Viridian (12 page)

Her eyes were blazing, her fists clenched at her sides. She seemed so intense, so full of passion, that Jay couldn't doubt her.

‘OK,' he said. ‘I'll do what you say.'

‘Just make my dad believe it,' said Toni. ‘And then, when it's dark outside, we'll sneak out of here. If your dad's in the Research Station, we'll find him.'

It wasn't too difficult. The Immunes were good people. They felt guilty about locking him up. Jay apologized. He said he knew he'd been selfish. That Dad might have to be sacrificed for the greater good.

The Immunes were very understanding. One said, ‘We know it's awful. But the human race is facing its greatest crisis ever. We've all got hard choices.'

Another said, ‘When we have a cure for the virus, your dad will be at the head of the queue.'

To spare Jay's feelings, they didn't add, ‘If he's still alive.'

Dr Moran might have been more sceptical about Jay's sudden change of heart. But he was locked away, working on the vaccine, and couldn't be disturbed.

‘He works all the time,' said one of the Immunes. ‘He doesn't even seem to sleep. That man's a hero.'

Jay nodded in agreement, even though he still thought Toni's dad was a cold-hearted creep.

Toni told the other Immunes, ‘I'll just show him around. OK?'

As he and Toni left the room together, Jay whispered, ‘Think they suspected anything?'

‘No, you did great.'

‘When will it be dark outside?' Jay asked.

‘It's dark already.'

‘So why don't we go?' fretted Jay. ‘What if your dad locks me up again?'

‘He won't,' said Toni. ‘He'll work all night, shut up in his room. But we can't get out of here until the others go to sleep.'

‘
When
will they go to sleep?'

‘Soon.'

‘But what about my dad?' Jay started to argue.

Toni whirled round, her eyes blazing. ‘Stop going on about your dad!' she snapped. ‘Think you're the only one here who's lost someone? We've all had people we love go Verdan, or get killed. You know Ellie and Jake, who died? That woman you were rude to is Ellie's mum.'

Jay flushed. ‘I didn't know,' he muttered. ‘I'm sorry, I never thought…'

‘Yeah, well, think now,' said Toni, stalking off.

* * *

Jay found her again, in a little cupboard-sized room next to the boiler room where he'd been imprisoned. He warned himself to shut up and hide his impatience. But Toni seemed to have calmed down. She was standing next to a tray of plants on a bench.

‘They need more light,' said Toni. ‘Some comes in daytime, through that ventilation grill. But it's not enough. And Dad won't give me a sun lamp for them. He says we can't waste electricity on non-essentials.'

‘What are they?' asked Jay, trying to sound interested.

‘Carnivorous plants,' Toni told him. ‘I've got sundews, pitcher plants, Venus fly traps. But look.' She brushed a sooty spot off a leaf. ‘They've caught this horrible fungus called black spot. It's the most deadly plant fungus there
is. It spreads like mad. You can't stop it. It'll kill them, eventually.'

A shocking image slammed into Jay's mind. It was Teal, her skin covered in fuzzy white fungus, spores puffing from her mouth when she tried to speak. The image vanished in a split second, leaving him trembling.

‘My absolute favourite is the Venus fly trap,' Toni was telling him. She pointed to a plant in a pot. It had leaves hinged in pairs like clam shells. Each leaf was the size of a penny and fringed with spikes. The leaves were green on the outside, and red as raw steak inside.

‘You hungry?' Toni crooned to the Venus fly trap, as if it was a pet dog or cat. There was a lazy blue fly crawling along the bench. Toni's hand darted down. She pinched it between her thumb and finger, lifted it up and fed it to the fly trap. Instantly two leaves sprang shut around the fly, the spikes holding it in like prison bars.

‘The leaves have got little trigger hairs on the inside,' said Toni. ‘Soon as they feel prey moving, they snap the leaves shut. Clever, isn't it?'

Jay could hear the fly's buzzing whine coming from its leafy trap, see its legs sticking out between the spikes. Suddenly, he found himself paying attention. Repelled but fascinated, he peered closer at the struggling prisoner. ‘Now what happens?' he asked Toni.

‘The fly gets dissolved to soup. Really slowly. And the plant absorbs its nutrients. Yummy! Then when it's finished
digesting, the trap opens again. And all that's left of the fly is its shell.'

‘The plant eats it alive?' said Jay. ‘That's disgusting.' He reached out a finger to trigger another trap.

‘Don't do that,' warned Toni. ‘If you trigger the traps too often, they die. It uses up all their energy.'

‘How does this one work?' asked Jay, pointing to another plant. It had slender, trumpet-shaped traps, with little hinged lids on top.

‘That's my pitcher plant,' said Toni. ‘When a fly crawls in, the lid closes. Then the fly slips down into a pool of water…'

‘Don't tell me,' said Jay. ‘It gets dissolved to soup.'

‘The plant drowns it first,' said Toni. ‘Then dissolves it. Some pitcher plants are big. They catch rats.'

‘Gross.' Jay shivered. ‘Doesn't anything ever escape?'

‘No,' said Toni. ‘Once they're trapped, they're dead.' Then she reconsidered. ‘Except wasps, sometimes. I've seen a wasp bite its way out of a pitcher plant, just munch through the walls and fly away.' Toni flapped her arms to show the wasp flying to freedom.

Jay frowned. ‘Carnivorous plants are really creepy.'

‘No, they're not,' Toni protested. ‘They're amazing. They're top plant predators, awesome killing machines. My mum hated them, though, specially after she turned Verdan. She said plants shouldn't eat meat, they shouldn't catch and kill things…'

Jay stared at her, forgetting all about carnivorous plants.

‘Did you say your mum is a Verdan?' he asked.

Toni nodded. ‘She wasn't Immune like me and Dad.'

‘Did they force her to?'

Toni gave a bitter little smile. ‘No way. She bought into the whole Verdan thing. She was one of the first to get her virus shot.'

‘Did you want to get a virus shot too?' asked Jay.

‘Yes,' said Toni. ‘It would have been beautiful, if it had worked. Saving the planet, all Verdans living in peace with no wars…' She looked embarrassed. ‘That sounds like a stupid dream now.'

‘No, it doesn't,' said Jay, fervently. ‘Don't say that. I believed it, same as you. I tried to get a shot.'

‘I would have, but Dad took my blood for research and found out I was Immune. Then we had to go into hiding when the Cultivars started saying all Immunes must be killed.'

‘They're the ones that spoiled it all!' said Jay. ‘The Cultivars, the Immune Hunters. Viridian.'

‘My mum's a Cultivar,' whispered Toni.

‘What?' said Jay.

‘When she turned Verdan, Dad took me to live with him. Mum wasn't interested in me any more.'

‘My gran was the same,' Jay burst out. ‘It was like I was a stranger.'

‘Then Mum moved to the Research Station, became a Cultivar. Dad said I mustn't see her again. He said she'd betray us if she knew where we were.'

‘She would have done,' Jay told her. ‘She
definitely
would have done.'

Suddenly a dazzling light went on in his brain. ‘Wait a minute! That's why you want to come to the Research Station, isn't it? It's not about rescuing my dad. It's about seeing your mum again.'

‘I still want to help you get your dad back. Honest, I do. And I am sick of being down here. So I wasn't lying…'

Jay interrupted, more brutally than he meant to. ‘Forget her! OK? She doesn't care. She's not your mum any more, she's a Cultivar. If she sees you, she'll tell the Immune Hunters.'

‘I know,' Toni answered, in a small, quiet voice. ‘But I still love her. I can't help it. I know I can't even let her see me. I just want to see
her
, from a distance. See she's all right.'

Jay sighed. He said, more gently, ‘Getting food wasn't the reason you left the basement, was it? That was just an excuse. You went looking for your mum, didn't you?'

Toni nodded. ‘I thought I'd see her at that big rally. All the Cultivars were there. But she wasn't. Why wasn't she there, when all the others were?'

‘I don't know,' said Jay. He felt a sudden sick, chilly twist in his guts. ‘Has your mum got a Cultivar name?'

‘Yes,' said Toni. ‘She chose it herself. It's Teal.'

Jay's horror must have shown on his face, because Toni said, ‘What's the matter?'

Jay knew he should tell Toni the truth, that her mum was dead. But he also knew he wasn't going to. If there was no hope of finding her mum in the Research Station, Toni might give up on the whole plan. And Jay needed her.

I'll tell her later,
thought Jay guiltily.

Out of the blue, he said, ‘My mum's dead.' He'd almost said, ‘My mum's dead too,' but he stopped himself just in time.

Toni said, ‘That's awful. Did the Immune Hunters kill her?'

Jay shook his head. ‘She died years ago, in a motorbike accident. I never met her.'

‘What, you mean, you don't remember her?'

‘I never met her,' said Jay. ‘She was pregnant with me when the bike crashed and she got fatal head injuries. I was born by Caesarean section, then they switched off her life support machine.'

Toni said, ‘I don't know what to say.'

‘You don't have to say anything,' said Jay. ‘It was a long time ago.'

He didn't even know why he was bringing it up now. Yes, he did. It was to show Toni that he sympathised, that he knew what it was like to lose a mum, and that she would survive it.

Except, Toni didn't know that her mum was dead, because he hadn't told her.

Jay's nerves felt so raw and twitchy he couldn't stay still a second longer. ‘Let's go,' he said. ‘They must be asleep by now.'

Toni went ahead to check. She came back to Jay and whispered, ‘OK.'

They crept past a door with a sliver of light showing underneath.

‘My dad,' mouthed Toni. ‘Working.'

They tiptoed through the lab to the basement exit and let themselves out into the dark world outside.

The night sky was beautiful. The sky over Franklin was clear, dark blue and crowded with stars. Without light pollution, they could see the constellations, and even shooting stars, whizzing across the sky with fiery tails.

While Toni stared upward, Jay ran ahead through Franklin High's overgrown playing fields towards the Research Station. All around was a deep, hushed stillness – no traffic sounds or police sirens or planes. Toni and Jay seemed like the only living creatures in the whole landscape.

Then Jay ran into some Verdans, hidden behind a bank of bindweed.

They were clustered in a tight little circle, like a mushroom fairy ring. Jay actually smashed into one. He bounced off and squirmed into the bindweed's tangle of twisted stems and big white trumpets.

‘Watch out – Verdans!' he hissed as Toni ran up.

‘It's OK, you can come out,' she told him.

Jay crawled out of his hiding place. The Verdans were still in their little circle, as if they were rooted there. Their green faces looked blank. Their wide-open eyes reflected silver in the moonlight. Jay snapped his fingers in front of one's face. There wasn't a flicker.

‘It's like they're switched off,' said Jay.

‘They're dormant,' said Toni. ‘Verdans do that sometimes. They're conserving their energy, like plants do at night. When dawn comes, they'll wake up.'

‘Do you think the Cultivars and Immune Hunters do this?' asked Jay. ‘We could walk out with Dad and they won't even notice.'

‘I don't know if the Cultivars go dormant,' frowned Toni. ‘They don't behave like ordinary Verdans.' Then she added, ‘You sure your dad is in there, by the way?'

‘That's where Viridian said to take him. So that's where I'm looking.'

‘And I'm looking for my mum,' said Toni. ‘Be great, wouldn't it, if we both found what we were looking for?'

Jay didn't know how to answer that.

They left the little group of dormant Verdans and cut through the gardens of abandoned houses, heading for the Research Station.

‘We can't go in from the front,' said Jay. ‘There'll be security.'

‘We'll climb the fence, round the back.'

Jay expected there to be sentries, patrolling the high wire fence. But there weren't. He wondered if it might be electrified, but when he hurled a rock there was no fizzing current, no shower of sparks. He couldn't see any CCTV either.

It was as if Viridian was inviting people to enter.

‘Why is there no security?' asked Jay, uneasily.

‘Because Viridian doesn't need it,' said Toni. ‘The Verdans aren't going to rebel, are they?'

Jay nodded. That made sense. And it would be just like Viridian. So arrogant, so supremely confident that he couldn't imagine any challenge to his power.

Toni's gaze travelled up the fence. ‘We've got to climb that.'

They clambered awkwardly up, using the mesh for footholds, handholds. The wire hurt, biting into their hands, leaving red weals.

When they were at the top the fence started to sway dangerously. Jay hurled himself over the top and went diving towards the ground. He crash-landed in soft grass on the other side. It knocked the breath out of him. He rolled
over and lay on his back, stunned, staring dizzily up at the spinning stars.

Toni jumped down more carefully. They crept between trees, through quivering pools of moonlight and shadow, all the time watching out for guards.