Acid (13 page)

I turn and see a street that looks as if it was abandoned years ago. There’s sodden rubbish strewn across the pavements, and all the holosigns have been vandalized. Halfway down the street is a large building, sticking out from the flat-fronted buildings on either side of it in a kind of hexagon shape, four storeys high, with most of its long windows boarded up. Old-fashioned spray-painted graffiti is looped and scrawled across the brickwork and wood, so many layers it’s impossible to make most of it out, although I can see a couple of NAR tags, their paint looking a little fresher than the rest. A flight of crumbling steps leads up to the entrance, which is set back under a triangular canopy of thin metal girders that look like they once had glass in between them. Above it, the remains of a sign – a printed one, not a holo – clings to the brickwork:
WELC ME TO CLEA ORD UBLI IB RY
.

‘What does that say?’ Max asks.

‘Welcome to Clearford . . . something something?’ I say. ‘No idea.’

Then I hear it, coming from somewhere to our right.
The
deep bass thud of a roto. Max hears it too; his head jerks up.

‘In there,’ I say, pointing up the steps at the entrance to the abandoned whatever-it-used-to-be. We run up the steps and, as the roto draws closer, start tugging frantically at the boards across the doors, trying to find a gap or a loose edge. There’s nothing. I get a jagged splinter in my palm which I yank out with a hiss, pressing my hand to my mouth to stop the bleeding.

‘Mia!’

I turn. Max is over by one of the windows. ‘This one’s loose,’ he says. He pulls up the board to show me; beyond it is an empty black square. ‘And there’s no glass on the other side.’ He pulls it up further until there’s a gap big enough for me to squeeze through. With the sound of the roto throbbing in my ears, I clamber through and drop as quietly as I can onto the floor. Max follows, the board thudding back into place behind him, and we crouch side by side, listening to the roto fly overhead.

When it’s gone, we stand up, brushing dust off our hands and knees. It’s dark, but not as dark as I thought it would be; light steals through gaps and knotholes in the boards across the windows, bathing everything in a dull, greyish twilight. We’re in a long, low-ceilinged foyer. Ahead of us are two wide counters, backed by rows of empty shelves. On the counters themselves are big, flat, upright objects that, when I look closer, I realize are solid-state computer screens, the sort people used to use before holocoms came along, with little scanners in holders beside
them
. There’s a strong smell of damp and everything is centimetres deep in dust, making my nose tickle. I have to pinch my nostrils to make the itch in them disappear.

Max sniffs, rubbing his nose too. I nudge him to make him shut up, then listen. I hear nothing. Whatever this place was, it’s been empty for a very long time.

We pass the counters and walk to the end of the foyer. It turns a sharp corner, then opens out into a wider space, also lit by chinks of daylight. The room is full of shelves, fixed to the walls or shorter, free-standing ones in the centre, filled with what, in the gloom, looks like hundreds of small, flat boxes standing on their ends. I step closer to look. Maybe this place used to be a shop?

I take one of the boxes from the nearest shelf, brushing away dust and cobwebs, and realize it isn’t a box at all. It’s a book – a real book, made of board and paper and glue, like the ones my father used to have locked away in a glass cabinet in his study, which were far too old and valuable even to touch, never mind read. This book isn’t anywhere near as old as the ones in my father’s study were, but it’s definitely seen better days. I take it over to one of the windows where there’s some light coming through. The cover is so damaged by damp I can’t read the title, or who the author was, and the pages are brittle and yellow, spotted at the edges with mould. I thumb through them, wrinkling my nose at their musty odour, then turn back to the first page. There’s a label with dates from over a hundred years ago stamped one under the other in crooked columns. The lines
THANK
YOU
FOR USING CLEARFORD PUBLIC LIBRARY. BOOKS RETURNED AFTER THE DUE DATE WILL BE CHARGED AT THE CURRENT OVERDUE RATE
are printed at the bottom.

‘What’s a public library?’ asks Max, reading it over my shoulder. He presses the inside of his elbow against his face to muffle a cough. I shrug and slide the book back onto the shelf, wiping my hands on my jacket.

We walk further into the library. The shelves of books seem to go on for ever, stretching away into dark corners. We come to a flight of wide, shallow stairs, curving round and up. I look at Max. He looks at me and shrugs, and we go up them.

The boards across the windows on the first floor are more solid, so it’s darker than the ground floor, and more shelves loom around us; I keep having to put out my hands so I don’t collide with anything. There doesn’t seem to be as much dust up here, for some reason, although the smell of damp paper is just as strong.

Max clutches my arm. At first I think he’s tripped and grabbed me to stop himself falling over. I start to ask him if he’s OK.

‘Shh!’ he hisses.

I turn to look at him. His eyes are wide, the whites shining in the gloom.

What?
I mouth.

He points. I look, and at first I can’t see anything.

Then I do.

A pale glow, coming from between the shelves over to our right, that flickers and jumps and moves.

CHAPTER 17

AS WE TIPTOE
closer, I see the shelves have been pulled round to form a rough rectangle. From within them, I hear a murmured voice, a soft laugh. Max and I stare at each other. Who’s there? And what are they doing here?

Max steps forward again. I put a hand on his arm, shaking my head. I see him swallow.
Please don’t start coughing
, I think as I tiptoe to the edge of the bookshelf walls and peer round them.

In the centre of the rectangle, two girls are sitting back to back on a heap of blankets and cushions. They’ve both got books open on their laps, with more piled around them, and on the shelves are several glolamps – the source of the flickering light.

The girls, one petite and sharp-boned with short, dark hair, the other plumper with reddish hair falling in thick waves past her shoulders, don’t look much older than fourteen or fifteen, and there’s an easy intimacy to the way they’re leaning against one another, the dark-haired girl with her head on the other’s shoulder, twirling a strand of her hair lazily around one finger, that makes me think they’re more than just friends.

I remember a conversation I had with Dylan once,
about
how his father, a prominent ACID agent who worked for my father, had arrested two men who’d been having a relationship with each other behind their LifePartners’ backs. ‘Can you imagine it?’ Dylan said to me. We were sitting on his sofa after school, and his parents were still at work. ‘Being a girl who gets Partnered to a guy when you don’t even find guys attractive, or a guy Partnered to a girl? It must be awful.’

I frowned. Up until then, I’d never given it any consideration; I’d just accepted it was wrong, like everyone else seemed to. As the warnings on the news screens and news sites said,
It is illegal for any person of any age, LifePartnered or otherwise, to engage in any sort of Partnership with a member of the same sex. Any person found guilty of this offence will be imprisoned immediately without trial
.

But Dylan’s question made me think. I started to wonder just exactly what
was
so wrong about it. Why
couldn’t
people choose who they were Partnered with, whether it was someone of the opposite sex or the same? Who would it hurt, exactly?

I sense movement beside me. Max. He looks shocked. I give him a frown, shake my head. I’m afraid even to breathe in case the girls realize we’re here. I take a step back.

And collide with a bookshelf, the corner catching me in the small of my back. Without thinking, I swear loudly.

The girls jump up, dropping their books, the one with the dark hair letting out a little scream. ‘Who – who was that?’ the red-haired girl says. ‘Paul?’

Crap
. My heart thudding, I step into the rectangle of shelves, Max behind me.

The girls clutch at each other. ‘Who are you?’ the red-haired one says.

‘It’s OK,’ I say, holding my hands up, palms out. ‘We’re not going to hurt you. We thought the place was empty.’

The girls stare at us. I can see they’re wondering whether to believe me.

‘I’m Sarah,’ I say. ‘And this is, um, Declan.’

The girls exchange glances. ‘I’m Neela,’ the dark-haired one says. ‘And this is—’

‘Don’t!’ the red-haired girl hisses at her.

‘What?’ Neela asks her.

‘How did you get in here?’ the red-headed girl demands.

‘We – climbed in the window downstairs,’ Max says.

‘Why?’ Her eyes are narrowed; suspicion is coming off her in waves.

‘It’s OK,’ I say again. ‘We’ll go somewhere else. I’m sorry for disturbing you.’ I take a step back, taking care to avoid the bookcase this time, cursing myself for being so clumsy before. What if ACID come here? Will these girls tell them they saw us?

Overhead, the roto does another flyover, low enough to make the whole building shake. And over the roar of the rain, I hear more sirens, frighteningly close.

‘Shit!’ Neela says. ‘Is that ACID?’ She goes over to the nearest window and peers through a knothole.

The red-haired girl looks at me and Max again. ‘Are they after you?’ she says.

I glance at Max. The girl frowns, pressing her lips together, and I become aware of how shabby we are, our clothes soaking wet and smeared with grime from climbing in through the window. We might as well have a big flashing holosign saying
FUGITIVES
over our heads.

‘You’d better come with us, then.’ She crouches down and shakes all but one of the glolamps to extinguish them, plunging us back into gloom. ‘I’m Shaan, by the way.’

Max coughs. I look at him again and see, in the half-light, that he’s looking back at me. I’m almost certain we’re thinking the same thing:
Who are these people? Why are they here? Can we trust them?
But what choice do we have? We can’t go back outside – not with ACID hunting for us.

‘What is this place?’ Max asks in the hoarse half-whisper his voice has been reduced to as, holding the remaining lamp, Shaan leads us and Neela through the maze of shelves, the lamp’s glow bouncing off the rows of books. ‘It said in one of those books it was a public library or something.’

‘Yeah,’ Neela says, and laughs at his puzzled expression. ‘I’d never heard of one either. Apparently people used to borrow these books’ – she sweeps her arm out, indicating the shelves – ‘and then they’d bring them back and swap them for new ones. For nothing.’

‘But you can get books now,’ Max says. ‘On your komm. OK, you have to pay, but—’

Shaan snorts. ‘Yeah, if you can call eFics books. Crap that’s been censored to within an inch of its life, just in case there’s something in it that might make people realize that LifePartnering and ACID aren’t the best things that ever happened to them.’

The venom in her voice takes me aback. Outside of Mileway, I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone talk about ACID with such open dislike before. What would she say if she knew who I was? Would it make me her enemy, or her hero? A shudder wrenches its way up my spine.

‘Jacob says this was the last public library in the country,’ Neela says. ‘They used to be everywhere, apparently, but ACID shut them all down because it was easier for them to control what people were reading if the only place you could get books was on the kommweb. He says this place was meant to be knocked down ages ago, only the town buildings bureau ran out of money, so it got left behind.’

Who’s Jacob?
I think as we reach a narrow, windowless stairwell, and begin to climb it.

‘Most of us live down in the old children’s library, but Jacob’s got one of the offices upstairs,’ Neela continues over her shoulder, the glolamp casting strange, leaping shadows on the walls and ceiling. ‘He likes a bit of privacy. He’ll help you with anything you ask for, though. He’ll help anyone. That’s what he does.’

Max and I exchange glances, but say nothing.

Shaan and Neela take us to a room at the far end of
the
top floor. Through a window in the door, I can see lights burning – more glolamps.

Shaan knocks, rapping her knuckles against the wood. There’s no answer. I can hear my pulse thumping in my ears, not because I’m scared, but because this is all so strange. I keep thinking that at any moment, I’m going to wake up and find myself back in my flat in Outer, with Cade slobbing out on the sofa, old pairs of socks and underpants balled up in random corners of the living room, and the milk left out on the kitchen worktop to go sour with dirty dishes heaped up beside it.

Then, from the other side of the door, a male voice calls, ‘Come in!’

CHAPTER 18

SHAAN TWISTS THE
handle, pushing the door inwards, then steps back and motions for me and Max to go through. She and Neela stay outside.

We’re in a small square room, lit by glolamps hung from metal brackets. They turn it into a flickering cave. It’s colder in here than the rest of the library; cobwebs of mildew spread across the ceiling. Pushed against the far wall is a metal-framed camp bed heaped with pillows, and beside that, on the floor, some grubby-looking blankets. Piles of books line the corners of the room, most of them battered-looking and coverless. On a small wooden table nearby are more books, paper, mugs and a metal dish full of what, after squinting at them for a moment, I realize are cigarette ends. But it’s the walls I’m staring at: they’re covered in pictures – jagged cityscapes and screaming faces, blending into one continuous mural. At first, I think they’ve been stuck up there by someone. Then I realize they’ve been drawn straight onto the paintwork in thick black and red pen.