16
It is almost as if his words have punched me in the stomach. I remember the rustling from last night when I returned to the room. Pietra must have heard me and reported it this morning while I was sleeping.
The Minister Prime’s eyes continue to skim between us, determined for someone to say something. ‘I will punish you all if nobody steps forward.’ The way he speaks reminds me of the sensation you get when you are ripping something in half. The tones ripple through you in a way that feels exhilarating, yet a little scary at the same time. Everything he says reeks of power.
I try to step forward but my legs feel heavy and refuse to listen to my command. I open my mouth to say something but can only let out a vague croak. My body is wracked with guilt and fear. What will happen to Colt and my mother? Inwardly, I scream at myself but then, one pace at a time, I see another girl stepping into the circle, her head bowed, her gentle sobbing filling the room.
The Minister Prime glances sideways to Ignacia who nods briefly and then looks away.
‘What is your name?’ he booms.
‘Bryony.’
‘Bryony what?’
‘Bryony Gaitlin, Sir.’
The Minister Prime smiles, although his thin lips don’t separate until he speaks. ‘Are you from the East, Ms Gaitlin?’
‘Yes.’
‘And you are an Intermediate?’
‘Yes.’
‘What would you like to confess?’
There is a silence as Bryony raises her head slightly. Although we have shared the dorm, I haven’t spoken to her since we arrived. She has reddish hair, cut short, and is glancing quickly from side to side. Bryony is now level with Pietra, who is the only person not watching the girl with the trembling voice.
‘I took food from the kitchen.’
‘You did what?’
Bryony’s voice is louder the second time. ‘I took food from the kitchen, Sir.’
‘Were the rules explained to you about stealing?’
‘Yes, Sir.’
‘Do you not respect our King?’
‘Yes, Sir.’
By now, the Minister’s voice has built to a climax. ‘Then why have you disrespected his good grace?’
We all know there is no answer Bryony can give that will get her out of trouble and I cannot believe how close I came to confessing to something they didn’t know about.
Bryony’s voice has dropped again. ‘I was hungry.’
With a flick of his eyes, the Minister Prime has Kingsmen descending on Bryony. She doesn’t resist but they grab her roughly anyway, hauling her out of the main doors.
Everyone stands in silence and Pietra is still in the centre of us. I stare at the back of her head, telling her without words that I hate her.
‘We have removed the food she took,’ the Minister says strictly, before turning his attention back to Pietra. ‘You will, of course, be rewarded for your loyalty. There will be extra rations for you waiting in your room tonight.’ He turns his attention back to the rest of us. ‘I hope you have all learned a lesson this morning.’
I have learned two lessons: firstly that Pietra cannot be trusted and secondly that if I am going to sneak out and explore, I need to be more careful about it.
‘Ms Gaitlin has been taken to the dungeons and when our King decides she has learned enough of a lesson, she will be given other more appropriate work.’ The Minister Prime does not expand but, regardless of what that work may entail, none of us thinks it is going to be pleasant for her.
I spend the rest of the day quietly seething as I work in the laboratories. There are so many things I would like to say to Pietra in the evening but none of them would be sensible. It is clear that we are all utterly divided after barely a week and the only person I think I can trust is someone I have spoken to only once.
Perhaps the only silver lining is that my work isn’t that bad. I made sure it took me the entire week but I solved the issue with the cameras – only to be scoffed at by Lumin who told me it was never an issue anyway. Instead it was a test to see how well I could do. They had all gone through it, with Lumin boasting that he had completed the task in three days. Not wanting to point out I could have done it in less than one hour, I let him have his moment and succeed in both keeping my head down and gaining a little sympathy from Hari. Mira doesn’t say much to anyone.
Inside the lab, when neither Lumin nor Porter are around, Hari is perfectly friendly – but she barely acknowledges me if anyone else is present and it is that approach I know I should copy. In a quiet moment, I ask her about the dungeons as I had never heard of anything like this until the Minister Prime mentioned it. Hari says they are under the hall and it is where they lock up and punish anyone who has broken the rules. The fact we are all locked up anyway doesn’t escape me but it is useful knowledge in the wider picture of understanding the castle’s layout. I wonder if there might be an extra exit down there, although I’m not overly keen on finding out.
Porter is gradually growing on me. He doesn’t say much and delegates everything but the most important jobs to us but he doesn’t come across like some of the other people who wear the Kingsman uniform. He seems more apathetic to the cause, as opposed to driven by it, but I cannot convince myself he is someone I should trust.
He does seem to have an inkling of what I am capable of, however, and has kept me in the main lab with him since I completed the initial task. He is working on a wider project that should help our electronic items use electricity more efficiently and, for the first time, I begin to see some of the good work that goes on around the castle. Every now and then, Porter will ask my opinion on something. A lot of his questions surpass any previous knowledge I have but I tell him the first thing that drops into my head and he looks back down at his machine with a ‘hmm’, without letting me know if I have been useful or not.
Most of my time is spent fixing things, mainly thinkpads but the occasional thinkwatch too. Tinkering with the spare parts makes me think of home, although it feels odd and almost too easy to have genuine extras to be using, instead of having to hunt through piles of scrap to try to find something I can work with. He gives me some burned-out thinkpads that he says belong to the Home Affairs department and I easily manage to transfer wires from what he tells me is an old tower computer to fix them. I didn’t know what they were called in the past but there are stacks of them in the gully outside Martindale, piles of plastic, silicon and metal winding into each other. If he seems impressed then he hides it well and I ask enough questions I already know the answers to, making the work seem harder than it is.
There is an access device which Porter keeps in his top drawer to reprogram things officially. Each time I need it, I have to ask permission and, though I am tempted to find out what else it could do with my thinkwatch, I resist the urge, at least for now. I spend the day submerged in work.
There is a very different atmosphere in the dorm when I return. Pietra is sitting on her bed with a bowl of bread and fruit but instead of the other Elites being around her – or the silence of recent days – there is a poisonous feel to the air.
‘Would you like something extra to eat?’ Pietra asks sweetly as I walk past. It is the first time she has spoken to me since the train.
I make certain to reply equally sweetly as I make my way back to my bed – there is no point in deliberately antagonising someone the Minister Prime is happy with. ‘I’m fine, thank you.’
All but a couple of the other girls are also on their beds, including Faith, who offers me a half-smile, which I return. Nobody is speaking but it feels as if I am in a tin can where the lid is about to blow off.
‘You do know I did this for all of us?’ Pietra says loudly, addressing everyone. She sounds aggrieved but close to tears as well. We all turn to look towards her as she stands and points to the food. ‘You could at least be grateful.’
I want to reply but know I shouldn’t. Anything said in front of the other girls could find its way back to Ignacia or the Minister Prime. Faith puts me to shame, though, spitting a fury I can only feel. ‘You did it for yourself.’
Everyone’s eyes shift from Pietra to Faith and then back again, although it is one of the other Elites who replies, ‘Who cares what you think, Trog?’
Faith laughs, showing a maturity I wish I had. I’m angrier on her behalf than she is. ‘Jela was an Elite and it didn’t do her much good.’
She is right, of course, but it is still shocking to hear Jela’s name used in such a way.
‘Go on,’ Faith adds, ‘report me. See if I care.’
One of the other girls starts talking about sticking together, which sounds nice in theory but would take a lot more trust than any of us have for each other. She is shot down anyway as the name-calling intensifies between Faith, Pietra and a few of the other girls. I feel nothing but guilt as I sit on my bed, watching instead of defending as I realise, again, that we are divided in every way – from our Realms, to our ranks, to thirteen girls who simply cannot get on with one another. The argument rages until one of the Kingsmen storms in and tells everyone to stop shouting. We all look nervously at each other as he asks if there is a problem he should be aware of but everyone stays silent. I realise with a small amount of relief that the dispute will not go any further.
After that, aside from a few mutterings in various corners of the room, there is near enough silence again. Through saying nothing, I have managed to isolate myself even further as I can’t bring myself to meet Faith’s eyes during the rest of the evening until the lights turn themselves off.
I lie awake waiting for everyone’s shuffling to stop and then head back towards the panel next to my bed. Within a couple of minutes, I am standing at the large window peering out over wisps of fog slowly descending on the battered remains of the town. The moon isn’t as bright as it was the previous evening but there is something wonderfully ethereal as Imrin whispers in my ear, ‘Beautiful, isn’t it?’
It’s slightly unnerving how he has crept up on me again but I have to agree.
‘I didn’t know if you’d come,’ I say, not turning.
‘What else have I got to look forward to?’
‘Did you hear about this morning?’
Imrin says that the head chef Kingsman gave the boys a massive telling-off that morning, reminding them of the penalty for stealing food. Then he pulls a bread roll out from a pocket and grins at me. ‘We all do it,’ he says. ‘But I suppose some of us don’t have anyone to trust or share with.’
He splits it and gives me half. At first I take small pinches but then end up gorging the final bit. The hunger here is far worse than at home because the food is tantalisingly close. In Martindale, you get used to not eating on certain days and doing everything you can to bump your rations up. Here, we feast once a week, but because there is next to nothing in the days in between, it is almost painful to eat after the first plateful.
As we finish, we stand together looking out over the town. There is something comforting and peaceful about the scene and when Imrin reaches out to hold my hand again, I let him.
‘What are we going to do?’ he asks after what seems like an age.
‘What would you like to do?’
Imrin takes a deep breath as the silvery swirling mist continues to gather over the tops of the trees in the distance. ‘I don’t want to die here,’ he says simply, putting into words something that has been in the back of my mind since Wray was killed in front of me.
It sounds obvious but it is almost as if his words crystallise the vague thoughts that have been swimming in my mind. I grip his hand tighter to let him know I agree and then say the words I have been trying to convince myself of.
‘Let’s escape, then.’