Acid (15 page)

Max stretches out on the blankets, and I crouch down
beside
him to wrap the other blanket around him. ‘I’m sorry,’ he croaks.

‘Don’t worry about it. You can’t help being ill,’ I say. His hair is hanging in his eyes. Without thinking I reach out to brush it to one side, then realize what I’m about to do and pull my hand back.

‘I’m sure I’ll be all right in a bit,’ he croaks. His eyes are too bright, shining with fever.

‘Don’t talk, sleep,’ I say gently. ‘D’you want some water?’

He closes his eyes again and nods gratefully. I get up, and go to find Elyn.

CHAPTER 21

FOR HOURS, I
sit cross-legged next to Max, watching him drift in and out of sleep. Despite the medpatch and the blankets, whenever he wakes up he complains that he’s cold, and his face is damp with sweat, even though I keep wiping it with my sleeve. Elyn comes over a few times to see if we’re OK. ‘D’you think you’ll still be leaving tonight?’ she asks after bringing us another bottle of water and some more medpatches.

I look at Max, who’s dozing again. ‘I’m not sure.’

She frowns sympathetically. ‘Well, if you need anything, let me know.’

‘Thanks,’ I say, giving her a small smile.

The rest of the afternoon passes slowly. I watch as, across the room, the others duck in and out of their dens. Where are they from? And what do they do here? Do they just sit in here all day, hiding from ACID?

Come on
, I plead with Max silently.
Get better. I don’t want to stay here
. Elyn seems nice enough, but the instincts I developed in prison are in overdrive, whispering warnings in my ear. I’ve no interest in actually working out what they’re trying to tell me. I want to get out of here
before
I find out what’s not right.

I lean forward, burying my head in my hands, wondering what the hell we’re going to do. Then I hear feet scuffing against the carpet. I look up and see Jacob, gazing down at Max with a grave expression on his face.

‘He’s going to need to stay put for a few days,’ he says.

I scowl. ‘We need to leave tonight.’

‘If you do, he’ll end up with pneumonia.’

I don’t answer him, just gaze at Max’s flushed face, listening to his noisy breathing. Does it sound worse than it did earlier, or better?

‘Where are you going to go, anyway?’ Jacob asks.

‘I’ve got some friends who can help us,’ I say. I’m not about to tell him that those friends are back in London and that I have no way of contacting them, so actually, they’re not going to be any help at all.

‘We’re about to have a meal. Will you join us?’ he says.

I look up at him in surprise.

‘You’d be most welcome,’ he adds, then turns and leaves us.

At first, I stay put, determined that I’m not going to take anything from these people; that I won’t owe them anything. But then the smell of food starts to drift across the room, making my stomach growl, and I remember that the last time I ate anything was this morning, back at the flat.

‘Sarah!’ I hear Elyn call.

I rub a hand across my face. My stomach growls again. It feels as if it’s trying to turn itself inside out.

‘Sarah?’ Elyn says.

I sigh, and get to my feet.

The others are sitting in a rough circle on the carpet in the middle of the dens. Elyn’s spooning something that looks like noodles and smells like chicken into bowls from a big pot. She smiles and moves over so I can sit down next to her.

For a little while, the only sound is the clinking of spoons against china. The noodles and vegetables are rehydrated, the meat sub, but I’m so hungry I could have eaten the carpet. ‘We’ll make some more for Declan when he wakes up,’ Elyn tells me as I eat.

‘So,’ Jacob says, when everyone’s finished. ‘You never told us why you were on the run from ACID, Sarah. Must have been something fairly serious for them to come after you like that.’

Is it me, or is he trying not to smile?

I glance over my shoulder, in Max’s direction. ‘I
did
tell you,’ I say. ‘We’re not LifePartners. ACID found out and came after us.’

‘Of course you did. My apologies.’ Jacob puts his bowl down on the floor.

I decide to challenge him back. ‘So what about you? What are you doing here?’

‘Oh.’ Jacob stretches, lacing his hands together and cracking his knuckles. ‘The same as you, I suppose. Keeping out of the way of ACID.’ He gets up. ‘There’s something I need to do,’ he tells the others. ‘I’ll see you all later, OK?’

He leaves the room. An uncomfortable silence falls, and I see Elyn and Shaan exchange glances, giving me the feeling I’ve asked something I wasn’t supposed to.

‘We were the same as you,’ Elyn says, gathering up the empty bowls. ‘Me and Rory, I mean. We met each other last September, a few months before our LifePartnering ceremonies. I knew Rory was the one I really wanted to be with – I didn’t get on with the guy my parents and ACID had chosen for me – so we ran away.’

Memories of Dylan flicker through my head. I push them away irritably. The guy ruined my life. Why can’t I just forget him?

‘Our dad got sent to prison,’ Amy says, indicating herself and Jack, and for the first time I notice how alike they look. So alike that I’m almost certain they’re twins. ‘Our mum was re-Partnered and the new guy was awful; he wanted to split us up and send us away to this military camp run by ACID.
So you don’t turn out like your father
, he said.’

‘Really, I think he just wanted us out of the way,’ Jack adds.

Paul and Lukas tell me that they’re runaways too, both from unhappy, violent families. And Neela and Shaan, as I suspected, ran away together because their feelings for each other were simply too powerful for them to ignore. Not for the first time, I wonder why I didn’t just run away. Why I let Dylan talk me into taking the gun and threatening my father with it. Surely, if we’d tried, we could have found another way to get me out of there?
And
yet I felt so strongly about him back then that I went along with his crazy plan without even questioning it. Sometimes, I hardly recognize the girl I used to be before I went to Mileway.

‘So how did you all end up here?’ I ask, frowning. It seems a bit of a coincidence that they all just found this place somehow.

‘I met Jacob in Manchester when I was squatting in an abandoned apartment block,’ Paul says. ‘He was recr— Ow! What was that for?’ He glares at Elyn, who’s given him a sudden, sharp nudge with her elbow.

‘We’re from all over,’ Elyn says smoothly. ‘Jacob travels around a lot, and we all happened to cross paths with him one way or another.’

‘So he offered you somewhere safe to stay in return for nothing?’ I say. ‘That’s very . . .’

‘Very what?’ Elyn narrows her eyes.

Selfless
, I want to say.
Weird
. But I don’t. With that suspicious look on her face, she isn’t so sweet or pretty any more; it’s like there’s something dark shifting under the surface. ‘Nothing,’ I say. ‘Don’t worry about it.’

The conversation seems to dry up after that, so I go and check on Max. To my relief, his breathing sounds a little easier, although he still feels hot.

‘Do you want to make a den?’ a voice says behind me. I jump and turn to see Elyn standing there. She’s come up behind me almost silently. ‘It’ll be more private for you.’

‘Um, OK,’ I say.

‘There are some spare bookshelves over there,’ she
says
, pointing to the other end of the room. ‘I’ll get Rory to come and help you move them, they’re heavy.’

‘I’ll be all right,’ I say. I cross the room to where the spare shelves are. One still has a dusty, damp-speckled poster pinned to the side of it, announcing
STORYTIME EVERY FRIDAY AFTERNOON
2–3.30
PM
, with a picture of a smiling teddy bear. God, this place
must
be old if they were still using the twelve-hour clock. I drag the shelves across to where Max is lying, then go back for another set. When I’ve pulled the third shelf across, Elyn has returned with an armful of sheets and blankets. ‘Wow,’ she says. ‘I can’t move those by myself.’

I shrug, arranging the shelves in a three-sided square, and she helps me drape the sheets over the tops of them and spread the blankets on the floor inside. ‘I got you these too,’ she says, handing me a couple of glolamps. I shake them to light them, placing them on the shelves. Then I gently shake Max awake and help him inside.

‘If you need a toilet, there’s one through there,’ she says, pointing to a door nearby. ‘It’s chemical, so it’s pretty horrible, but it’s better than nothing.’

I nod again, and with a small smile, she drifts away. I watch her go. She looks so delicate. It’s amazing to think she’s managed to evade ACID for so long. But then, isn’t it always the innocent-looking ones who surprise you? There were plenty of people at Mileway who assumed I was weak and fragile. And who found out, to their cost, that I wasn’t.

I crawl into the den. ‘Mia?’ Max croaks. ‘Are we staying?’ he asks.

‘Until you’re better, yes,’ I say.

He gives me a weak smile. ‘I guess it’s better than nothing, huh? I thought we’d be spending tonight in an ACID cell.’ He coughs, then swallows, wincing.

‘How d’you feel?’ I say.

‘OK,’ he says.

He doesn’t
look
it, though. I sigh inwardly. We’ll probably be here for two or three days at least. But he’s right – it is better than an ACID cell.

I wait until he closes his eyes again, then lie down on the blankets beside him. It feels strange being in here with him like this. I’ve never even shared a room with anyone, never mind a space this intimate. It’s even smaller than my prison cell was; there’s about thirty centimetres of space between us. The floor beneath me is hard and uncomfortable, but I don’t want to move around too much in case I bump against him and wake him. For some reason I keep remembering how it felt to be pressed against him on top of the bookshelves when we were hiding from ACID; it sends little waves of hot and cold through me. To distract myself, I stare up at the sheet draped over our heads and think about how Jacob evaded my question earlier about what he was doing here. Why would he do that unless he had something to hide? After all, haven’t Max and I done the same thing? And what was that nudge Shaan gave Paul all about? What had he been going to say?

It doesn’t matter
, I think.
As soon as Max is better, you’ll be out of here. Who cares who they are or why they’re here?

Except Jacob has the gun, and our c-cards, which I want back, even though they’re useless. The thought of him hanging onto them makes me nervous. Will he give them back? Why did he even take them in the first place?

Maybe he knows who we really are
, I think.
He said no one had komms here, but what if he was lying?

Right now, this is the safest place you could possibly be
, I tell myself.
Go to sleep and worry about this stuff tomorrow
.

But that’s easier said than done, and I lie awake for hours, my mind buzzing with questions.

CHAPTER 22

‘D’YOU THINK YOU’LL
feel up to leaving tomorrow?’ I ask Max quietly. We’ve been here three days. Although it’s early, and everyone else is still asleep, we’ve both been awake for a while. I’ve made some coffee using the bottled water and the little stove that’s kept in a room next door, and we’re clutching half-full mugs.