Matthew gently pulls my hair over my shoulder. ‘Now keep still, if it looks fake, the guards’ll shoot you.’
Saskia repeatedly pricks the skin on the back of my neck, returning to dip the needle in the ink every so often. My eyes water and I can’t help but whimper as the needle passes over a nodule in my spine.
‘Dammit, Violet,’ she spits. ‘You’re making the five wobbly.’
She finishes and lays a damp piece of gauze over the wound. ‘This stops infection and speeds up healing. We nicked ’em from the Pastures.’
It also numbs the pain, for which I feel hugely grateful.
Nate is next. He remains completely still; only his fingers betray him as they dig into his thighs.
Saskia admires her handiwork. ‘You should fool the guards.’
I glance at Nate as a knot forms in my stomach. ‘Should fool the guards?’
She shrugs and gathers up her kit. Rose crossed the border with only a minor run-in with a guard. But she was lucky, and she didn’t have a wonky five. I try not to think about it, focusing on the Pastures . . . on Willow.
We pull on some regulation overalls. The material itches and rubs whenever I move, as if it’s objecting to the fact it covers me and not Rose. I watch Nate scratching his arms through his sleeves, and I feel enormous responsibility pressing into my windpipe. But I also feel like I’m back on that carousel, the wind on my face and the rattle of a metal pole beneath my hands. I’m going to meet Willow. Not Russell Jones, but the Willow.
We leave headquarters with no ceremony. They don’t even let us say goodbye to Alice and Katie, which may be a good thing, because I’d probably cry. If I get this wrong, if I fail, Katie dies. And then there’s Alice, my best friend. I turn Thorn’s words over and over in my head – I’ve got a very special job for her – but I’m just left feeling frustrated and none the wiser.
The journey through the city takes most of the day. We take the longer, more meandering route to avoid the controllers who tried to lynch me yesterday. Alley after alley, wall after wall, till it feels like we’re lost in a grey, stinking maze. My feet smart, my stomach growls and my skull continues to ache from the mounting head blows, but still, I feel a sense of loss for the London I know and love. Sunken buildings, faded street signs. I say each street name in my head again and again, thinking of how the sounds have slept for centuries, the city filled with illiterate Imps.
We continue to walk until the city wall looms ahead, snaking into the distance and merging into the grey sky so that it seems endless. A large, windowless building sits to the right of the gates; a cube with metal doors. The city wall appears to cut straight through it like a train through a tunnel. I recall this building from canon. The decontamination block, where the Imps are sprayed with a cocktail of chemicals and their tattoos are checked for fakes before entering the Pastures. It looks even more soulless than on the silver screen. Even more soulless than I’d imagined after reading the book, and that’s saying something.
I remember Rose feeling anxious at this point in the story, sneaking across the border, her counterfeit tattoo fresh and stinging just like ours. But words on a page, a scene in a film, can’t do this awful feeling justice. It’s like my body has solidified, but my thoughts have turned to popping corn, firing again and again inside my skull. What if we get caught? Will they kill us? Can we really die in a story? Is it just a story? It seems so real. Like my brain is this screaming, writhing, red-hot mess, and yet my body is heavy with fear and powerless to act.
I glance at Nate and notice the tendons on his neck standing proud.
‘You remember what happened to Rose in the decontamination block?’ I whisper to him.
He nods. ‘Yeah, course. The guard with eyes the colour of cornflowers.’
‘The unicorn,’ I reply, hoping to lend him some strength.
He nods, but his neck remains stiff. Saskia demands my silence with a firm glare.
I want to remind him that not all Gems are bad. Within the block exists at least one Symp – a Gem who’s secretly an Imp sympathizer. A guard with the most amazing, bright-blue eyes searched Rose, and noticed her tattoo looked fresh, but instead of arresting her for trying to enter the Pastures illegally, he simply warned her to avoid the guard with the moustache and the steel-grey eyes. Rose thanked him, and told him that she always thought Symps were a thing of magic and myth – like unicorns.
It’s always been one of my favourite lines, and I’m secretly hoping I may get to say it.
I watch the Imps traipse towards the building like they’re part of a funeral procession. There’s just so many of them. I remember this from canon. Imps carry out most of their manual labour under the cover of darkness so as not to offend the Gems with their normal, imperfect, human bodies. This means there exist far more Night-Imps than Day-Imps. And even though the Night-Imps miss the warmth and the colours of the day, they enjoy more freedom, able to roam the Pastures in peace. And I’m starting to understand that freedom is its own form of sunshine.
We join the back of the line. I practise slouching and lowering my head, trying desperately to blend in, but my tattoo burns, a constant reminder of the wet ink and that wobbly five. We approach the iron doors and I focus on the dirt underfoot, avoiding the glint of the guards’ pistols. Finally, we enter the block, plunging into the dense, congealed air, stiff with the odour of bleach.
We shuffle in a line down a windowless corridor, strip lights flickering overhead, throwing into relief the stippled grey of the breeze-block walls. I watch the nape of Nate’s neck oscillate between white and black, his tattoo just hidden by the collar of his overalls. I feel this crushing pain in my chest, this feeling of helplessness.
A whirring noise builds and builds, and soon I can just make out a cloud of steam swelling then diffusing every thirty seconds or so. As we shuffle nearer, I begin to pick out a contraption – it looks like a car wash, only smaller, Imp-sized. I remember it from the film, only now it looks dangerous – hungry. As the line passes through, a burst of steam engulfs each Imp before they move on, sterile and Pasture-ready. Nate glances nervously over his shoulder, and I wish I could go first, but swapping places now would only draw attention from the guards. The steam engulfs Matthew, then Saskia. Next, it’s Nate.