The Killables (4 page)

No good would come of this, she knew that. The System would find out what they were doing; she didn’t know how, but she knew it would because it knew everything, eventually. And when it discovered the truth, it would punish both of them for what they were doing, and bring shame on their families and the City itself. They would become D’s – or worse, even; her parents too for failing in their duty of care. Her match to Lucas would be terminated immediately. Her government job would be taken away. She would be an outcast; she would be moved into manual labour, into latrine cleaning, to be pointed at by others and spat on in the street. She knew all this; this was the torment that kept her awake at night and made her hate herself, that terrified her and stopped her making friends or trusting anyone. Because she knew that her heart wasn’t like theirs, that she was not good. But right now, Evie was willing to accept that fate. The System would find out, and even a D would be too good for her. She would be a candidate for a second New Baptism; she would carry that shame for the rest of her life.

But right now, right here, hidden in the darkness, with everyone else asleep, Evie brushed her fears away. The System didn’t know. Not yet. Maybe it couldn’t see in the darkness either. And even if it could, right this minute she didn’t care. She felt free, happy, and that life was worth living. And anyway, before they were ravaged by wolves, it always seemed to Evie that the gypsies in her mother’s stories always had a pretty good time of it.

The New Baptism was nothing to fear. It was what made the City different from all other civilisations: a peaceful, good place. The New Baptisms had been the Great Leader’s big idea, back before the Horrors, before the City, when the world had been a different place and the Great Leader had been a brain specialist, a doctor, a healer.

Only he hadn’t been able to heal, not in the way he’d wanted to. He’d identified a part of the brain, the amygdala, which was bigger in the brains of psychopaths and criminals. And he realised that it was the root of all evil, that it was the fundamental weakness of human beings. The amygdala wasn’t dangerous in everyone, but it had to be watched carefully because it had the potential to grow, to start taking over and change people from good to bad. An enlarged amygdala stopped a person caring about others, made them want to kill and hurt people, made them want to steal and fight. It was people with large amygdalas who started every war, who lead people to hate each other, who caused others pain. It was these same people who had started the Horrors and worked everyone else up to make them want to fight, drop bombs and destroy everything. Because even good people could be weak. Everyone could, given the right circumstances.

It always struck Evie as strange that anyone would reject something that would make everything better. But that was the problem with evil – it made everyone suspicious, made them resist anything that would rid the world of evil because evil had already taken hold and it didn’t want to go.

And all because of the amygdala, a bit of the human brain that evil had monopolised and made its home. It meant that people were naturally selfish, aggressive, proud, difficult and competitive and it got them into problems again and again. Wars, skirmishes, robberies, rapes and murders. Terrible things. Unimaginable things. And the most terrible of them all was the Horrors. Evie knew all about the Horrors – everyone did. It was the reason they were here. It was the reason the City existed.

The Horrors made people realise how weak and dangerous they were. The Horrors made them realise that he’d been right all along.

Within the City this seemed so obvious. It seemed bizarre that before the City existed, only the Great Leader had seen how to cure all the ills of the world, and it seemed even more bizarre that as soon as he told everyone, they didn’t jump up and down and tell him to get on with it as quickly as he could. But that was the problem with humans, the Brother always said. They were flawed; faulty. They didn’t see the truth; they ran away from anything too new and revolutionary until they realised there was no alternative. Just like everyone ran from the Great Leader and refused to listen to him, refused point blank to let him try his theory out and prove what a difference it would make.

But that was before the Horrors, when humankind had looked pure evil in the face and suffered the consequences. That was before the alternatives had dried up and people realised that sometimes a revolution was what it took.

Then, a few enlightened souls started to listen to the Great Leader, and a small group of people realised that he was right. So he built the City to protect them, and no one was ever sad, or bad, or dangerous or cruel again. He made it so that evil just didn’t exist any more. Not inside the City’s walls, anyway.

Before the Horrors, the Great Leader had been an academic. He taught people and carried out research, because when he’d been a surgeon, when he was doing his operations, he’d come up with an idea – one which, like all good ideas, was totally rejected by everyone. They said it wouldn’t work, it wasn’t possible, that he was crazy. So he gave up being a brain surgeon and went into research so he could prove that his idea was a good one. He taught people, too, so his students could help him hone his idea and spread the word.

But still no one would take him seriously; every time he tried to publish a paper, everyone said he was deluded, dangerous. They struck him off the medical register. It just went to show how misguided people were back then, the Brother liked to say, shaking his head incredulously as he did so. But they were the ones who were dangerous. They were the ones who brought the entire world to its knees.

In the City, though, the Great Leader was finally able to prove that he was right. Back then, when the City had just been started, anyone who wanted to come was welcome; anyone who wanted to escape the barren desert that the Horrors had left behind, who wanted food, water, shelter and survival. They just had to have the New Baptism – to have their amygdala removed. Everyone who lived in the City had the New Baptism. Babies had it when they were born; newcomers had it when they arrived. It was part of the deal; you couldn’t live in the City if you didn’t have it. Everyone had the same, small, comforting scar to the right of their foreheads that told everyone they were safe. Because once the amygdala was gone, people were pure and free from evil. And so long as they were determined never to allow evil inside their heads again, they would stay good.

Now the City’s walls kept evil out and goodness in. But goodness had to be nurtured; that’s why everyone in the City was watched carefully, monitored by the System. D’s were watched especially carefully, because sometimes even the New Baptism wasn’t enough. Sometimes the amygdala grew back. And if it did, you needed another New Baptism. Only this time you were taken away from your friends and family, because you couldn’t be trusted, because you were a potential danger both to them and to yourself.

The label you got if your amygdala came back was different from the others. It was K: a blood-red label for danger. Only you never heard that label being mentioned; never even saw K labels on people because K’s were taken away as soon as they were labelled; taken to the hospital for reconditioning. They didn’t come back, either; they were too dangerous to live in normal society, because if the evil came back once, it would come back again. So they had to be watched more closely, protected from themselves and kept apart from the good people of the City. No one knew where the K’s went; no one was allowed to know. K’s were dangerous, and those around them were treated with suspicion because the evil might have spread.

That’s why no one liked Raffy.

His father had been a K, and he had been taken away when Evie was four. She still remembered seeing him being removed from his house, which was on her way home from school. She’d been with Raffy when it happened – she’d been allowed to be his friend back then, when they were little and still at school together – walking back home with his older brother, reciting the words they’d learnt that day. Lucas had seen them first, the police guard arriving at the door, his father trying to run but being stopped, his hands tied behind his back. Raffy had wanted to run after him but Lucas had held both of them back. So Evie had just watched as their father was marched away and their mother ran out of the house with books, clothes and other objects, heaping them in a pile in the front garden, then setting them alight. ‘A purification,’ my mother had explained later, shaking her head wearily. ‘Poor woman. It goes to show, you just never know.’

Lucas had accepted the fact that his father had been taken away for reconditioning; it had appeared to act as a catalyst for his own self-improvement programme. From that day on, Lucas, who had always been fairly sensible and sober, had become a model citizen. He had worked hard, found favour with teachers by pointing out the weaker members of the class, and proved himself to be cut from a different cloth than his father. ‘His mother’s boy,’ people would say. ‘Such a shame about his brother.’

Raffy had reacted very differently to his father’s disappearance. He had become disobedient and had to be disciplined again and again. He took to silence, staring angrily at teachers, and even at the Brother, when they tried to talk to him. Evie had tried to help him, had tried to stay friends with him, but her parents arranged for her to sit on the other side of the classroom; had made it clear that she was to have other friends. Good friends. Better friends.

Friends like Lucas. But when she’d finally found Raffy again, when they had started to confide in each other once more, she had learnt the devastating truth: his father had become a K because of Lucas. Because his eldest son had betrayed him. That’s what Raffy had told her. That was why he was so angry.

Sunshine crept through Evie’s window, telling her that it was time to get up and get ready for work. Heavily, she pulled back the blankets and swung her feet out of bed, just as she always did. But today she felt even more tired than usual, and she suspected it wasn’t just because of her midnight outing. It was guilt; guilt and fear.

The thing with Raffy . . . it hadn’t started out as such a terrible, terrible thing. But that was the trouble with evil; the Brother told them all the time how evil dressed itself up as something else, as something innocent and faultless. That’s how it sucked you in and enslaved you. Evie had listened solemnly, all the while knowing that it was already too late, that she was already evil’s servant.

But back then, when they were still young, it really had been innocent; as school children, she and Raffy were brought to the clearing to play each afternoon, to run around and burn off energy. That’s when they’d discovered the tree, where they would slip in unnoticed and tell each other stories they’d heard from their parents and teachers about the past: of the Horrors, of flying machines, of a large world full of people. They told each other the things they could tell no one else, and they listened to each other and understood. Then, when they were eight and moved to the next school, when they were no longer allowed to see each other, they made a promise that they would return to the tree, that it would be their place.

It had been five years before they’d found each other again, before they had the carefully controlled independence that allowed them to visit the glade under the pretence of running practices or of meeting sanctioned friends. Raffy got to the tree first; he told Evie when she finally joined him that he’d waited there every day for a year and he’d begun to think she’d forgotten, that she didn’t care, that he’d been foolish to think of her all that time.

But Evie had never forgotten. She knew, though, that what they were doing was very dangerous, so they had started to meet at night time instead – secretively, furtively, knowing what would happen if they were caught but doing it anyway because something more powerful than fear was drawing them to that place, to each other.

Every week Evie had told Raffy that they had to stop. Every week she implored him to forget about her. And every week he held her and told her that he would never forget her, that she was his only friend and she alone understood; that if that was wrong, then it meant the City was wrong. Evie knew that what he said was deviance, that what they were doing would lead somewhere terrible. But she knew Raffy was right, too. Because when she was apart from him she felt empty, and when she was with him she felt like she’d come home, somehow, even though that made no sense. No sense at all.

That’s why she knew the Brother was wrong about her dream – and that he’d find out the truth eventually. No one knew how the System watched its citizens, how it monitored and measured them. All they knew was that it did, and that it knew everything. If it didn’t yet know about Evie and the evil inside her, then it would know soon enough. She had already failed, already shown herself to be unworthy of the City; evil had already claimed her and made her do its bidding, and she had proved herself unable to resist.

Quickly, she got dressed, putting on the trousers and blouse that every girl wore in the City. Clothes were all made in the cloth district where her mother worked, in only three or four designs, to ensure maximum productivity and usefulness and minimum vanity and competition.

But that didn’t mean that people looked the same. They might wear the same clothes, but the label sewn into their lapel differentiated them more than any piece of clothing could have done. Yellow for A’s, blue for B’s, pink for C’s, purple for D’s and . . . and the other label. The one that was never seen. The label that was the colour of blood, and inspired fear in all who saw it. The label office was at the back of the cloth district; two queues could be seen stretching out of it first thing in the morning and after work in the evening. One queue for upward changes; another for downward. Labels would be ripped off, the new one sewn on with the unique stitching only learnt by label changers.

Evie rarely went near the label office. She hated to see the stooped shoulders, the fear in the eyes of those whose labels had gone down. Even though she herself might have been the one who changed the label on the System. Maybe because of it . . .