The Killables (12 page)

‘It stands for Killable,’ Lucas spoke as though he hadn’t noticed that she was talking. He was looking at her unflinchingly but she noticed that above his left eye a tiny muscle was throbbing. ‘Killable. They’re not reconditioned. They’re left outside for the Evils to kill them. Tomorrow, Raffy will be a K. Tomorrow night the Evils will come. So tonight we are going to get him out of the City.’

Evie stared at him in disbelief. The Evils always come when someone was made a K; everyone heard them wailing and the key holders were on high alert. But they didn’t kill anyone. They couldn’t. They couldn’t get in. ‘No,’ she gasped. ‘You’re wrong.’

‘You think the Evils come because they’re angry? They come because they’re brought here. Because they’re hungry,’ Lucas said bitterly. ‘They come to do the City’s dirty work for it.’

‘No!’ Evie shook her head. ‘No,’ she said again, her eyes narrowing. ‘You’re lying. I don’t know why you’re here, Lucas, but I’m not falling into your trap. You want me to be a K, too. You want to get rid of both of us because you’re full of hate.’

Lucas shook his head angrily. ‘I’m here because I need your help,’ he said, his voice wavering slightly. ‘Because Raffy needs your help. Otherwise he’s dead. If you want to help Raffy, you have to get me your father’s key.’

Evie gaped at him. Was this some kind of trick, some kind of test? ‘The other day,’ she said suddenly. ‘When you were here. You were looking for the key. That’s what you were doing in my father’s study.’ Her mouth hung open even when she’d stopped speaking; the flicker in Lucas’s eye told her she was right.

‘You knew even then he was going to be a K,’ Evie said, anger filling her veins. ‘Because it was you who told the Brother. And now you want my help? You’re a liar, Lucas. You’re a liar and I’m not helping you. I don’t know what you want the key for but I’m not helping you.’

‘You’re right about one thing,’ Lucas agreed. ‘It’s my fault Raffy’s been labelled a K.’

‘Because you told them about us?’ Evie asked, a tear pricking at her eye, a tear that she managed to hold in because she didn’t want to cry. She was too angry to cry. ‘Because you had to follow him? Couldn’t let your brother break one of your City’s precious rules?’

Lucas raised an eyebrow then looked away. ‘Because of you?’ he asked bitterly. ‘You think I’d . . .’ He stopped, swallowed; the muscle above his eye was throbbing more quickly. ‘No, Evie. Not because of that.’

Evie felt her stomach clench. ‘Then why?’ she demanded. ‘Why is Raffy a K? And why are you telling me you want to help him now when you’ve never wanted to before, when you’ve treated him like a second-class citizen all his life, when you’ve behaved like a machine?’

She didn’t know until she said the word whether she’d be brave enough to do it. And when she had said it, and she saw Lucas’s face darken, she wondered whether she’d gone too far. But then Lucas slowly nodded. He sat down on the bed, allowing his head to drop into his hands.

‘I’m sorry, Evie,’ he said then, looking up at her. His blond hair was dishevelled and for a moment he looked not just human, but vulnerable. Evie almost wanted to reach out, but she didn’t. It was Lucas. He wasn’t really vulnerable. He was just up to something and she didn’t trust him. She would never trust him.

He breathed out deeply. ‘I have been hard on Raffy. But I’ve been trying to protect him. He couldn’t see . . . couldn’t understand that what he was doing, the way he was, the way he looked at people . . . He couldn’t see that it was going to get him into trouble. He couldn’t see that Dad was the same. I was trying to protect him . . .’ Lucas’s voice cracked slightly and Evie moved towards him warily. ‘Your father?’ she asked. Raffy had been young when his dad had been labelled a K, too young to understand that he was evil, that he was dangerous. But he’d learnt soon enough what his father’s legacy meant: that people were wary of him, didn’t trust him, just because he
looked
like his father.

‘Our father believed in this place. He thought that by learning more he could help. But he wouldn’t follow the rules. He wouldn’t follow protocol, didn’t see that the rules existed to . . . to . . .’ Lucas trailed off again, his eyes gazing into the middle distance.

‘To what?’ Evie asked breathlessly.

He met her eyes, then shook his head. ‘There’s no time,’ he said. ‘Not now. We have to get Raffy out while it’s dark. While everyone is asleep.’

Evie looked at him warily. Then she sat down next to Lucas on the bed. ‘You haven’t told me why Raffy was made a K. Why it’s your fault, if you didn’t tell anyone about me. About us.’

Lucas looked around the room furtively as though there might be people in it, waiting to hear what he had to say. ‘It was the glitch,’ he said eventually, his eyes darkening further as he spoke. ‘I taught him how to use and manipulate technology. I thought it would give him a future. But he got too good. He found . . . something. Something that he shouldn’t have found.’

Evie gasped. She immediately remembered what Raffy had told her about the glitch; remembered telling him he must be wrong. ‘You mean the communication device?’ she asked, the hairs on the back of her neck standing up.

Lucas stared at her in alarm. ‘He told you? He told you about it?’

‘I thought he’d just made it up. He was always making things up,’ Evie said, her voice breaking as she spoke.

‘Did you tell anyone?’ Lucas was looking at her intently; Evie shook her head.

He appeared to digest this. Then his eyes were back on her, uncompromising; they seemed to look right inside her. ‘So will you help? Will you get the key?’

He was looking at her intently – his whole face seemed completely different to the Lucas she’d known all her life. He looked like a real person. Like a person who needed her. Like a person who really cared about Raffy.

‘You’ve known all this time? You’ve been pretending all this time?’ she asked Lucas.

He nodded. ‘I had to,’ he whispered. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘And me? What was that? Why match with me?’

‘Because I knew Raffy loved you and would never have you. I thought I could at least make sure you were safe.’

A lump appeared in her throat. And emotions she couldn’t make sense of flooded her.

‘I’ll help you,’ she whispered.

A shadow of a smile brushed over Lucas’s face, then it was gone again. ‘Okay.’ He stood up. Evie did, too. ‘We need the key. You go and get it. Meet me outside. If one of your parents wakes up, pretend you were sleepwalking. Pretend you couldn’t sleep. Anything, okay? But do not mention my name. They mustn’t know that I am here. Do you understand? A great deal depends on this, Evie.’

Evie nodded. She still wasn’t used to this new Lucas; she kept expecting him to suddenly round on her, his clear blue eyes cold as ice again as his lip curled triumphantly at her stupidity. But instead he just shot her a look of gratitude and climbed back out of the window, leaving her alone, her mind racing but fixed on one thing: she would help to save Raffy. She would do whatever it took.

She crept towards the door and opened it a fraction; the corridor was quiet. Hesitating outside her parents’ bedroom, just as she had done many times before as she left the house to meet Raffy, she waited until she could hear her father’s rhythmic breathing before continuing on her way towards the stairs. The stairs themselves creaked; they always had, but Evie knew which steps could take her weight without groaning too loudly. Delicately she moved down them, as though on stepping stones, until she was at the bottom. Then, seconds later, she was in her father’s study, looking up at the portrait of her mother, behind which she knew was the safe that held the key, the safe that her father opened only on the nights that the Evils came. He did it alone, unwatched, according to protocol. But Evie had learnt as a small girl how to slip into a room unnoticed, to watch, to observe.

Nervously she climbed up onto the desk and removed the picture. Then, her hands moistening with sweat, she started to turn the dial of the safe just as she’d watched her father do. 4-5-24. Her birth date. The door slid open and for a moment she stared at it, before reaching in to take the key.

And then she stopped. What was she doing? She was playing into Lucas’s hands. All his life he had been cold, heartless, cruel. And now, suddenly he was telling her that it had been a pretence? Now she was expected to believe that he wanted only to help her and Raffy? Lucas didn’t have feelings. He was ruthless. He was clever. And whatever his plan was, she wasn’t falling for it.

She edged backwards, climbed off the table, then went out of the study and out of the house. Lucas was waiting for her. ‘You have it?’ he asked, holding out his hand.

She shook her head. ‘I’m not doing it,’ she said, looking him right in the eye. ‘I don’t trust you.’

Lucas grabbed her by the shoulders. ‘Evie, you have to trust me. Don’t you get it? There is no other way. You get me the key or Raffy . . . Raffy . . .’ His voice broke; Evie stared in disbelief as tears appeared in his eyes. He brushed them away roughly.

‘But how can I trust you?’ she asked miserably. ‘How, after everything you’ve done?’

‘Everything I’ve done? Like covering up your little midnight meetings with Raffy? Making sure the System never picked up on them? That kind of thing?’ Lucas asked, his eyes shining angrily.

Evie stared at him, her eyes wide. ‘You knew?’

‘Of course I knew,’ Lucas sighed. ‘How else do you think you’ve been getting away with it?’

Evie digested this slowly. The System hadn’t known; hadn’t been waiting to judge her. Lucas had been protecting her all this time. Protecting both of them. Or, she thought suddenly, the System had primed him with this information to get her trust. Would he really have stood by if he’d known about her meetings with Raffy?

‘I don’t see how you could stop the System from knowing,’ she said, doubt filling her head. ‘You can’t control the System.’

Lucas closed his eyes. Then he looked at her strangely, uncertainly. ‘Okay. There’s something else.’

‘What?’ she asked him, her eyes narrowing. ‘What is it?’

‘I’m going to tell you something, Evie. Something important. So that you’ll trust me. Okay?’

‘Okay,’ she replied dubiously.

He looked skywards, then back at the floor, as though searching for the right words.

‘What is it?’ Evie repeated, frowning. ‘Tell me.’

He took a piece of paper out of his pocket and handed it to her. Evie looked at it uncomprehendingly; it was a certificate of some kind. Her name was on it, along with her parents’ names. ‘Your parents,’ Lucas said then, his voice barely a whisper. ‘Your parents are not your parents.’

Evie raised an eyebrow. ‘Of course they’re my parents,’ she said.

‘No, Evie.’ He exhaled, stepped back, looked at her apprehensively. ‘They’re not. They adopted you when you were three.

Evie’s eyes narrowed as they scanned the document again until she saw the word she was looking for. Tucked away at the bottom. ‘Adoption’. She felt sick, crumpled the paper into a ball.

‘What are you talking about?’ she said angrily. ‘Is this another lie? What are you talking about, Lucas?’ She prodded him in the chest with her finger, then the prod became a thump, and before she knew it she was hitting him. Hissing at him. All decorum had gone, she realised, all pretence had vanished. ‘What are you talking about, Lucas?’ she demanded again. ‘Tell me.’

Lucas crouched down, pulling her down next to him. ‘It was part of the growth programme,’ he whispered, his voice taut with emotion. ‘There weren’t enough people, not young people. After the Horrors not everyone could have children. Not everyone . . .’ He took a deep breath. ‘So they let people in. People who were desperate. There were people who’d travelled long distances. They were hungry, starving. They’d been surviving, but only just. They thought the City would save them. They came here and . . .’ He trailed off; his eyes were glistening with tears.

‘And what?’ Evie asked. She was getting a strange feeling at the bottom of her spine. ‘What happened to them?’

‘They took their children. Gave them to good couples. Couples who couldn’t have children of their own.’

Evie felt a lump appear in her throat. ‘That’s not what I mean. What happened to them? What happened to my real parents?’ Her voice was low, guttural.

Lucas shook his head in response.

Evie stepped back. She couldn’t speak. She turned, stumbled towards her house, the house she’d grown up in, the house she’d thought of as her own. A house that now represented only a lie.

She felt sick.

She wanted to shout. Scream. She wanted to shout at Lucas, tell him to stop lying, to stop telling her these things.

But she didn’t, because she knew, somewhere in her heart, that he wasn’t lying. She knew because she remembered. The man from her dream, carrying her against his chest. The woman, stroking her head, telling her about the wonderful place they were going to, telling her to be strong. Her parents. They had been her real parents.

She turned back to look at Lucas and realised that her eyes were swimming with tears. ‘I dreamt about them,’ she heard herself say, her voice nothing to do with her for she was lost again, a little girl being carried by a man who loved her. ‘The Brother told me I was dreaming about the City. They knew. They . . .’

She met Lucas’s gaze, saw the pain in his eyes, knew that he understood. And as he walked towards her she fell against him and felt his arms wrap tightly around her, and it was almost as though she was in her dream again. ‘You see?’ he whispered desperately. ‘There are so many lies here, Evie. We have to get Raffy out. We have to.’

And Evie nodded, because she knew he was right. But she knew something else, too. ‘I’m going too,’ she said, and as she spoke her body filled with fear because beyond the City walls lay only danger, the Evils, a brutal world filled with brutal souls. But she would take her chances.

‘No,’ said Lucas immediately. ‘No, you stay here. You’re safe. I’ve planned it. It will look as though Raffy stole the key. You must stay.’

‘Never,’ Evie said, shaking her head vehemently. ‘I’m going with Raffy. I don’t belong here. I don’t want to live here. I don’t want any part of this place any more.’