State of Grace (11 page)

For a little bit, the boy just stares. Then, in a voice that sounds all puffed up and confident, he says, ‘You won’t get away with it.’

It’s only the way he squeaks at the end of the sentence that makes me wonder if I’ve made the boy precalm. I should have chosen better words. The boy might be just a test, but that doesn’t mean I want to scare him.

‘I didn’t mean to –’

‘You can’t just kill me, you know.’

Kill
.

The word is nowhere in the Books but I somehow know what it means. At least, I’m pretty sure
kill
is a really, really prenice thing to do to someone.

‘Nathan Quigley’s my big brother and he could get you really bad if he wanted. He’s probably going to anyway because of what you did.’

The boy – who must be Dennis – looks at the pieces scattered on the floor. ‘He’s definitely going to get me for taking his device.’

‘Wait,’ I tell Dennis. I try to touch him, just on the arm or whatever, but as soon as I go closer he shoves me off. ‘I don’t want anything prenice to happen. I only want you to go away. It’s what Dot wants.’

‘So that’s why you wrecked my brother’s device?’

‘I didn’t wreck anything.’

Dennis holds up the only part of the device that’s still in one piece. The transparent strap, all mangled and dented. ‘Yeah, right.’

‘It was making a noise. I couldn’t stop it.’

‘This noise?’ Dennis makes a sound then, exactly the same one the device was making when I smashed it. I’m nodding but shushing him at the same time.

‘It was ringing. That’s how it sounds.’

I know
, I think. I’ve heard the noise before. But at the time it panicked me, and now it panics me thinking about how I might know what a ringing device sounds like. What a device even is.

Dennis’s eyebrows and eyes squish together. ‘You’ll have to pay to get it fixed.’

I guess I look as blank as I feel, because then Dennis asks, ‘How come you don’t know anything about anything?’

He scans the hut, at the butterflies hovering around the window frame and the ones carved into the ceiling, the portrait of Dot on the wall, the bed, the furniture and the row of coloured sungarb hanging in the wardrobe.

‘Is everyone at Club Naturelle like you?’

‘Club Naturelle?’

Dennis rolls his eyes. ‘Don’t you even know where you are?’

‘I know where I am. The same place I’ve been since Dot created me.’

‘Aren’t you on holidays or something?’

Dennis touches the spot on his head carefully with his fingers and pulls a face. ‘You can’t just stay here the whole time.’

‘Here’s all there is.’

To myself, I add,
See, Dot? See how faithful I am?

‘You think this is the only place in the whole entire world?’ Dennis says.

I nod, even though I’m not entirely sure what
the whole entire world
is.

‘Okay,’ he continues. ‘So where’s the gate leading out of here go then?’

‘There’s no gate.’

I shouldn’t know what a
gate
is. The word
gate
shouldn’t even exist.

‘There is so a gate.’

Obviously, he wants me to know all about it. ‘Pretty pathetic. It took me about one second to guess the passcode. Nathan’s internet friends didn’t think he could get in here. But guess what? I got in and I’m only nine, so there!’

Dennis’s standing right in front of the open shutters. If anyone walked past right now, they’d see him.

‘You … um … what?’

Dennis beams. ‘It was so easy! Now I’ve done it, Nathe’s going to know I’m not a little kid anymore. He’s going to let me hang out with him from now on, for sure.’

I’m shaking my head when Dennis reaches for the door.

‘Anyway, think whatever you want. I’m going. My mum is probably mad by now. And I want to get back to Nathe and tell him –’

‘No!’ I shrill. ‘Don’t go.’

Not now, in the day when everyone can see you
. Not that I know how I’m going to make Dennis disappear, even in the prelight. It’s just, I’m sure that if he doesn’t stay hidden until I work it out then everyone’s going to find out how predotly I am.

‘Nah, I think I better …’

I go to the bed and let the fruit spill out of my pockets all over the red-streaked sheets.

‘Look, I brought you stuff to eat.’

Dennis’s hand is on the doorknob but he’s sort of interested, I can tell.

‘What?’

‘Come and look.’

When he comes over to the bed I say, ‘See? Plenty. Raspberries, peaches, mangos, everything.

‘Is fruit all you’ve got? No toast, or Froothoops?’

Froothoops
. I hear the word and straightaway think of Julius, without even knowing why.

‘If you don’t want this, I can bring you other food. There’s tamarillos. There’s rambutans.’

‘No thanks,’ says Dennis, turning for the door. ‘Yuck.’

‘Stay.’

My arm swings out to grab him. I have him circled in creation’s most awkward hug. If he wanted to, Dennis could bust out of it. But he doesn’t. He lets me keep talking.

‘You have to. Just until prelight.’

Dennis doesn’t seem to know what I mean by this, so I tell him, ‘Until night.’

Dennis steps away from me. His hand goes to the doorknob again.

‘Why should I?’

No-one can see you
, I want to yell.
Don’t you get that?

But instead I say, ‘There are animals out there, you know.’

Dennis looks sideways at me. ‘Like cats and dogs?’

‘Like lions and tigers. Bears as well.’

Dot’s animal creations are as gentle and kind as Dot herself, it says so in the Books. But Dennis doesn’t know that. And something tells me he wouldn’t like meeting a bear. I’m not sure how I know that. I just do. It’s the same way Julius would feel, I find myself thinking.

‘If you wait, I’ll take you to the fringe myself,’ I say quickly. ‘You’ll be fine.’

Dennis thinks about this. ‘Only as far as the trees?’

I look away then. I guess he wants me to say I’ll take him to the gate. But there’s a whole lot of problems with that. One, we’re not meant to go into the fringe. Two – and this is the big one – there should be no such thing as a gate in the first place.

So I decide to stall. I tell Dennis, ‘We’ll see.’

A gate should not exist. But then, neither should Dennis. And if Dot can create a real boy to test me, there’s no reason she couldn’t also create a gate. That’s absolutely, totally believable, right? As far as going into the fringe goes, I’m going to have to think that one through.

Dennis looks around the hut. Finally he says, ‘Okay. I guess I’ll stay.’

I smile.

A smile flickers to life on his face too.

‘But you can’t tell Nathe I was scared of bears.’

‘No way,’ I tell him. ‘Promise.’

14

W
HEN
F
ERN FINDS
me, it’s practically prelight again and I’m on the path outside our huts. Heat rises up from and the stone and there’s all these ants turning busy circles at my feet.

‘
There
you are,’ she says. ‘You weren’t at the lagoon.’

Or the newfruit grove, or anywhere at the same time as everyone else. After I left Dennis’s hut the second time, I filled my picking bag in the newfruit grove. Early, before too many other people arrived.

The rest of the day, I kind of hung around the empty huts without going in or anything. Sometimes I walked to the orchard, other times just up and down the path. Going too far away from Dennis made me feel all precalm. I mean, what if he suddenly decided he didn’t care about bears anymore?

Behind Fern, the path is all lit up with torches rammed into the soil. The light from the flames turns Fern’s hair into these long, pale, gold wires. She’s switched on, charged up, the same way the actual air around us seems to be.

‘Everyone’s over at Gil’s,’ Fern comes right up close, her smiling face kind of looming at me. ‘Something’s happening tonight!’

‘What do you mean, something’s happening?’

A wind’s gusting. There’s a fizzing kind of smell and the near-prelight sky’s a heavy grayish-yellow.

‘Who’s everyone?’

‘Sage,’ Fern says. ‘Luna, Jasper, Drake. You know, everyone.’

All my friends, in other words. And not one of them realising what’s really going on with me.

‘That’s okay. You go. I’ll just …’

Fern’s bow lips mash down into a straight line. ‘Gil said to find you. He’s wants you to come. He’s been wondering where you are.’

Brook probably told him about the orchard this morning. Scratch that. Brook
definitely
told him.

‘Are you going to hook up with Gil?’ Fern asks, all jittery and excited. She’s jumping around on the balls of her feet when normally she’d just be planted in one spot, still and serene. It’s like she’s soaking up whatever’s going on up there in the sky somehow.

‘Not tonight.’

Fern squeals and grabs both my arms. ‘Oh my Dot! You hooked up with him already? How was it?’

I give her my
you-know
look, even though Fern doesn’t know, not really, since she’s never hooked up with Gil or any guy, for that matter. She doesn’t ask anything else though. Despite how huge she thinks me hooking up with Gil is, she’s sort of distracted too. As in, her eyes are roaming all over the place. I guess that’s how she spots the deer running out of the shadows round the base of my hut. It’s this soft, brown colour with white speckles on its flanks. Its eyes are so deep and brown and clear they practically glow.

‘How gorgeous!’

Naturally, Fern loves all Dot’s creatures but she especially loves the furry, long-eyelashed variety. She practically falls down my stairs and stretches out for a stroke, but the deer’s way too quick. It leaves my hut behind and disappears under Fern’s, next door, its tail just a flash of white behind it.

____________________

Gil’s balcony’s totally jammed. There are people lounging on the stairs, sitting on the floor, cross-legged on the path out the front or curled up in the doorway. Gil himself is swinging in his hammock, one pale arm thrown over the side, those long fingers of his sort of stroking the wooden deck.

Sage has snagged herself a floor cushion. Fern gets onto it right beside her. There’s no room for me, and anyway Sage is already whispering in Fern’s ear and holding her hand. So I’m left looking for somewhere to sit. It turns out the only free space is leaning up against Gil’s balcony railing, right beside Brook.

‘I saved this spot for you,’ he says. Which would be prenormal even if it weren’t for our meet-up in the orchard. I mean, Brook and I have always been friends but not, you know,
best
friends. ‘I haven’t seen you all day.’

‘Yeah. Well. I’ve been busy.’

‘Doing what?’ Brook asks.

Luckily the wind starts up then, which kind of removes the need to answer. On the palm trees, every single frond is churning and the sky is empty. No birds, no bats, nothing. There’s hardly a torch left alight and when fat drops of rain start sploshing down, the last of them go out anyway. Down on the path there’s the smell of hot, wet stone even though the wind’s turned cold enough to dimple the skin on my arms. It isn’t going to rain the way it normally does, a quick downpour and then it’s over and all creation’s washed clean. Whatever’s happening now seems like a whole other kind of thing.

And then there’s this flash. A branch of light cuts the dome of the sky in half. The branch is purple with a smell to it, like a fire just gone out or something. Then the light disappears and basically everyone on Gil’s balcony is screaming.

Nearby, someone says, ‘Do you think Dot’s prehappy about something?’

A prenormal little flutter starts to work its way up my spine. The rain’s really sheeting down now, so heavy it makes all creation look white. Next, a crash. A boom really, which has to be the loudest sound I’ve ever heard.

Dot’s more than a little bit prehappy. She’s so prehappy I swear she must be tearing creation apart. Then more purple flashes light the trees and the roofs of all the huts, including the one with Dennis inside. Dot knows he’s in there, naturally. She’s always watching. Maybe she thinks I’m not working fast enough at making Dennis disappear, that I’m not taking her test seriously? And now she’s whipping up all these rumbles and flashes just so everyone else will find out about him.

Over on the hammock, Gil’s eyelids are flickering closed. Straightaway, Brook gets up and goes over there. He hovers around as Gil starts to rock, faster and faster until his whole hammock squeaks as it swings. He yells stuff out too, just like in the gazebo, the same stream of letters with only the odd, random word making sense. Gil throws his hands up to the balcony roof and tips his head back, tears rolling down his face as he screams out Dot’s name and tells her he’s listening.

Then there’s another flash, another crash, practically on top of each another. Around me, everyone’s talking at once.

What’s going … Gil can hear Dot … did you know?

Suddenly there’s this wave of people surging across the balcony. Everyone decides they’ve got to get close to Gil, all at exactly the same time. When the sky lights up again, I see Brook trying to calm everyone down. An elbow slams into my shoulder. From every direction there are faces coming towards me, sweating and squealing, teeth and the whites of eyes flashing in the prelight.

Then Gil stands up. The balcony goes completely quiet, like the noise from the sky has somehow sucked the sound out of us. Gil holds up his arms and a purple flash in the sky lights him from behind.

His eyes snap open and he says, ‘Dot wants me to share something with all of you.’

It looks like Brook’s going to make some kind of comment but the silence doesn’t last long enough to let him. The entire balcony wants to know what Dot said.

‘Some creations don’t love Dot as much as they should,’ Gil announces.

I can hear people asking each other how that could even be possible. The concept of predotliness is totally new to everyone apart from me, Gil and Brook.

‘Dot wants us all to look out for predotly creations. Anybody who exposes one will be chosen on completion night.’