The vehicle crawled down Hampstead High Street towards the southern checkpoint near Belsize Park.
Jasper hadn’t uttered a word since cursing at the sight of her father. If during most of the ceremony he’d looked like he was preparing for battle, now it seemed he’d surrendered the fight.
‘Jasper?’ she said. ‘What’s wrong?’
His eyes flicked across to her, but they appeared focused on something in his mind, as though she were imaginary, not whatever it was he saw.
‘Not now,’ he said.
‘Five minutes ago you said you had to talk to me urgently.’
‘Wel, now I don’t.’
A chiling hardness seeped through her. If Jasper couldn’t make himself accessible on the day of their binding, she wasn’t sure enduring the Community and everything that staying in it meant – the Board’s tests, the constant scrutiny and ostracism – was worth the trouble. But that was her anger and her pride talking. She could hardly give up on 23
herself. She straightened the blue ripples of silk across her legs.
‘Please, Jasper, we’re going to be spending a lot of time together over the next few weeks. I was hoping we could be open with each other.’
His eyes came back into focus. ‘Are you sure you want honesty?’ he asked. His flat voice carried an air of such menace, she flinched.
Jasper’s hand felt limp and hot against the skin of her palm. She considered untying the white fabric so that she could sit further from him, or jump out of the car when they stopped at the Hampstead checkpoint. But of course, she didn’t.
‘Yes,’ she answered, ‘I want us to be honest with each other. You can’t go through with the joining because you feel sorry for me, or because you sent me a binding invitation on a whim before you knew I was a Big3, and now, out of some misplaced sense of duty, you feel responsible for my future safety.’
‘I see,’ Jasper said. A hint of amusement touched his ashen face. ‘So this is how you behave the first time we’re officialy alowed to be alone together?’
‘And this is how
you
behave,’ she said. She would not be manoeuvred into avoiding a serious conversation. She knew what it was like to live with someone you didn’t com-municate with. She and her father had never connected.
Whatever compromises she was prepared to make, a su-perficial relationship with Jasper wasn’t one of them; not even to escape the City. She glanced at him and the sight of hopelessness in his expression softened her.
24
‘I’m not sure I can ask this of you,’ she said.
‘I’m not sure I can ask this of you,’ she said.
‘Ask what?’
‘Come on. You know what.’
Instead of answering, he scowled.
Ana rubbed the soft silk of her dress between her right-hand finger and thumb.
‘So, how are your studies going?’
‘Fine.’
‘I could help you prepare for the bar exam if you like.’
Jasper looked up and stared at her. Perhaps he thought she was being ridiculous.
‘When my dad was arrested I got interested in law,’ she explained. ‘And then you started your law degree. I kind of folowed the sylabus.’ She shrugged. It was probably better not to tel him how fascinated and obsessed by the subject she’d become. How a non-existent social life and boring school studies meant she’d read every paper from the three-year Oxford sylabus she could get her hands on.
Law appealed to her natural ability to memorise and her enjoyment of rational and creative argument. Her school studies never required such mental gymnastics. If anything, they’d grown simpler and stupider the closer she’d come to finishing.
Jasper remained mute.
Ana glanced out the window, then tried again. ‘I er . . . I Ana glanced out the window, then tried again. ‘I er . . . I was remembering on the way to the binding the first time we met,’ she said, ‘at your parents’ Christmas party.’
‘You were much shorter then,’ he responded.
‘I was eleven.’
25
‘Wel, that could be why.’ The hint of a smile shone through his expression.
She raised her eyes and grew warm under his gaze.
Perhaps puling the old Jasper out of the new required skil and delicacy, like extracting the soft flesh of a prickly pear.
‘I was sure you’d be joined by the time I was eligible,’
she said.
‘Wel, there was one near-miss.’
‘Who desisted?’
‘It was pretty mutual.’
She nodded, but she didn’t believe him. She couldn’t imagine any impressionable teenage girl turning down the rich, handsome Jasper Taurel.
‘You were playing the piano,’ he said. ‘The first time we met,’ he added, by way of explanation. ‘You’d hidden away in the old annexe near the library and you were playing the piano and crying.’
Ana looked away, embarrassed and amazed he remembered. ‘Yes, and you and Tom found me and remembered. ‘Yes, and you and Tom found me and insisted I return to the party.’
Jasper smiled, but the smile quickly faded and his gaze grew distant.
‘Do you prefer not talking about him?’
‘It’s fine,’ he said. But a sadness crept over him – a heaviness she knew too wel from losing her mother.
Before she quite realised what she was doing, she reached out and brushed a fingertip across the bruise above his eye. He wrapped his right hand over hers and brought it up to his lips. He gently kissed the bottom of her thumb. She held her breath. In her mind she saw her disease oozing out of 26
her skin where his mouth touched her and staining his lips blue; she saw it sink into his veins and mix with the blood coursing through his body. It was like a curse. He was her antidote. She was his poison.
*
The opening bars of the evening’s final concerto resounded through the auditorium. Hunched in his balcony seat, Jasper tried to swalow the lump in his throat. The melody they listened to pained him almost as much as the confusion in Ana’s ocean-grey gaze.
Without thinking, his fingers searched beneath his shirt for the pendant he’d altered to conceal his brother Tom’s research evidence. He’d wanted to tel Ana what was realy going on for months, but he’d been afraid she wouldn’t believe him, just as he hadn’t believed his brother the week before Tom’s death, when Tom claimed he’d uncovered the story of the century – there was something wrong with the Pure tests.
Rachmaninov’s C Minor Concerto grew wistful. A hush descended on the stals below. Jasper almost didn’t notice the muttering and murmuring until moments like that –
when it stopped. He gazed over the balcony at the Crazies standing shoulder-to-shoulder inside the wire mesh pen below. The Benzidox addicts were easy to spot. They twitched and jerked; they were missing large clumps of hair or wore badly made wigs. The majority of the ragged crowd had their interfaces switched on. The wearable, miniature computers projected spinning symbols and catchwords on the T-shirts and sweaters of those in front.
Blurred images and letters throbbed in a sea of colour.
One 27
or two of the Crazies manipulated the digital information in time with the music, using hand gestures to alter the colours and forms superimposed on the world around them.
When the violins began to crescendo and the music sweled through the vast hal, the mumbling and fidgeting resumed.
The lump in Jasper’s throat sweled to the size of a golf bal. He had to say something to Ana now. It might be his last chance. He leaned towards her. The scent of lemon and the glow of her silvery blonde hair momentarily distracted him. Sensing his closeness, she turned. Serious eyes settled on his face. Beneath the fabric of their bound hands, he tightened his grip and leaned forwards towards hands, he tightened his grip and leaned forwards towards the balcony, drawing her with him. He began to speak, gaze trained on the concert pianist centre stage.
‘There are things I haven’t been able to tel you,’ he murmured. ‘I’m in trouble.’ Her eyes widened. ‘Don’t look at me,’ he said. ‘Don’t draw attention.’ She nodded. Her face relaxed. She turned from him and rested the side of her head against his cheek, as though they were simply sharing an intimate moment; a gesture that concealed his mouth.
Jasper felt a surge of admiration for her quiet inteligence.
And regret. He should have trusted her. Now it was too late.
‘This morning I met an acquaintance in the City,’ Jasper began. ‘One minute we were talking, the next he was flipping out, going mental. The Psych Watch arrived within seconds. They sedated him, dragged him away. It was . . .
because of me.’
On Ana’s left, her father rose. She leaned back, alowing 28
him to squeeze down the row, forcing Jasper to do the same. As Ashby excused himself, Jasper’s mother, sitting to Jasper’s right, placed her hand over his. He glanced around and saw his own father, mother and sister al watching him.
His face began to burn. He removed his hand and shook out one arm from his dinner jacket. A piece of paper flitted to the ground. Instinctively, he let his programme drop and bent to retrieve both items, jerking Ana down with him.
with him.
‘Sorry,’ he muttered. He rested the programme on his lap and strained to read the scrap beneath. A telephone number. ‘Ana,’ he whispered, ‘I’m sorry, I’ve got to . .
.’ He untied the binding knot and started to unwind the material folded over their hands. She paled. Though a couple didn’t stay bound for the four-week courtship, removal of the ribbon was usualy a significant, intimate moment ful of unspoken hope. Often a couple would hold off doing it for as long as possible, believing it auspicious to stay fastened together until the very last moment when they parted for the night.
‘Sorry,’ Jasper repeated. He rose and passed his family to the end of the row. His heart pounded as he strode up the aisle, loosening his bow tie, which now strangled him.
At the exit, he pushed open the auditorium door and stumbled into the corridor. The door sucked shut behind him, muffling the orchestra. Dim coloured lights in the floor lit the passage towards the bar.
It was only after Tom’s ‘accident’ and the Wardens’
‘investigation’, which included ransacking Tom’s room and confiscating al his possessions, that Jasper had started to believe his brother had been on to something.
And then it 29
had taken him weeks to pluck up the nerve to search Tom’s locker at the golf club. He’d found the tiny disc wedged into the metal latch, exactly as Tom had described. He’d found it and hidden it again in the next locker along. It had taken him over two years of deliberation before he decided to finish what his brother had started. Then he’d begun slowly building up his contacts and determining the safest way to get the contacts and determining the safest way to get the evidence out of the Community.
But al his planning had come to nothing this morning.
The moment Jasper had handed over the only other copy of the research material to the transporter, the guy had gone nuts. A minute earlier there’d been nothing wrong with him. He’d obviously been spiked, and the Psych Watch had been waiting. Which meant there was a leak.
The Wardens had known exactly what was going on and had taken out the transporter. It was only a matter of time before they caught up with Jasper.
He should have disappeared in the earlier confusion, glided through the cracks of London’s chaotic city streets and buried himself. But he hadn’t been ready to walk away from his life; hadn’t known where to go. And though he couldn’t explain what was going on to his mother, he’d hoped for the chance to tel Ana the truth.
Reaching the bar, Jasper turned to make sure he wasn’t being folowed. The overhead surround-sound vibrated as the concerto climaxed, trumpets blaring. The piano’s refrain started over, staccato and swirling. He was familiar with the final piece of the evening, but the shift felt different this time, as if it had lost control. He skirted round the 30
bar and with a last backwards glance, exited through a fire door.
In the stairwel, he waved his hand in front of him to activate his interface – a gold triangle enclosing a circle of ruby glass, which hung from his neck chain. The ruby lit up. As the device projected digital information from the up. As the device projected digital information from the internal computer, the red stone blazed against his shirt like burning coal. Quickly, he attached the magnetic scrambler on to the metal housing so the Wardens couldn’t use his transmission to track him. He mimed making a phone cal.
The camera inside his interface picked up the hand gesture and the computer switched to phone mode, casting numbers into the air. He held his palm paralel to his chest and the virtual telephone pad focused up on it.
Using his other hand, he keyed in the number that he’d found slipped into his jacket pocket.
The line clicked into voicemail straight away.
‘This is Enkidu,’ a male voice said. ‘I’m busy so try again later. BEEP. Sorry no messages! I ain’t no answering machine.’ Jasper hung up and rechecked the paper.
Scribbled beside the number was the word
Camden
. As he scrunched the scrap into a bal and shoved it in his trouser pocket, his interface beeped that he’d received mail.
Enkidu, Camden,
he thought. If he could get there without being folowed, he might stand a chance of eluding the Wardens. Employing the stairwel door as a screen for his interface, he opened the new message and saw an image of a guy in a strait-jacket, blood down his cracked nose.
Mouth twisted into a scream. Forehead mashed up.
Unre-31
cognisable. But the eyes – the eyes were his contact’s.
The transporter.
Sweat seeped through Jasper’s shirt and trickled down the sides of his face. He yanked off his bow tie and bent over, palms pressed into his thighs. His breathing was al over the place. The music, though barely audible now, whirled in his head.
Someone anonymous had sent the image to warn or frighten him. Either way, it confirmed what he knew – his contact going demented right after Jasper had entrusted him with the disc was no coincidence.
Jasper glanced at the overhead security camera, then turned and flew down the stairs. His hard shoes clattered on the concrete steps. At Level Two his interface flickered off and back on again as the wireless network booster kicked in. At Level Three he yanked open the stairwel door, panting.