Acid (25 page)

I nod and try to look enthusiastic, but the conversation is piling new worries on top of the ones I’m already having about the person on the news screen. Who am I going to invite?

Halfway through the meal, I feel a sting on my wrist as my mediband administers my meds. The anxiety recedes, although I can’t quite stop worrying about not having anyone to invite to the party, and I still can’t convince myself that I imagined that person on the news screen.

After the meal, we go back into the living room, where the maid serves coffee. At her father’s request, Suki switches on the news screen – which is twice the size of the one back at our new apartment – and we watch an ACID report about how the pulse barrier being built around the IRB’s coastline to keep illegal immigrants out and people from trying to leave is entering the final phase of its construction, and is scheduled to be switched on in less than four weeks.

‘Damn good job too,’ Evan’s dad grunts at the screen. ‘It should have been put up a hundred years ago, but of course the government we had back then dragged their heels over it, never got anything bloody done.’

I remember learning about the old government at school – about how they almost ruined the country because they were so incompetent – and murmur in agreement. Evan’s dad doesn’t seem to notice.

Then Evan’s mum touches a finger to her ear. ‘Do forgive me,’ she says to all of us. ‘It’s the caterers for the party – I’ll have to take it.’ She leaves the room, already starting to talk to whoever’s linking her.

‘That reminds me, I want your opinion on something, Evan,’ Evan’s father says, getting up too. He turns and smiles at me, and I’m struck again by how alike he and Evan are. ‘Will you excuse us for a moment, Jess?’

I nod. ‘Yes, of course.’

They go out of the room, leaving me with Suki, who, now she has the sofa to herself, stretches out with a cushion in her lap, her gaze still fixed on the screen.

‘Um, Suki?’ I say, after glancing behind me at the door to check Evan’s mum isn’t coming back yet.

She looks round at me. ‘Yes?’

‘Have you ever, um, seen anything, um, weird on the news screen?’ I say, not quite believing I’m even asking her. What if she tells her parents, and they get angry with me? But I have to know if what happened to me this morning has ever happened to anyone else. And right now, there’s no one else I can ask.

‘Weird like what?’ she says.

I swallow. ‘I, um, saw this person on my news screen earlier. They interrupted the broadcast. They were wearing a mask, like they didn’t want me to know who they were.’ I swallow again, deciding not to tell her that the person spoke to me, said my name. ‘They were saying all this . . . stuff,’ I finish.

‘Oh my God,’ she says, her eyes widening. ‘You mean your screen was hacked? You linked ACID, right?’

‘Not yet,’ I said. ‘I wasn’t sure what it was. Has anything like that ever happened to you?’

She frowns and shakes her head. ‘I don’t think anyone’s ever tried to hack our screen.’ She looks uneasy now, and I’m already starting to regret saying anything to her. If anything, it’s made me even more doubtful.

‘Don’t worry about it,’ I say. ‘I’m sure it was nothing. Sorry if I scared you.’

She gives me a small smile with one side of her mouth. ‘It’s fine,’ she says. Then she goes back to watching the screen. We don’t exchange another word.

CHAPTER 40

TO MY RELIEF
, Suki doesn’t say anything to anyone, and back home that evening, Evan and I sit in the living room on separate sofas, looking through the information about our new jobs that’s been linked to us on our komms. We’ve both got positions at a branch of the ACID Statistics Bureau, checking reports before they go up on the news screens. They’re pretty menial, but the job you get when you finish school and get Partnered always is at first. Ours were chosen for us based on the results of our exams and aptitude tests and, despite their ordinariness, have great career prospects. I remember thinking those exams, which I sat back in May last year, were the hardest thing I’d ever had to do in my entire life. I couldn’t wait for them to be over. I had no idea that just three months later, I’d give anything to have that time back.

By twenty-two thirty, I’m so tired I can’t keep my eyes open. ‘I think I’ll go to bed,’ I tell Evan, switching off my wraparound and getting up.

He stretches and yawns. ‘I should get some sleep too, I guess,’ he says. As we get ready for bed, I wonder if tonight will be The Night. But once again, Evan just gets
into
bed, gives me a chaste kiss on the cheek, rolls over and goes to sleep. I gaze up into the semi-dark and sigh quietly. Doesn’t he find me attractive? I so badly want there to be chemistry between us. I turn over too so I’m facing his back, and tentatively lay my hand on his shoulder. He mutters something and wriggles out from underneath my touch. I sigh again, turn onto my other side and close my eyes.

The next day, we’re both up early. I pick out a cream-coloured shirt and navy skirt and jacket, which I team up with tights and flat black shoes. Then I make us some toast.

‘Aren’t you hungry?’ Evan asks as I nibble listlessly at a corner, then pass the rest to him. I shake my head. Even the thought of food turns my stomach. I’m so nervous, I feel sick.

‘You need to eat something,’ he says. ‘Otherwise you’ll get lightheaded. That might have been why you thought you saw the – you know – on the news screen yesterday.’

‘I’m fine, really,’ I say, wishing he hadn’t reminded me about the news screen. I’ve been trying to forget about it.

Evan raises his eyebrows, but says nothing.

When we get outside, our car is already waiting, the driver holding the back door open for us. As we get in, I grip my bag so tightly my knuckles go white. What will the people at our new job be like? Will they be friendly? Do any of them know what happened to me? And what about my meds? I glance at Evan, but he’s looking out of the window, not paying me any attention.

The journey to work takes just ten minutes. ‘This is it, Mr and Mrs Denbrough,’ the driver says as we pull up outside a towering office block with huge, silvered windows.

‘Thank you,’ I say. My voice doesn’t sound quite steady, and my palms are clammy. I wipe them on my skirt. The driver gets out and holds the door open for me. I get out of the car, and, taking a deep breath, follow Evan to the entrance.

‘M-my name’s Jessica St—
Denbrough
,’ I say to the holoscreen by the door, after I’ve waved my c-card at it to confirm my identity and a voice has asked me why I’m here. ‘I’m starting a job here today.’

Evan shows his own card, and the door hisses open, admitting us into the building.

We find ourselves in a wide foyer decorated with lush-looking pot plants. The air is cool and music is playing softly somewhere.

‘Please take a seat,’ a woman’s voice says from somewhere up near the ceiling. ‘Someone will be with you shortly.’

We sit down, me holding my bag on my lap. A few moments later, one of the lifts opens and a tall woman with red hair strides out, the heels of her shoes clicking sharply against the floor. ‘Jessica Denbrough?’ she says. I get to my feet and try to speak, but no words come out.

‘I’m your boss, Kerri Gough,’ she says. ‘This way, please.’ She nods at Evan. ‘Your manager is on his way
down
, Mr Denbrough.’ She turns and walks back to the lift. I hurry after her.

We ride the lift up a few floors in complete silence. Kerri looks as if she’s in her mid-forties, with a square, hard face, her forehead permanently creased into a frown. When the lift stops she marches out without waiting for me, calling, ‘This way, please.’

I scurry after her down a narrow corridor. She takes me to a large room with rows of workstations stretching from one end to the other. At each, someone sits in front of a holoscreen. When we enter the room, there’s a buzz of chatter in the air which dies the moment everyone realizes Kerri is there. She leads me across the room to an empty workstation. I can feel everyone’s eyes on me as I pull out the chair and sit down.

‘You know what you have to do?’ Kerri says as I press the power switch.

I nod. ‘Read the data as it scrolls past, and check for any mistakes or inconsistencies.’

‘And if you find any?’

‘Mark them up and link them through to the Corrections department.’

Kerri nods, apparently satisfied, although the frown lines on her forehead never quite disappear.

‘I’ll put Cara with you for the first hour or so to help you get the hang of things,’ she says, looking around and beckoning. Immediately a tall girl my own age, her dark hair tied back in a ponytail, gets up from her own workstation and comes over. ‘Lunch is at thirteen hundred, but
I’d
like you to come up to my office ten minutes before for a review of your morning. I’m on the seventh floor, room nine.’

Then she turns and says sharply to the people in the room – mostly women, but a few guys too, who have all stopped work to watch me – ‘Eyes on screens, please!’

She strides out of the room, the door sliding shut behind her.

There are a few moments of silence, and then the low buzz of chatter starts up again. Cara grabs a spare chair and sits down next to me. ‘Don’t worry about Gargoyle Gough,’ she says. ‘She hardly ever comes down here.’

She gives me a grin. Suddenly I don’t feel so nervous, and smile back.

‘So, we’d better get you started,’ Cara says, leaning across me to adjust the screen. She shows me how to sign in, and brings up a list of options on the screen. ‘Choose
Start datascroll
,’ she says. I touch my index finger to the screen, and a slowly scrolling list of place names and figures appears, all to do with the city’s sub food supply. Most of the place names have an ‘O’ next to them for Outer.

‘ACID have to keep an eye on things in Outer because of the population being so big,’ Cara explains. ‘Otherwise, the people there’d take everything and we’d be left to starve – after all, there are ten people in Outer for every one of us in Upper. Can you imagine if
we
had to eat sub?’

‘I’ve never tried it,’ I say.

She makes a face. ‘God, you don’t want to. It’s awful.
I
don’t know how anyone can call it food.’ Then she says, ‘Ah!’ making me jump. She leans across me and jabs a finger at the screen. The scrolling list stops moving. ‘There,’ she says. ‘You see?’

I look.

‘There’s an extra “S” on the end of that word,’ she says, tapping the screen to highlight the mistake in yellow. ‘It’s because the data’s input remotely by the people at the distribution depots as they send the deliveries out. They’re always making mistakes. The yellow means I’ve flagged it for Corrections.’ She starts the datascroll moving again.

An hour later, with Cara watching me, I feel like I’m starting to get the hang of it.

‘I need to go back to my own desk,’ she says, getting up. ‘But yell if you get stuck, OK?’

The morning passes quickly. The girls on either side of me, Meredith and Hailey, are also my age, and apart from the fact that Meredith’s hair is dark and Hailey’s blonde, they could almost be twins, with identical chin-length bobs, blue eyes and wide grins. They chat to me whenever I pause the screen to give my eyes a rest. ‘So, you just got LifePartnered, didn’t you?’ Hailey asks me. ‘I heard Kerri telling one of the other managers last week, when they were getting ready for you to start work here.’

I nod.

‘Have you had your Partnering party yet?’ Meredith asks.

‘It’s on Saturday,’ I say.

‘How many people have you got coming?’ Hailey says.

‘Um, I didn’t invite anyone yet,’ I say.

‘You’re kidding!’ Hailey’s eyes widen.

‘I haven’t had time,’ I tell her. ‘I – I’ve been ill. My Partner has a few friends coming, though . . .’

I trail off, realizing how lame it sounds – a Partnering party with hardly any people?

Hailey grins. ‘Can we come? I haven’t been to a decent party in
ages
.’

Meredith snorts. ‘Since
my
Partnering party last month, you mean.’

‘Oh, yeah, that was pretty good.’ Hailey waves a hand vaguely. ‘But I bet Jess’s will be amazing too, right?’ She looks around at the people near us, who all nod in agreement.

‘Sure,’ I say, feeling a little flustered. ‘You should definitely come.’

Before I know it, it’s twelve forty, and Cara’s calling across the room, ‘Jess, you’d better go up to Kerri’s office. She’ll eat you alive if you’re late.’

I nod, log my screen out and push back my chair.

‘If you don’t make it down before lunch, we’ll save you a seat in the restaurant,’ Meredith promises as I bend down to pick up my bag.

‘Thanks!’ I say.

‘It’s on the bottom floor, through the door after the lifts and on your right – follow the signs!’ Hailey calls after me as I hurry to the door, trying to remember where Kerri said her office was.

CHAPTER 41

I FIND IT
with a couple of minutes to spare. The door is open, but there’s no one there. I check the holoscreen next to the door. It’s definitely Kerri’s office, so I go in and sit down on a chair beside her desk to wait.

There’s a holoscreen on the desk just like mine downstairs, with the datascroll paused on it and a word highlighted in yellow. I glance at it, wondering what sort of statistics someone higher up like Kerri deals with. Something more interesting than food supply stats, I should think.

CONFIDENTIAL INFORMATION – NOT FOR NEWS SCREEN BROADCAST. TO BE VIEWED BY AUTHORIZED PERSONS ONLY
.

Case Ref:
RQ675

Name of prisoner:
Maxwell Alexander Fisher

Age:
16

Citizenship-card ID number:
996437865MAF

Charge #1:
Evading arrest

Charge #2:
Suspected involvement in escape of category A prisoner

Charge #3:
Helping a felon evade arrest

Senttence:
Life, Innis Ifrinn Prison, former Orkney Isles