the next day. Whichever way I turned, things looked bleak.
As the sun rose I heard the distant engine of a lorry. I grabbed my gun and ran to the main road, careful to stay out of sight as the noise grew louder. A minute or two later a removal lorry, huge and unwieldy, rolled down the road. As it passed I caught a glimpse of the driver and ran out, waving my arms and shouting. He must have seen me in the rear view mirror because the lorry pulled up and Ferguson jumped down from the cab.
I ran to met him.
“Is my Dad with you?” I asked.
He shook his head. “I found the kids, though.”
“The ones in Hammersmith?”
He nodded. A girl jumped down from the other side of the cab. Short and stocky, with an eye patch and long red hair, there was something vaguely familiar about her.
“Hi Lee,” she said as she walked to Ferguson’s side. My face must have betrayed my confusion, because she added: “Caroline.”
“Bloody hell,” I said, astonished. “We looked for you everywhere.”
“I know. Matron told me.”
“What?”
“Lee, did you get to Nottingham?” asked Ferguson.
“Um, yeah, there are some of your mates in the hospital. Just down the road on the right.” He took off past me to compare notes with his colleagues. Caroline walked to the back doors of the lorry and opened them, revealing a small army of children huddled in the back.
“Caroline,” I asked. “Have you seen Jane?”
She nodded, and something about the way the blood drained from her face told me that she did not have good news for me.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
“I MEANT TO ask,” says Cooper as we walk the corridors of power. “Were your people responsible for taking the plane at Heathrow last week?”
“Someone took a plane?”
He examines my face closely to see if my surprise is genuine. He decides it is, and he nods.
“Yeah, a bloody 747, no less. A woman and a bloke killed a bunch of my guys and flew to New York, leaving me with four months’ worth of children backed up at the airport.”
“I came here to kill you,” I suddenly blurt out, frustrated by small talk.
“No, you came here to kill the man who killed your brother. Your surprise prevented you from killing me. And now I’ve answered all your questions, you have all the facts at your fingertips. So you have a choice.”
“Which is?”
“Join me or die,” he says slowly, rolling his eyes, as if explaining something very simple to an idiot.
“But why offer me that choice? Why not just kill me? What makes you think I won’t pretend to join up in order to save my life until I can find a way to betray you?”
He sighs and looks up at the ceiling, shaking his head at my obstinacy. “I like you, Kate. Always did. You’ve got, what do they call it? Pluck, spunk, guts.”
“God, you really are a public school boy, aren’t you.”
“Plus, you know, you’re not bad-looking, all told.”
“Oh, thanks,” I say, then a thought occurs to me. “Christ, you’re not saying you want to go steady?”
“Don’t be silly. I’d wake up with a knife in my heart.”
“Trust me, it wouldn’t get that far.”
“Pity,” he says with a wink, as he walks away. I trail after him as he promenades through his echoing palace, confounded. I just can’t work out why I’m still alive.
“This is the central lobby,” he says as we enter a huge chamber with four corridors running off it at each point of the compass. A massive chandelier hangs above our heads and statues regard us gnomically from the shadows. “Directly above us is a big tower and in it there’s this huge metal contraption, like an engine,” says Cooper. “No-one has any idea what it is. You see, when they were building this place they gave the contract for the central heating to a guy who said he had a revolutionary new system that he would install. Once he was done all they had to do was switch it on and voila, nice warm Palace. But when they opened it for use they switched it on and nothing happened. So they called for the guy to come explain and he’d gone. Legged it with the money! So no-one knows if this machine above is a real central heating system that turned out not to work, or a huge fake thingy put there to make the con look good!”