Cracks (9 page)

Someone puts a cup of tea in front of me and I take a huge slurp, scalding my tongue but grateful for the heat and the sugar. My body and mind react to the drink and I feel myself breathing
properly but my hands won’t stop shaking.

‘But why?’ I say when I trust myself to speak. ‘What’s the point? So they could have a good laugh at what was knocking about inside my head?’

‘No, I’m afraid it’s rather more sinister than that,’ says Bonaparte. ‘You’ve been out of circulation for a long time,’ she says. ‘Everything is
about control now.’ She pauses. ‘I’m afraid that’s the reality of living in 2024.’

2
024?
2024?

I hear a weird groan and realise it has come out of my own mouth. I’ve finally lost the plot. One of us is definitely mad. It’s the only explanation for the
ridiculous thing I just heard her say. I goggle at her, goldfish-like, too shocked to speak.

She flicks a nervous look at the others. ‘Oh dear,’ she says. ‘You must think it is still . . . what, 2012? 2013? I suppose you would.’ She breathes out a long exhalation
before speaking again. ‘That’s when you would have entered the Facility in the first place as a small child. Time was essentially suspended then for you. We realise, from having been
able to observe you these months, that much of what was happening inside your brain was probably based on the donor boy’s real memories. You must have been living his teenage years.
I’ve no doubt that it all seemed entirely real to you.’

I lean forwards and rest my head on my hands, fingers in my hair. I feel hollowed out, like someone scooped out everything inside that makes me who I am. ‘What about the boy?’ I say
shakily. ‘Who was he?’

Bonaparte gives a helpless shrug. ‘I’m so sorry, we don’t have that information. Just that the Revealer Chip was created using brain tissue from a donor. They’d
previously tried to create something of this nature with artificial materials but it failed. They realised that actual brain tissue was required. Not that this was straightforward. You would have
been pumped full of drugs for the first few years so your body wasn’t able to reject the foreign object inside you.’ She leans forward, her eyes kind. ‘What I’m trying to
say is that we don’t know anything about the boy’s identity. Nor, I’m afraid, anything about where you came from. But we’re working on that. We hope to find more information
in time. I hope we can help you to adjust to all this,’ she says softly. ‘It’s such a lot to absorb, but the important thing right now is to get you to safety. There was a brief
window of opportunity to get you out of there when you woke. We have been looking for signs that you might have been emerging from the coma, and waiting for an opportunity to get you
out.’

I stare silently at the table for several minutes. Everyone’s watching me. I wish they’d stop. A picture comes into my head of a lab rat in a cage and I try to shake it away.
That’s all I was. An experiment.

‘But what did they
want
?’ I say finally. I know I sound whiney but I don’t much care. ‘I still don’t understand why. Why do all that?’

Helen sighs. ‘It’s all about quashing any resistance. The Securitat – that’s the people in charge – are a ragtag collection of businessmen and army generals. They
believe in stamping down on any opposition to their regime. They wanted to perfect the technology and then planned to roll it out first to all prisoners, to monitor their thoughts and behaviour.
But we believe ultimately they want to chip the entire population. If people’s thoughts are no longer private, the authorities can root out dissenters and frighten the rest into submission.
They’ll stop at nothing to control people.’

‘Can you get it out? The thing in my brain?’ I scratch my head like I can scratch it all away. I have to force myself to stop because I know it looks mad.

Helen speaks gently. ‘No. I’m afraid not. But they can only access it when you’re at the Facility. The important thing now is keeping you away from them and keeping you
safe.’

The other nurse I recognise from the Facility comes back into the room. He has some blood on his shirt so I’m guessing he’s been sorting Beardy out. I feel a bit bad for smashing his
face in, but what did he expect?

‘We’ve been working on getting you out for a while, Cal,’ he says. ‘I’ve been turning up the resistance pressure inside the pod so it would strengthen your muscles
and get you fit.’

‘Track training,’ I whisper and they all just stare at me with sympathetic expressions. ‘I thought I was track training.’

I want to punch the walls until my knuckles split. And then the feeling drains away and I slide back into a chair and put my face in my hands. I wish I could stop thinking as easily as stopping
those images on the paper screen. The idea that people have been watching me, watching every private thought I’ve had up there in widescreen feels like I’ve been burned all over. My
face actually throbs from the blazing blush I can’t seem to stop. Every time I think about them watching me, watching my thoughts about Miss Lovett . . . All my dreams and fears . . .

I look up.

‘They knew I was waking up, then? If they could see everything?’

‘No, they didn’t watch you all the time,’ says the nurse. ‘I think there were signs and they gave you more drugs, but it definitely came as a surprise to them. But they
were up to something new, Cal. We don’t know what, but they had some sort of bigger plan.’

‘Like what?’ I say.

‘We don’t know,’ says Helen, shaking her head, ‘but we don’t believe they would ever have let you go. You were no good to them awake. They may well have been
planning to keep you in that coma for, well . . . the rest of your natural life.’

I shake so violently then I have to press down on my knees with my hands.

Helen clears her throat. ‘There’s something else, Cal. We’re about twenty miles away from the Facility but when they discover you’re gone, they’ll easily be able to
track you down. They can’t do that via the Revealer Chip – it wasn’t designed for that. But there’s another way they can trace you . . . and we need to remove that
possibility.’

She reaches across the table and takes hold of my hand. I’m too bone tired from trying to take everything in to resist. Her hand is warm and soft. She turns mine over so my birthmark is
showing.

She looks at it and traces it gently with her finger before turning to the blond man. She sighs. ‘First generation, I’m afraid. Bigger than usual.’

‘What?’ I say. ‘It’s just a birthmark.’

‘It’s not a birthmark, I’m afraid,’ says Helen. ‘It’s a satellite tracking device that can pinpoint your whereabouts at any given time. The technology has
come on considerably since it was fitted but because you’ve been there so long, you have the very earliest type.’ She pauses. ‘They fitted it when you were small, before you got
used to that grotesque pod, in case you went wandering off. I’m afraid we have to remove it before we go any further.’

She’s looking searchingly into my eyes, as though she can find an answer there. Understanding plops into my stomach.

‘
Remove it?
What . . . you think you’re going to just cut it out? No way!’

‘Cal, I’m sorry but there’s really no alternative.’ She nods her head almost imperceptibly and the two blokes grab hold of my arms.

‘Let go!’ I struggle and try to wrench free but they’re both miles stronger than me and all I can do is wriggle sort of helplessly.

Helen winces and picks up a roll of plastic sheeting and spreads it across the table. She goes to a bag on the floor and produces a small medical kit, which she brings to the table. Then she
gets out a bottle of antiseptic and the biggest, meanest mother of a scalpel I’ve ever seen. Next she goes over to the sink where she wets her hands and starts scrubbing at them with soap and
a small brush, before pulling on a pair of thin flesh-coloured gloves, giving them a snap as she does so.

‘I’m very sorry about this,’ she says. Her mouth is set. ‘But it won’t hurt, I promise.’

‘NO!’ I’m struggling like crazy and another bloke rushes over. He holds me around the chest so tightly I can hardly breathe. One of the men stretches my arm out on the table
into a vice-like grip and pulls my sleeve but I won’t turn my hand over. I’m all the while crying out, ‘No! Stop! You can’t do this!’ No one takes any notice. Helen
rubs some sort of icy cold cloth over my hand, which immediately goes limp and numb. She nods to one of the men. ‘Hold his head away, I don’t want him to see.’

I catch the smiley bloke’s eye and he has the cheek to look upset. He says, ‘I’m really sorry about this, mate,’ and takes hold of my face gently. I shout, ‘NO!
You’ll have to break my neck if you try to stop me!’ and he looks at Helen, who nods once. It somehow seems important that I watch. Surely she won’t really do it? ‘There
must be some other way. You can’t just cut it out!’

‘Cal, you’re going to have to trust us. You’ve had too much to absorb in a short space of time and it’s impossible for you to think clearly and know what’s best for
you right now. I’m very sorry, but what’s best is this. I’ll be very careful to avoid too much scarring.’

It’s a good job my hand is numb because I don’t know what I’d do with it if it wasn’t. My other arm is still tightly gripped in a way that means I can’t move in the
chair. I look around the kitchen, thinking about how I can get away. Beardy, or Nathan as he seems to be called, comes back into the room. His nose looks terrible and his eyes are all puffy. Do I
see something triumphant flick across his face as Helen picks up the scalpel? I’m glad it’s not him holding it.

‘Hang on!’ I shout desperately, playing for time. ‘Why did he stop me from leaving the Facility if you were going to get me out of there anyway?’

‘It wasn’t the right time,’ he says, his voice thick and nasal. ‘We didn’t have everything in place. You could have completely blown it for us. You wouldn’t
have got ten metres away before they tracked you down and then security around you would have increased.’

I look down and Helen Bonaparte is actually
pressing the scalpel against my skin
. I can’t feel it but I shudder anyway. It looks like a pen’s drawing a thin line of bright red
in an L-shape. I can only feel a slight tickling sensation as she gently tugs the skin to one side as a flap. The very worst part is a meaty smell and my stomach heaves but I can’t stop
looking. She reaches for a long, thin pair of tweezers and rummages about in the gory wound while my blood pools in scarlet streams down my wrist and onto the table.

Then she’s holding a black metal oblong with the tweezers. ‘There we are. I hope you believe me now and understand why this was necessary.’

I stare at the tracking device then glare at Helen, hating her for cutting me and being right.

‘I’ll be as quick as I can getting you stitched up,’ she says as she pours a chemical over the wound. Then she gets out a tiny needle that’s already threaded and begins
stitching my hand as though doing some embroidery. The tip of her tongue pokes out the side of her mouth. Each tiny stitch seems to take hours.

The blokes holding me relax their grip and I suddenly see myself jumping to my feet and escaping. But I know that wound needs stitching and, anyway, where am I going to go? I’m too
confused to know what to think about anything. I’m so tired, suddenly it feel like Pigface’s weights have been attached to my limbs. My eyes are gritty and heavy and I keep
blinking.

A lifetime later she’s done. She sprays my hand with something that instantly dries into a shiny film before wrapping gauze around the wound and bandaging it up. The dressing goes high, up
and over my wrist bone too.

‘All done,’ she says. She throws the gloves onto the bloodstained plastic on the table and goes to the sink, where she gets a glass of water. She puts a couple of pills and the water
in front of me and nods again to the men, who let me go and stand back. I immediately jump to my feet and turn on one of them, shoving him hard in the chest. But he barely blinks. Humiliated and
close to crying, I sit back down again with a thump.

‘Easy now, Cal,’ says Helen. ‘That local anaesthetic will wear off quite soon so it’s very important that you take these painkillers every four hours. You’ve had a
minor operation and it will be sore for some time. If there is the slightest discolouration or oozing from the wound, you must take these antibiotics, without fail.’ She pulls out a tube of
pills from her pocket. ‘They’re very precious and you must not lose them. This is very important. I’ve sprayed a powerful antiseptic on there but you must watch for infection.
Peel back the bandage every couple of days and check, OK?’

She moves her head, her eyes earnest, to make sure I’m looking at her. I feel exhausted now. It’s hard to follow everything she’s telling me.

‘Cal, I need to know that you’re understanding this. You’ve been in the same environment for twelve years. Your body is going to have to adjust very quickly to the bacteria and
viruses that most of us are used to. Coupled with this operation on your hand . . . well, those antibiotics could save your life. Especially nowadays. Only a few people have access to drugs like
these.’