Reckoning (2 page)

It is a reckoning in every sense of the word.

2

As the hall doors open, the crowd cheers on cue. Then it's a whirlwind of action, the Kingsmen springing to life, ushering us into the main part of the building. I have only been inside once before, when we had to register my brother Colt for school two years ago. The grim, yellowing brickwork is as I remember and my footsteps clatter on the hard surface. I look up to see a full-length painting of King Victor hanging on the wall directly ahead, dwarfing everything else. His short ginger hair and regal crimson gown are instantly recognisable from the images of him on our screens but he seems utterly unnatural due to the sheer size of the canvas he has been depicted on. I am towards the back of a queue that has bottlenecked as people stop to stare in awe.

I manage to squeeze myself through the crowds until I am close to Opie. I can see the nerves rattling through him.

‘I don't want to be a Trog,' he whispers to me.

I try to speak reassuringly but he isn't listening. ‘You won't be.'

After the Reckoning, we will all end up in one of the four categories. An Elite is just that. I should probably be a Member, the next level down. Most end up as Intermediates but no one wants to be a Trog. They get the worst jobs and the lowest credit on their thinkwatches. They are assigned everything no one else can be bothered to do. For Opie, being graded as an Inter is something he aspires to; for me – for my mother – it would be a disappointment. Wanting to be an Elite is perhaps aiming too high; hardly any come from our village.

I say his name but his eyes are as blank as I've seen them. Eventually, he faces me, nodding towards my wrist. ‘Did you change your mind?'

My eyes flicker sideways but there is only a nervous bustle of teenagers and no one around us to overhear. He is wondering if I have done anything to my thinkwatch to try to cheat the Reckoning but he knows we shouldn't talk about that here.

‘I've not touched it,' I reply.

Opie is one of the few people who knows how good I am with technology; I've been doing it for so long that it is natural. But altering your thinkwatch is an offence punishable by either banishment or death. It is never for anything noticeable; an extra bit of food when my brother Colt was poorly, or a few more minutes of electricity when our house is unbearably cold in the winter. Opie is the only person I can trust to keep these secrets to himself.

The lake outside Martindale has long since run dry. It is filled with old computers and circuit boards, keyboards, screens, primitive thinkpads and watches. In the distance, there are mountains of old fridges and freezers, piles of rusting vehicles, metal, plastic, rotting wood; all different shapes and materials. Some of the areas I know well but there is more here than could ever be explored in a lifetime; a collection that spans decades of innovation, before the war and the shortage of electricity and power that followed. At some point these items would have filled people's homes and lives but they have long since been thrown away. I began to naturally drift there, playing with the objects as if they were toys and figuring out how everything worked – then creating my own versions. Opie and I have spent so much time there that we have our own nickname for the place – the gully. Even before the Reckoning tells me what I should be doing, everyone expects me to end up working in research and electronics, trying to find practical answers to the nation's problems. It sounds too easy, as if there aren't already people trying to do the same thing.

‘I've heard Paul Fisher is going to try to trick it,' Opie adds quietly, nodding to a boy on the far side of the room who is standing by himself.

I'm not entirely surprised. Anyone who is aged sixteen on the first of July has to take the Reckoning. Opie and myself only just qualify this year but Paul is almost a year older than us and has had all those extra months of worry and anticipation. Opie is concerned too but no one in our village expects him to perform that well. He is a practical person and the Reckoning is an academic test, or so everyone assumes. No one really knows how it works. I'm expected to do what I always do – get by. For Paul, there is more to it than that. His family were rich before the war and, although they have the same rations as the rest of us, there is a belief that someone such as Paul should perform strongly. This could be the worst day of his life.

‘What is he expected to get?' I whisper.

‘He should be a Member but he wants to be an Elite.'

It's all guesswork anyway; some say you end up with the rank you want, others that you have to work for it. Some say it is all about what happens on the day but there are those who insist it is about the things you have studied over the years in school.

If Paul is going to interfere, I hope he knows what he's doing, even though I doubt it. There isn't enough power for any of us to go to school for more than two days a week and I know he wouldn't be able to rival me when it comes to assembling and reassembling a thinkwatch – not that he would be aware of my talents as I hide the extent of what I can do well enough.

Before Opie can say anything else, more Kingsmen appear, motioning for us to stand in single file.

For the first time, I begin to feel something at the bottom of my stomach, nerves I am not used to, reminding me that the next few hours will define who I am to be. I near the front. One of the Kingsmen is holding a flat screen that looks like a slightly larger version of a thinkpad, on which I scan my thinkwatch. After it acknowledges me with an authoritative-sounding beep, the Kingsman says one word: ‘Thumb'.

I press my thumb onto the pad as a red light scans underneath. At first nothing happens and, just for a moment, I feel a panic that something is wrong. Then, as quickly as the feeling arrived, it disappears as the machine emits another satisfied beep. The cameras are there again as we troop one by one through to a large room. Rows of tables are laid out and a tall bank of windows allows the sun to stream through. I blink rapidly to adjust to the light before I feel a hand on my arm. A Kingsman is pushing me towards an empty seat on the far side of the room.

I stumble slightly from his shove and try to look for Opie as I move. He is at the front and though I will him to turn and look at me, he doesn't move.

Waiting on the desk is a thinkpad but not like the ones we usually have at school. Those are thick, scratched and heavy, but this is silvery, thin and soft. When I touch the screen, it leaves a small indentation. In the bottom corner is the communication port which I press my finger into. I feel a prickling at the base of my skull, as it scans my thoughts. I feel something in my head, asking my name and date of birth, and no sooner have they come to the front of my mind than I feel it telling me the answers have been accepted. A page of text appears on the screen, cataloguing so many things about me that I had forgotten most of them, a complete listing of everything I have ever successfully remembered at school. When you first start using one, it takes a while to figure out which thoughts you should be giving it. It doesn't read your mind, it simply stores what you tell it. Where the information is kept, no one seems to know, but this new thinkpad has all the data from our school ones, so it must be somewhere externally.

I look up from the device but, apart from the back of Paul's head in front of me, there is little to see. His thumb is pressed to his thinkpad and I wonder how he might try to cheat. My only guess is by tampering with his thinkwatch. The thinkpads connect to your thoughts but we've all felt the tingling under the metal of our thinkwatches as it does so. On its own, a thinkwatch acts as a way for us to communicate with each other, for our days to be planned, to receive alerts, and to tell us the time. With the thinkpads we use at school – and this new one in particular – the two seem to work in tandem.

The thinkwatches are complicated devices but logical at least. You are not supposed to remove the underside panel but, if you do, there is a trick I found through years of playing at the gully which allows you to get into programming mode. With a mixture of guesswork and experimentation, I worked out that you can use that to take advantage of almost anything you want. The only problem is that I am almost certain everything is fed back to some sort of central server. You can get away with cheating on your rations or altering your schedule – but only if you do so in small amounts. The first time I tried, I doubled my rations but after a week, the Kingsmen refused to let me leave the allocations carriage of the supplies train. I was terrified as they scanned my thinkwatch but then, after an hour or so, they released me. The next day, my rations were back to normal. It took me another six months before I was brave enough to try again and only by using it sparingly have I stayed undetected. Or at least this is what I assume.

I wonder if Paul is somehow aware of the things I am. Perhaps he has gone further and has been able to manipulate the way our thinkwatches communicate with the thinkpad? As my eyes begin to peer towards the light of the windows, I feel the device tugging at my thumb, letting me know it is time to begin.

The strangest thing is that no two people have the same story to tell about what the Reckoning is. After each year's is over, the younger children ask the older ones what happens but all I have ever heard is that it is a new kind of experience. Some say it is a conversation, some a test. Others seem scarred by it, almost bullied, while the mother of one of Martindale's few Elites once told me her son said it was the best few hours he had ever had.

Not knowing what to expect, I feel a question drifting into the front of my mind, wondering how my day is going. I try not to smile but respond that I thought the Reckoning would be a little harder than this. I can feel the itching under my watch as a tickle goes down my spine. For me, this feels like a conversation, as the thinkpad starts painting scenarios into my mind and asking me what I think. For the most part, it is a pleasurable experience. It makes me feel like I am flying, then judges whether I am happy. Suddenly, I feel as if I am falling rapidly. I breathe deeply and calm myself and the device seems pleased. It asks me what grade I would like, telling me I could be a Trog and not replying when I tell it I would not be that concerned. Broadly it is the truth. It shows me images of death and asks what I think, then instantly flicks to an infant child. I can feel it trying to manipulate me, searching for who I am as a person.

It asks me if there's something I'd rather not tell it. I fight to keep Paul away from my thoughts but I can tell that's not what it's searching for. Instead the pressure is building in my ears, starting with a gentle squeal and increasing quickly until the sound is everywhere, squashing and squeezing me like the most brutal of hugs. In the moment it takes for me to breathe in, I feel as if I am falling again and suddenly the Reckoning is tugging a memory from my mind.

3

YESTERDAY

I feel the goosebumps rise on my arm as the chilled rush of the breeze skims across the remains of the gully, a reminder the warmth of summer is almost over for another year. I can hear my mother in my head, telling me it's time to go in, that tomorrow is a big day and the last thing I need is a cold to go with the nerves, even if most of the anxiety is hers. The truth is, I am sat here gazing at the pile of shattered electrical goods for a reason, waiting for the snap of a broken screen or the crunch of an old piece of plastic to disturb me. Maybe Opie believes the gentle howl of the wind will be enough to cover his footsteps or, more likely, he still has no control over how much noise he makes as he blunders through the mounds of other people's rubbish. It's not as if I haven't told him to be quiet enough times when we've been out. But there it is, a brush of broken glass against boot that makes me want to grin, although I remain sitting against the dirt bank, facing the other way.

If I wasn't trying to pretend I didn't know he was there, I would probably laugh at the fact Opie thinks he can sneak up on me. We have known each other for most of the sixteen years since we were born a day apart and, although he has those few extra hours, he has rarely been able to get anything over on me.

But today is different because tomorrow's Reckoning will change both of our lives, almost certainly dividing us. That is why I came out to our spot to wait, pressed up against the gentle incline of the dry lake facing away from the forest, away from our village. I knew he would show up at some point: he has a question to ask.

As I feel him approaching, I decide to let Opie have his moment, keeping my eyes steady on the wreck of plastic and glass filling the space that once brimmed with water, fish and any number of creatures we hear stories about. I never knew my grandparents, but Opie's grandmother never seemed happier than the evenings she spent telling us stories of how things were before the war; when the gully held water, not the waste and memories of a different generation.

As he touches my shoulder and grunts a ‘raargh' of happiness, I jolt my body in mock surprise, turning around, grabbing his legs and pushing him to the ground. I roll on top, peering down at the sandy soil which has caked his hair. He tries to grab me but I wriggle from his grasp and elbow him under the ribs in the way I know will make him giggle with ticklish enjoyment. He writhes involuntarily and kicks me upwards until we are both lying in the dust, staring at the grey skies, hooting to ourselves as if this won't be the last time we do this. Around us is the sea of technology that no longer works.

‘You knew I was there, didn't you?' he says in a voice that seems to get deeper each day.

‘It wasn't hard with those big feet of yours scaring everything that is still alive out there.'

Opie doesn't reply but I feel his hand rubbing the back of mine and allow him to lock our fingers together as we listen to the draught of air scuttling around us.

‘You do know those parts belong to the King,' he eventually says.