State of Grace (14 page)

Its long, paddle-shaped blade sparkles in the early morning sun as he tries to pass it to me.

‘Wren? You need to finish this.’ Brook watches me, waits for my reaction.

I shake my head really fast. As in, hummingbird-wing-fast.

Brook’s eyes never leave my face. ‘Dot wants you to. This is Dot’s work. Unless you don’t –’

I jump in before he gets the chance to say anything about predotliness or believing or whatever else might be about to come out of his mouth.

I blurt, ‘You know what? I wouldn’t know how. Dot didn’t create me strong enough.’Then I do this little laugh.

Then, thank Dot, Gil says, ‘This first time, you can watch.’

He steps back, holds out his arms and kind of sweeps everyone else back too. Everyone but Brook.

Brook crosses between the crowd and the deer. He drops to his knees. Then, all swift and strong, Brook hauls the deer upwards and grabs its neck, anchoring its body down with one knee.

I’m pretty certain the deer knows what’s about to happen. Its hooves, sharp as the coconut knife, gouge these huge chunks out of the ground. The deer thrashes in the grass, trying to roll itself away from Brook, planning on setting itself free I guess. It opens its mouth to wail and inside there’s a row of barbed teeth, one snap away from Brook’s arm.

Brook doesn’t stop. He raises the knife and plunges it into the deer’s warm throat. The front legs are flying now in every direction all at once. Brook pulls the knife out and blood streams from the cut. Still the deer goes on bucking and twisting and even Brook, strong as he is, can hardly keep it pinned to the ground. He slices through the skin underneath one side of the deer’s jaw, then saws the blade until he reaches the other side.

The deer shrieks. I blanch. Blaze looks away and everyone else watches with their big eyes and their slow, heavy, dazed smiles.

And when the whole thing’s over, Brook drops the heavy, soft body to the ground. Steam rolls from the deer’s cut throat. Brook’s arms are wet and bloody to the elbows, his sungarb torn, his face all red and sweaty.

Jasper starts clapping and it isn’t long before everyone else does the same. Clapping and cheering and whistling like we’ve just finished dancing to the best-ever dottrack on completion night.

Even Fern. At the same time though, her face is shiny with tears.

‘It’s so …’ She studies the deer, which is still sort of jerking on the ground. ‘Isn’t it beautiful, doing Dot’s work?’

Brook eases the deer out from under the crushed roof of the hut. Fern doesn’t look away at all, not even when he slits the deer’s soft belly, puts a hand in and pulls out the slippery blue and brown and purple innards. She totally watches the whole thing, until at last Brook gathers up the two front hooves and drags the deer away, leaving this long, slick, sticky trail behind him as he goes.

____________________

The two of us are the last ones left at the huts.

Blaze says, ‘Still want to pass Dot’s test?’

I tell him that I do, obviously.

‘Gil’s dotly and you want to be like him?’

‘Gil’s trying to be good. He thinks he’s doing what Dot wants. He’s just …’ I realise I have no idea how to finish that sentence. Plus, even to me my voice sounds wobbly. I breathe in and out, carefully, through my nose. ‘Obviously I want to be dotly. One of the chosen ones and all of that. That’s what we’re all supposed to want. It says so in the Books.’

The mess on the grass is drying black. Already it’s starting to smell.

Blaze starts, ‘If Gil finds Dennis –’

‘If Gil finds out Dennis is here because of me –’

‘He isn’t.’ Blaze sighs. ‘There is no test.’

‘Okay, so why else is he here then?’

‘To impress his brother, sounds like.’

‘Brothers don’t exist,’ I tell him, trying to squish down the picture of Julius that keeps popping into my head when I say the word
brother
.

Blaze doesn’t even bother answering.

So I say, ‘Go to the gate then. Get Dennis out of here. Take him to Woodend if you’re so convinced it’s real. You can go looking for FancyVividBlue, whatever you like.’

‘I will. Tonight.’

‘Fine.’

‘You’re not coming?’

I’m not. I don’t need to. Not now Dennis has Blaze to protect him from the bears. I say, ‘Even if I did believe in a gate, which I don’t, Dot’s creations aren’t meant to go through the fringe.’ A fly buzzes past my face. ‘It says so in the Book of –’

‘The Books say Dot created this place and only this place.’ Blaze lets his eyes slide to the mess on the grass. ‘They also say Dot’s creations are kind to all creatures.’

I get what he’s implying. It’s just I still don’t want to talk about it or know about it or have anything to do with it.

‘Why do you care if I come? This is your little obsession. You don’t need me.’

The way he acts, it’s like Blaze doesn’t need anyone, ever.

Blaze digs his toe into the ground, turning up divots of bloody, sticky grass. ‘I’ll come back once I find FancyVividBlue. When I know what’s going on. I’ll get help.’

‘I’m fine, thanks.’

‘You’re not. You believe something that isn’t true.’

Pause. Huge pause. ‘At least, you say you believe.’

‘Do whatever you want. Just leave me out of it. Leave us all out of it.’

‘The others have a right to know. It’s presafe to tell them outright, now Gil’s … you know. But we could go out there, find out how to fix them –’

‘Everyone’s fine. We don’t need fixing. And there is no
out there
.We’re all good.’

‘Because everything’s so dotly in the garden,’ Blaze says. ‘There’s nothing prenormal about Gil and Brook? Everything they say, you believe.’

‘I know I believe in Dot.’

And the thing is, I want to. I’m
desperate
to, to be totally precise.

Except there’s something else that I’m only just figuring out.

The Dot I want to believe in is
my
Dot. You know, the beautiful, peaceful, happy version smiling down from the silky banners in the gazebo.

Only now I’m wondering if Gil and Brook believe in a completely different Dot.

18

T
HE KNIFE IS
back where it should be, hanging from its nail on the coconut palm in the orchard. The blade’s bright silver. So clean, you’d never know what just happened if you weren’t right there to see, hear and smell the entire thing.

I cut a pineapple, a coconut and a couple of mangos, green-skinned with an orange blush. When I get back to the huts, I guess everyone’s in the newfruit grove because it’s superquiet. The empty huts have their shutters closed, apart from Dennis’s. One of his is part-way open and through it I can see a sliver of Dennis’s pale face and one wide-open eye. His expression tells me Dennis saw exactly what Brook and Gil did.

When I get inside the hut I tell Dennis, ‘I brought you something.’ Even for the old Wren, my voice sounds way too cheery. ‘Pineapple! It’ll be superawesome.’

As I start slicing into the fruit, the knife blade flashes in the gloom. I try handing Dennis a thick circle but he won’t take it.

I cut myself a slice. ‘Sweet,’ I say.

I make a big deal of licking the juice from my fingers. I try again to offer Dennis some but he doesn’t even look at it. His eyes never leave the knife. It might not have been my best ever idea to bring it into the hut with me.

‘You saw?’

I put the knife on the ground and give it a kick so it slides all the way over to the other side of the hut, the blade circling.

‘Yeah,’ Dennis says. He folds his arms and I can tell he’s about to start sniffling.

‘That deer. I know it seemed like a prehappy thing to happen.’ Dennis studies the floor, but I plunge on.

‘But it really wasn’t,’ I say, trying very hard mean it.

For some reason Dot wanted Brook to cut that deer’s throat. That must be true, even though it’s the opposite of how the Books say to act. Thinking anything else would be predotly and I definitely don’t need to be doing anything predotly right when Dot is testing me. It doesn’t matter that I don’t understand Dot’s reasons. She has them and that’s all I need to know. That’s what I go on telling myself, anyway.

Dennis mumbles, ‘So how come that pretty girl was crying?’

It takes me a second but I figure out which girl he means. ‘Fern was
happy
. Really. If you got to know her, you’d realise she’s always happy, pretty much.’Then I hear myself saying, ‘Fern is totally fine.’

I slice into a mango, releasing its dotly smell into the hut. But Dennis is even less interested than he was in the pineapple.

‘So, guess what. You and Blaze are leaving tonight.’

‘Me and Blaze?’

I can hear this rising note in my voice. ‘Um, yeah. You and Blaze.’

‘But you said you’d take me.’

I sigh. ‘It’s predotly to go into the fringe. But Blaze doesn’t care. He wants to leave. I don’t. So he’s taking you.’

‘You said there were bears.’ Dennis’s eyes are really filling now. No matter how fast he wipes, he can’t hide his tears.

‘Blaze can protect you.’

Dennis’s lips jut out. ‘You
promised
.’

I try smiling an
it’s-okay
sort of smile at him. No go.

‘I’m only going if you come too,’ says Dennis.

‘But Blaze’s a great guy,’ I say, while inside me everything’s sort of collapsing.

Because here comes a huge dilemma. It’s not right to go into the fringe, the Books are totally clear about that. But if I don’t go, Dennis won’t disappear and I’ll fail the test Dot’s set me. Whatever choice I make, there’s no way I can come out of this one hundred per cent dotly.

If I didn’t know that Dot was wonderful and perfect, I’d think there was something not quite fair about this whole scenario. The only way I can see to save the situation is to bend the rules.

I strike a deal with Dennis. ‘If I promise to come with you, then
you
have to promise you won’t leave the hut until prelight. You can’t let anyone see you.’

‘As if.’ Dennis looks at me like I’m the most prenormal person in creation. ‘There are bears
and
guys with knives out there.’

____________________

The newfruit trees are barer than I’ve ever seen them. On the upper branches, the rain has turned practically all the fruit to pulp. Down lower, close to the trunks, the newfruit are mostly whole, although their thin silver skins are dented and pocked. They’re about as far from perfect dotly newfruit as it’s possible to get.

I choose a tree on the edge of the grove, away from everyone else, and climb onto the lower branches. When I look down, Blaze is heading over to me. I drag my sungarb around my scabby legs as he hands me a bag. Somehow he’s managed to nearly fill it for me, even though there’s hardly any dotly fruit left in the grove.

I jump down from the tree.

‘Dennis saw.’ I can’t quite bring myself to add,
what Gil did to the deer
. ‘He wouldn’t eat. He’s trying to act normal but I think he’s pretty precalm underneath.’

‘I’ve heard some people do that,’ Blaze does his mouth twist. ‘Act like everything’s fine when it isn’t.’

I ignore that. ‘He promised not to leave the hut till prelight. He said he wouldn’t, because of Gil and Brook.’

Which is exactly when Gil’s voice says, ‘Did I hear my name?’

‘Nothing important,’ Blaze answers.

His picking bag is full. Mine is too, almost, because of him. So now Blaze strides off through the grove, away from Gil. I start walking after him, moving too fast to sling my bag over my shoulder the way I normally would. Instead, I bunch the top together in one fist.

Not that tightly, I guess, because when Brook says, ‘How did you fill your bag so quickly?’ I fumble and the whole thing falls to the grass, spilling newfruit all over the place.

I crouch down and start piling newfruit back into the bag. But my fingers don’t seem to be working the way I want them to. The fruit keeps rolling back out again.

‘Careful with that,’ says Gil. ‘We don’t want to do anything predotly.’

I haven’t forgotten. Not even slightly. It’s sort of impossible to forget something like
Anything predotly must be crushed
when you’re the predotly thing in question.

‘I wouldn’t. Never.’

But a single newfruit has rolled out of my reach and I can see from here the underside is squished and bruised. It’s not exactly the way anybody dotly wants to thank her creator.

Don’t let them notice the squashed one
, I think.
Please don’t let them.

By now Blaze has turned around. Gil looks at him, then lets his eyes settle back on the pile of newfruit at our feet. Blaze kind of lunges for the squashed newfruit, scooping it in one hand at the same time as he grabs three perfect fruits with the other. Down on his haunches, he starts piling fruit back into my bag. The squashed one he doesn’t put in. I don’t see for sure but I guess he stashes it in the pocket of his sungarb, which today is the brightest shade of peacock blue.

19

F
OR THE MILLIONTHTIME
that night, I wiggle my fingers into he slats of the shutters.

‘They’re still on,’ I say.

‘Wren. Stop looking.’

I let the slats snap back into position, which gives a pair of butterflies hovering just outside the window a pretty gigantic surprise. They rise up into the air and resettle themselves on the railing around the balcony of the hut.

‘I want to get going, that’s all.’

Blaze says, ‘I worked that out.’

He’s sort of smiling at the same time though. I guess Blaze thought I changed my mind about
everything
when I told him I’d changed it about coming to the gate. He doesn’t know I promised Dennis I’d come, and I’m not going to fill him in.

A moment later, I’m working my fingers back into the slats all over again. I’m totally precalm for a whole number of reasons. For a start, there’s going into the fringe. Then there’s the whole issue of the gate. I want for there to be a gate created by Dot so that Dennis can disappear through it.

But then, if there is, I can’t figure out what’s going to happen next. Go through it and I’d be failing Dot’s test, surely. Stay behind and I’d have to find a way of telling everyone where Blaze has gone. And explain how it’s even
possible
that he’s gone.