We’ve been told we can come up with our own surname on our sixteenth birthday. They make them legal and we get a passport and then we can travel. We’re not allowed to keep our mom and dad’s names, but they took that from us a long time ago. I would have been Carrick Brightman. I still use it in my head. I never say it out loud, though. Here we just have a first name and a number for our surname.
I’ve finally decided my name and they’ve approved it. I had to sit before the board and explain why. I didn’t tell them the truth, but I haven’t been telling them the truth since I started writing this thing. I think writing this makes it easier to lie to them because I know that somewhere I’m telling the truth. If they ever find this, I’ll be branded and I won’t care.
I remember being out late at night with Dad. I was on his shoulders. It was pitch-black and we were running. I thought it was a game, but now I think we were running from the Whistleblowers and they were trying to pretend it was a game.
I think we were lost, or I thought we were lost, and that’s when Dad taught me about the stars. He showed me the North Star and everything that leads from that.
He told me if I’m ever lost, to find that star. I know that when I leave here in 1,095 days that I will try to find them. Finding them is the worst thing we could do; we’re told this every day. But I want to find the woman who wrapped me in the towel that smelled of baby powder and the man who taught me about the stars. The two people who made me feel safer and happier in the smallest memories that I have than anyone has ever done in here.
I don’t know where they are, but I know one thing: I’ll look north. The answers are north, and I’ll let the wind take me.
And that is why my new surname is Vane.
Carrick Vane.
*
I close the diary, hot tears dripping down my cheeks, with a sense of urgency within me. I quickly change my clothes into anything I can find, I no longer care. I can wear the clothes of yesterday and still move forward. My sock catches on my anklet and I sit down and take it off.
I leave it by Art’s bedside.
“You’ll always be with me,” I whisper, kissing his lips. “Good-bye, Art.”
I leave the hospital room expecting to be stopped when I get outside. Instead, the nurses and doctors part for me. There are Whistleblowers at the door at the end of the corridor, and my heart sinks. I’m being taken again. The kind nurse urges me on. I frown. Then one of the Whistleblowers sees me. He reaches for the door, and he opens it.
I start walking, and the hospital staff starts clapping, smiles on their faces, some of them crying. I keep walking, expecting for somebody to grab me at any moment, but nobody does. I walk straight through those open doors, into the unknown.
EIGHTY-THREE
2 MONTHS LATER
I’M ON GRANDDAD’S FARM. It’s July. The sun is beating down on my skin. I’m wearing a sundress, with spaghetti straps tied on my shoulders, a pretty floral design that’s confusing the bees.
I’m alone in the strawberry beds, eyes closed, face lifted to the sun. I am free, but even better than that, I feel free. I was free before, but I never knew it, now I feel it.
I hear laughter and the flow of conversation in the distance, the smell of burning wood as the food is lifted from the cooking pit for all of us to share. The farmworkers, my family, Pia Wang and her family, Raphael Angelo and his wife and their seven children, Carrick’s family, too. My new friends, Mona, Lennox, Fergus, Lorcan, Lizzie, and Leonard, are here. Cordelia and Evelyn are traveling; Cordelia is showing her daughter, the big wide world that she’d been forced to hide her from since her birth. Lennox has been hovering exceptionally close to Juniper ever since he laid eyes on her. I think the feeling is mutual; Juniper hasn’t stopped smiling.
Mr. Berry and Tina decided not to come. It’s not as easy for everyone. It’s not easy for anyone.
It has been one month since the Guild press conference that was to announce Sanchez’s replacement of Crevan. Instead, that press conference announced something quite different: the dissolution of the Guild.
Appointed by the state, the Truth Commission will write up a report of their findings on the Guild. This while the private inquiry into Crevan’s personal behavior still continues, alongside the legal investigation by police into his criminal activities. Everybody wants to be seen to be doing something, but there are no solutions and no punishments as of yet.
Enya Sleepwell, on the back of her dramatic broadcast on the eve of polling day, was voted into power and is our new prime minister. The Reduction of the Flawed proposal has very much been scrapped, no possibility of it ever coming to light, and Enya has commissioned a study, titled the Sleepwell Report, separate from the Truth Commission, into the Guild’s proceedings, examining the roles of every politician, businessperson, and legal eagle who passed through its halls. How exactly they are to be held accountable, I don’t know. The findings from the reports are eagerly anticipated.
Enya said that nothing could happen overnight, but it did. After weeks of debate, the government voted against the Flawed court and anti-Flawed decrees, and the Flawed system was abolished at midnight on the day of the vote. In a matter of hours, Flawed were declared to have the same rights as everybody else in the country, no longer second-class citizens. The people, Flawed and un-Flawed, gathered in Highland Castle courtyard to celebrate. I was among them.
The aftereffects of this decision have been enormous. Raphael Angelo’s office grows steadily by the minute as he takes on case after case against the government for compensation for the damage done to the lives of people who were branded Flawed. A government compensation scheme totaling one hundred million has been set up, the Clayton Byrne fund, named after the old man who died on the bus, the man I tried to protect but failed to save. His death will not be in vain.
But the most valuable compensation of all was Enya Sleepwell’s well-meaning public apology to all the victims of the Guild for the government’s failure to intervene. An apology is perhaps all that many people will receive, but Raphael won’t rest until every single branded person receives at least a personal apology, until their reputations are redressed, until the suffering of anyone who was ever hurt as a result of the Guild has been acknowledged.