Darkhaven, page 15
Not convinced that I hadn’t fluked it, or maybe because I celebrated with an outburst of ‘Nailed it!’, he had me do it all again, and I stuffed up the hill start the second time. We spent the rest of the morning daring each other to execute perfect hill starts on increasingly steep inclines until I tried to drive up a hill that even the all-wheel-drive rally car simply couldn’t manage.
‘I think you’ll pass,’ Stephen said, laughing as we rolled down the slope to a halt. ‘But we’re not done yet.’
He unbuckled his seatbelt, got out, and leaned back in the window. ‘Drive out of the pit and follow the road south-east.’ He pointed.
My gaze followed his hand across the gravel to a dirt track disappearing into the bush. ‘Where am I going?’
‘You’ll know when you get to the end, there’s a flag. Drive as fast as you can, and don’t stop until you get there. No matter what happens. Got it?’
‘Drive to the flag.’
‘No matter what happens. As fast as you can.’
He turned and climbed back into the Corolla, driving off the way we’d come in. I grumbled to myself as I put the Rex into gear and steered towards the track at the end of the pit. Whatever this was, I would have preferred to have known something about it. If it was some vague test of intuition, I had nothing.
I crawled onto the road in first gear, trundling along cautiously, nerves bristling. Nothing happened. Maybe it was just a driving exercise. I shifted up to second, about to accelerate, when a thud on the roof startled me. I slammed on the brakes. The car stopped almost instantly and my body whipped forward as a large black-and-white shape rolled over the bonnet and onto the ground. Keraun sprang to his feet, grinning, and hurried around to the passenger seat.
Irritation battled with an eager flutter in my chest. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘You wanted to hang out.’
‘Until I said I was busy.’
He pulled the door closed and wound down the window. He wasn’t wearing his sunglasses today, and his eyes were, for now, a normal human brown. ‘You want me here for this. I’ve seen the course, I can be your navigator.’
I folded my arms. ‘What if I was meeting a boyfriend?’
Horror flashed over his face, followed by a faint yellow glow about his eyes. ‘Oh. Um. Sorry.’ Without looking at me, he leapt out of the car and shut the door. ‘Sorry,’ he said again through the window. His face creased in puzzlement as I cracked up laughing. ‘What’s so funny?’
‘You’re in luck.’ I tried – and failed – to straighten my face. ‘The guy didn’t show.’
He stood awkwardly, fidgeting with the chain at his neck, then shoving his hands in his pockets and staring at the ground.
‘Get in,’ I said. I revved the engine a little.
‘But what about…’
‘I was messing with you. Are you going to be my navigator, or what?’
He shuffled for a moment, then opened the door and climbed back in.
‘How did you get here?’ I asked as he adjusted his seat, sliding it back. His eyes still burned with what I suspected was embarrassment. Serve his presumptuous arse right. ‘We’re in the middle of nowhere.’
‘Magic,’ he muttered. My stomach gave a little leap –
BANG. I jumped so high I actually hit my head on the roof of the car. Without another thought, I rammed the car into a random gear and floored it. The car jerked along until the revs were high enough for second, then sped off with an increasing whine. In the rear-view mirror, a cloud of dust rose from what must have been some kind of explosion.
‘Change gear!’ Keraun called over the keening engine, breaking through the mask of panic filling my brain. Donovan had given me a complex about explosive noises.
‘What?’ I glanced at the tacho. ‘Oh!’ I quickly changed up to third, then fourth and fifth as I kept accelerating. Another explosion shattered the dirt behind us. I found a groove though, and even a moment to be a bit pleased with myself as I deftly swung around a corner, then another one. It didn’t last. The next bend kept curving around, until the back end of the car flicked out to the side. Without thinking, I went to brake, lifting off the accelerator.
‘No brakes!’ Keraun reached across to put a firm hand on my leg, stopping my movement. I clutched at the steering wheel, trying desperately to hold the car straight. The car slowed enough for me to get it under control just as another explosion fired. I took a deep, shuddering breath, speeding along the now straight road. I also became aware of Keraun’s hand, a warm pressure on my thigh. ‘Uh,’ I began.
‘Oh.’ He snatched it back to rest casually on his own leg. ‘Sorry.’
I came around another corner, slightly slower and in better shape than last time, to see a billow of smoke obscuring the road. It was too late to stop, and besides, I had a sense that the explosions behind us weren’t finished. Smoke filled the air. My eyes adjusted rapidly to the diminished light, but I felt trapped by the lack of visibility, somehow even more acutely now that my vision was supposed to be sharper. The explosion earlier had left me feeling unsettled and out of touch with my intuition. I still struggled to push down the rising panic.
‘On your left,’ Keraun whispered. He seemed to know that if he yelled, I would lose my grip on self-control.
I glanced to my left just in time, swerving to avoid an object looming out of the smoke. Then another on the right. I wasn’t quick enough. I clipped it with the corner of the car, flinging it away with a solid thud. I just missed a third on the left, but this one I could see in the smoke, and I reeled with horror. It was the shape of a person, standing on the edge of the road.
‘Breathe,’ Keraun said.
‘They’re people! I hit one!’ Another explosion crashed behind us. I should go back. I couldn’t go back.
‘Think about it,’ Keraun said. I took another deep breath, finding the calm intuitive place that Liam had taught me to cultivate. It was tiny, almost impossible to reach, but things came into focus. Stephen had set this up. It wasn’t real.
‘This is an exercise,’ I said. ‘They’re mannequins. But what are the explosions?’
‘Mostly smoke and noise. Stephen’s not really tearing up the forest.’
I gritted my teeth and kept going. I didn’t want to admit it, but Keraun’s presence was calming, and I kept my hold on my intuition.
‘Don’t think so much. Just drive,’ Keraun suggested. I relaxed my vice grip on the wheel and let my chest soften so I could breathe without forcing it through an iron cage. Driving and dodging the mannequins became a little easier. The smoke cleared, and I was only half-surprised when Stephen’s Corolla flew into view on my left. It crept up on me, threatening to push me off the road. I accelerated and gave in to my reflexes. I still had some dodgy moments on the corners, but it was better. After I nailed a particularly gruelling bend, I found myself beaming.
‘Yes!’ Keraun whooped. I laughed with him, but it was short-lived. I ran over a branch on the road, shooting sideways as I jerked – too late – at the steering wheel. I wasn’t prepared for the immediate sharp left. I went in too fast and too close, and I knew before it happened that I couldn’t recover it. The car spun around, narrowly missing a tree, and stalled to a halt facing the way I had come. Stephen pulled up in a cloud of dust in the Corolla and waved at me to continue. I started the engine, did an awkward three-and-a-half-point-turn, and drove on, picking up speed as Stephen harried me, tailgating and zipping from side to side behind me. He blared his horn.
‘I think that’s an indication that you’re failing the time trial,’ Keraun said.
I grunted, putting my foot down. The road was starting to get all twisty again. I scrabbled at the steering wheel, trying to balance intuitive reflex and careful driving. There was a roar of an engine, and a motocross bike flew out of the trees. The figure on it was clad entirely in tight black leathers and a black, dark-tinted helmet, but I could guess who it was.
I lost my calm place.
Donovan rode right up beside me, so close she could have reached out and touched me. She was riding with one hand. In the other hand was a gun. She fired. I ducked, swerving across the road. Cracks splintered through the driver side window, but it stayed in place.
‘Faster!’ Keraun yelled. For the first time, I heard a hint of fear in his voice.
I flattened the pedal. Donovan dropped back, still shooting at me. I hit a deep pothole in the road. The window shattered out of the door, bits of glass falling into my lap. My mind fogged over, sinking into panic, and I flailed at the steering wheel as it slipped under my sweating palms. Keraun reached across and grasped the wheel, but I couldn’t drive any faster. A chequered racing flag up fluttered up ahead – the finish line! I knew if I could get there, my pursuers would stop. Keraun held the wheel and I gunned it for the flag. Donovan drew alongside me and fired again.
The shot punched me in the side, throwing me against my seatbelt as the burning metal lanced my chest. Blood soaked my shirt and I gasped, trying to find air somewhere in the blooming pain. I couldn’t. I sagged in the seat, blackness creeping into my vision, my hearing muffled. We swerved across the track. Keraun was almost in my lap now, pressing on my side, muttering about getting the bullet out. Pain fired through my body. The last thing I heard before I passed out was Keraun’s voice, saying something pointless about everything being okay.
Chapter 16
Wattle Blossoms
‘You weren’t supposed to actually shoot her! What happened to blanks?′ Stephen’s furious voice jolted me back to consciousness.
‘What happened to preparing her for the real world?’ Donovan, cavalier. A wave of loathing surged through me, washing out the pain that suffused my chest. I opened my eyes to find myself lying on a blanket on the ground, Keraun hovering in the distance, a crease between his brown eyes. I took a tentative breath. Both lungs worked. The pain receded moment by moment as bone, muscle, fascia and skin realigned and knitted together. My jumper was wet with blood, and I shivered. Nearby, the finish-line flag flapped in the breeze, slapping against the pole with irregular clangs. I squinted into the blue sky, tried to talk and croaked like a frog.
Stephen appeared at my side, muttering about guns being the most unnecessary invention on the planet and peering at me, grey eyes full of concern. ‘Are you okay? How do you feel?’
‘Okay,’ I said, pushing myself up to sit. Physically, at least, I was okay, except for a pounding ache in my ribs like a bruise to the bones. I took another breath, appreciating how good it felt to have both lungs back, even with pain lancing my side. I rose to my feet, swaying but managing to stay upright.
‘She’s fine. We needed to test her heal speed.’ Donovan shoved my shoulder, pretending to be playful, but I could feel the aggression underneath.
‘Leave me alone,’ I growled. Well, it sounded growly in my head.
Donovan laughed as she buckled her helmet. ‘See you Tuesday.’ She mounted the monstrous motorbike, gunned the engine and vanished in a flagrant spray of dirt. I groaned and sagged against the side of the Rex. My adrenaline drained away, taking the last of my body heat and most of my anger with it, although I still seethed over Donovan and her awful test.
‘How was it then?’ I asked through chattering teeth. ‘My heal speed.’
Stephen perched on the passenger seat with a laptop balanced on his knee. He looked up, then set the computer aside, shucked off his hoodie and handed it to me, goosebumps dimpling his forearms. ‘You’ll get faster.’
I took the jumper, but my shirt was still covered in blood, so I didn’t put it on. ‘I thought I was supposed to be, like, superhuman,’ I grumped. ‘All this is so hard.’
Stephen ran his fingers through his hair. ‘Do you have any idea what we’re asking you to do with these challenges? They’re well beyond what I’d expect a new Eventer to manage, but we need to know where you’re at for the Taskforce mission.’
‘And I failed.’ I glared at the flag, still twenty metres away from where I’d pulled up. My gaze caught Keraun’s. He leaned against the Rex’s bonnet, his posture stiff.
‘It was a benchmark test. Your stats on here’ – Stephen indicated software that had, unbeknown to me, been analysing my driving – ‘are quite good. I’m sorry about your getting shot, that wasn’t part of the plan.’
‘Not your plan,’ I muttered.
‘Donovan has her own way. She means well. You,’ he said, climbing out of the Rex and turning to Keraun, ‘were also not part of the plan. What are you doing here?’
I bristled. Keraun showing up uninvited was my concern – if I wanted to be concerned. ‘He’s with me.’
Stephen eyed Keraun with suspicion, then flashed me a questioning glance. ‘I thought we talked about this.’
I shrugged, stifling a gasp as my ribs screeched, but I wasn’t about to explain my choice of friends. If that’s what Keraun and I were.
‘I’ll go,’ Keraun said, breaking the silence.
‘Do you need a lift somewhere?’ Stephen asked. My intuition flared – Stephen was partly genuine in his offer, because he was Stephen, but he was also fishing to find out how Keraun had got here in the first place.
A thin smile twisted Keraun’s lips. ‘Nah, I’m good, thanks. See you, Gabby.’ Without waiting for a reply, or another loaded question from Stephen, he turned around and loped away, back down the gravel road. It looked like walking, but he covered ground awfully quickly.
Stephen turned his back so I could strip out of my cold, bloody clothes and don the hoodie. I simmered over Donovan and her rubbish training and now Stephen’s open dislike of the one person who had helped me out. Stephen squeezed my arm as we climbed back into the Corolla. ‘I’m just looking out for you,’ he said. ‘I don’t know who Keraun is, but he’s not your average teenager.’
I grunted. There was no arguing with that.
I expected to be driven home, but apparently we had one more thing to do today. Stephen took an unusual route, refusing to answer my questions until we pulled up on the side of the road in a leafy suburb. The building we were in front of looked like a house, except for a sign out the front: Wattle View Hospice. A wattle tree in full yellow bloom took up most of the front yard, and I could smell its perfume even with the car windows up.
‘Don’t worry, we’re not going in.’ Stephen reached into the back seat, produced three manila folders and handed them to me. They had little labels on the tabs: #1.1, #1.6 and #1.14.
‘What are these?’
Stephen’s eyes were filled with regret. ‘The files that convinced Catherine to stay.’
‘And now you think I’ll be convinced too.’ The paper was heavier in my hands than it should be. I didn’t want to look.
Stephen sighed. ‘No, it’s just for your information. Full disclosure, remember?’
I opened the top one, #1.1. A photograph was paperclipped to the inside of the file. It was one of those horrendous school photographs, but this kid actually looked cute instead of awkward, which was all I’d ever managed. He was about eight years old, with brown hair gelled into spikes, a freckled nose and a broad, dimpled smile. The sky-blue school polo shirt complemented his light blue eyes.
‘I bet he had to beat the girls away,’ I commented to fill the silence. Stephen didn’t reply. I felt silly for saying it.
The next page was some kind of transcript, but most of it was blacked out. At the top were handwritten initials: T.J. The rest of his name was redacted. So was his date of birth, parental details, address … the only other readable information was an army enlistment number. At the bottom of the page was an authorisation for ‘Subject 1.1’ and a signature dated for November 1999 – the year I was born. I turned the page over. The next was a memo, stating that Subject 1.1 was commencing with the application of the Praegressus program. More redaction. A series of reports followed, all dated between November 1999 and January 2000, noting things like “no adverse effects”, “program retention successful”, and other words that didn’t make sense without the surrounding context. There wasn’t a single name on any of these. The final page had no black lines. I read it, feeling even more the callousness of my comment.
FILE CLOSURE REPORT
Date: 20 July 2002
Reference: Subject #1.1 – T. Johnston, age 9
Subject Status: Deceased
Comments: T.J. experienced his Event on the morning of 19 July 2002. Donovan and May pursued unsuccessfully. He was not recovered.
The report was signed by Stephen May. I closed the file and toyed with the edges of it. Eventually, Stephen spoke.
‘We’d lost three Eventers already, without even knowing their names. It was just too hard, trying to be everywhere whenever there was storm activity, so Donovan snuck into the Taskforce and managed to retrieve some files. As you can see, there’s not much in them. We pieced together the data, and we found the boy. We were so close.’ He paused, twisting his hands in his lap. ‘The Taskforce got to him first. They killed him and made it look like a lightning-induced cardiac arrest.’
Sensing that the worst wasn’t over, I opened the #1.6 file: Charlotte Sulley. Her Event report was dated 2010, age 19. There was no redacted Taskforce information, just pages of medical or psychological words I didn’t understand. Donovan had signed this one.
‘We found her first, but she was nineteen and she didn’t want to leave her fiancé to stay with us. So we let her go.’
‘What, no memory loss, or deactivation or whatever?’
Stephen shook his head. ‘She was the first who had a choice, and, like you, we felt that was important. But Donovan and I, and Liam by then, we were supported through our transitions. We didn’t have the pressures of the outside world to the same degree, and we didn’t realise.’
I nodded as I understood. ‘She couldn’t cope with the sensory overload. So why didn’t she come back?’
