I wriggle the rest of the way into the hut and swing the shutters closed behind me. The hut’s cool and shadowy now, hardly even light enough to see Dennis, or Blaze at the table with the pieces of the device spread out in front of him again.
‘Better?’
‘No.’ says Dennis. ‘My eyes hurt. Everything hurts.’
He looks up at me from under low eyebrows, which is when he sees Fern standing behind me. His face uncreases. Suddenly, he’s smiling. In fact, it seems like there’s light beaming directly out of his skin.
‘You came to see me!’
Fern bounds over to the table where Dennis is sitting. ‘As if I wouldn’t! Don’t you know you’re the most important thing in creation right now?’
Dennis tries patting his hair straight but it springs back straightaway. His eyes never leave Fern.
‘Am I?’
‘Totally! Dot’s coming to take you back tomorrow night. That’s completion night,’ she reminds him. ‘And I’m going to be a chosen. I’d say that makes us both pretty special.’
Tomorrow. If I don’t work out how to make Dennis disappear by then, Fern’s going to know all the stuff I’ve been telling her isn’t even slightly true. And then she’ll probably tell everyone about Dennis and me and the test. That would be the dotly thing to do and Fern’s totally dotly.
But right now, Fern’s holding the garland behind her back. She pulls it out and says to Dennis, ‘I made you something.’
Dennis takes the garland. ‘Flowers?’
It’s pretty obvious he has no clue what he’s meant to do with it.
‘You wear it,’ I tell him, wondering if Dennis is going to say
no way
like he did with Blaze and the sungarb.
But he doesn’t. He just lifts the garland onto his head and sits there with his neck and back all straight, making sure it doesn’t fall off.
‘Not now,’ Fern laughs. ‘On completion night!’
Dennis won’t take the garland off though. He even gets up to look at himself in the mirror. Fern stands behind him and drapes her arms around his neck.
‘I’ll see you later. I’m going to the gazebo.’
‘You’re going?’
‘I want to thank Dot for making you look so good in your garland.’
Dennis goes, ‘You don’t have to do that. You could stay.’
But Fern’s already at the window, getting ready to slide out like she’s been doing it ever since she was created. Dennis closes the shutters behind her, his hands on the window frame Fern’s just touched. Then instead of sitting back down at the table, he goes over to the bed. He lies face up, his garland tipped sideways, staring up at the ceiling.
Now there’s a space for me at the table, next to Blaze. That’s actually the only place there is for me to sit. But when I go over Blaze doesn’t even look up from the device.
‘How’s it going?’
‘Still busted.’
‘You’ve put those two bits together though, so if you keep going you’re definitely going to … or probably you’ll be able to –’
‘Fix it before tomorrow. That’s what you mean.’
‘That would be –’
‘So Dennis can leave on completion night and Fern won’t know you made that whole thing up?’
At this point, there’s really nothing I can say.
Blaze goes on, ‘You’re not leaving with me, even if I do fix the device. You were never going to.’
‘I’m … I guess I’m … you know. Still thinking about it.’
It seems better than telling him no outright. But Blaze gets up from the table so fast his knees bang against it, sending the bits of the device skittering across the floor.
At first I want to get up too, just walk out of the hut and go. But when I start thinking about that properly, I’m suddenly not so sure. Outside the hut is the orchard, Fern and her garlands and the sticky sweet gazebo with the dottracks worming their way inside my head.
And the only place to go apart from that is my own dank, shuttered hut.
‘You two need some of those silver things,’ Dennis says.
‘What, so I can feel as prehealthy as you?’ I say.
On the bed, Dennis rolls over onto one elbow. ‘You’ll feel good for a bit.’
‘As in, how good?’
‘Really good.’
‘She can’t eat newfruit,’ Blaze says flatly. ‘Wren won’t do anything that isn’t in the Books.’
T
HE SMELL OF
newfruit is all around me, a big thick cloud of it. The newfruit trees have started to blossom again after the storm. Pretty soon every branch in the grove will be loaded with young fruit, but for now all that’s left to pick is the stuff that’s pocked and bruised.
Am I really going to do it? Here in the grove in the middle of the night, there’s no Gil or Brook, no Fern or Blaze to see me.
But someone is looking, of course. Dot. Whatever I do, she’s going to see it.
I take a newfruit in my hand and kind of cup it there. A quick twist and it’d come free from the tree. I could bring it up to my mouth, eat it and, if Dennis is right, feel better straightaway.
More than better, even. Amazing, awesome, completely incredible.
I’d also be doing one of the most predotly things a person could ever do. A way bigger deal than going into the fringe, for example. The times I did that, it was always to pass Dot’s test. If I ate the newfruit now, it would be purely because I wanted to. Nothing to do with becoming dotly again.
I let go of the newfruit again like it’s hot or something. I do this scratchy little laugh, all by myself in the prelight.
What am I even doing here? I can’t eat a newfruit. No matter how prenormal things get or how precalm I feel, I could never, ever do that. I should just go back to my hut, try to sleep, try not to think about Fern or Blaze, Gil or Julius.
But the idea of that is so heavy it might as well be physically pressing down on me. All by themselves, my legs fold under me and I find myself sitting on the ground underneath the newfruit tree. And there, half-buried in the grass, is a single, dropped newfruit, right beside my hand.
I pick it up. I place it in my open hand and look at it.
Eat it
.
Go on. Right now.
And beyond that, I don’t really think about it. I mean, if I were thinking, what happens next wouldn’t happen. I lift the fruit to my mouth and take a bite.
I wait for something gigantic to happen. Is the sky going to flash? Will the ground open up or the grove tear itself in half? The trees should start churning. Or a wind should blow up or maybe Dot’s hand will reach out from the beyond and squash me the way I wanted to squash that spider.
But those things don’t happen. Not one of them. I’ve just done the worst thing a creation can do and guess what? Absolutely. Nothing. Happened.
My mouth floods with the flavour of newfruit. It’s lame to say it’s indescribable, so I’ll have a go. At first the newfruit tastes like berries, all tart on the front of my tongue. Then it dissolves into honey, only a thousand times sweeter. It ends up something like eating a fresh pink flower would be. Or – and this is going to sound really prenormal – a dragonfly. Kind of bright and sparkly and fresh, if that makes any sense at all.
Literally straight after I’ve finished the first newfruit, I decide I’ll have another. I’m already as predotly as I can get, so why not? I’m definitely craving the taste, but, more than that, I want more of the feeling that eating newfruit has given me. The feeling of knowing the rules but breaking them and following my instincts instead, no matter how confusing they happen to be.
I guess you’d call the feeling
freedom
.
I jump up on my feet, tweak a newfruit from the tree and pop it into my mouth whole. I spit the pip out, then I pick another and another, stuffing them into my mouth so my cheeks have a matching bulge on each side.
It’s about then that a whole different feeling kicks in. I start to imagine I’m in mid-air, falling, but not plummeting or anything. More like drifting downwards until I feel myself landing in a whole gigantic pile of feathers.
I harvest more newfruit. I totally strip two or three trees, but even then I’m not sure I have enough to keep the feeling going. But there’s not much fruit to begin with. I fill my pockets. I only stop when the newfruit I’m trying to cram into them start rolling back out.
I drop some newfruit in the chute then get down on my hands and knees and yell directly into it.
‘Hel-lo, Dot? Can you hear me? Are you there? Is anyone there?’
Then I work out that I’m treading on all the newfruit I dropped on the ground. The fruit squashes and splits under my feet in a way that seems hilarious to me.
So I stomp around, laughing, with my head tipped back to the sky, as newfruit squishes between my toes and blossoms shower down from the uppermost branches of the trees.
When I’m sticky all over, literally dripping with juice, I get the idea to go swimming. I run to the lagoon, still and glittery with those pinpoints of silver light way down on the bottom.
I take off my sungarb and the moment before I dive in I see my face reflected in the surface. My eyes are just like Fern’s and Gil’s and everyone else’s again. Huge black circles in the centre, covering the green.
I’m starfishing in the water, staring up at the sky, when the sensations swamping me switch direction without warning. Now instead of floating, I’m plunging downwards. Arms and legs flailing, everything inside me loose and unhinged.
And then another idea jumps into my head. It fixes itself there until I find myself planning the whole thing out.
I’m going to climb the escarpment. I could jump from up there, I think, but not even aim for the water the way I do when I’m jumping from the rocks. Instead I’d point myself at the rocky edge of the lagoon and deliberately smash my head so I’d have to go beyond.
I wonder if I’d even get to meet Dot, now that I’ve eaten newfruit? I need to tell her how much I wanted to pass her test and be dotly. I want to understand why I couldn’t seem to do that and why exactly it is I am so pregood in the first place.
I have so many questions to ask and suddenly it seems pointless to wait when I could choose to go beyond and ask them right now.
I splash to the edge of the lagoon. Tears and water mix together on my face as I run to the escarpment. My fingers find the first crevice easily. I dig my hands right into the crack in the rock and use the strength in my arms to lift myself clear off the ground. With my feet I steady myself on a lip of rock. I wiggle my fingers out of that first crevice, then reach higher for the next crack and the next, until I’m ten or more whole body lengths above the ground, right over the lagoon, high as the ledge Blaze pointed out to me on the first day things started going prenormal.
Up here is where the climb’s going to get really interesting. Higher up, the crevices are way further apart and the rock’s all slippery from the waterfall.
There’s a wind blowing sideways across the rock and it whips my sungarb around my wet skin and splashes spray all over the place.
I swing my arm over my head and find the next handhold, then I look down to work out where to put my feet. There’s a perfect little crack for my toes but it’s too far to reach. So I hang on with my fingertips and kind of kick my legs so my whole body swings towards it. Loose stones go rattling down the rockface and plunk into the lagoon below.
But I don’t stop climbing. I keep going until I’m nearly at the top, reaching a hand out for the lip of the escarpment and hauling myself up and over the rock.
I did it.
I am on the edge of everything. In a few seconds, life down there, the sunshine and the fun, the testing and the doubt, all of it will be over.
I want that, I tell myself. I’ve convinced myself I want to end all that right now.
I take one last look. Creation has kind of unfurled itself below me, the lagoon with its silver lights and the huts all black apart from one with a lantern on, which has to be Gil’s maybe, or Brook’s. Owls and bats circle while the daytime animals sleep.
I look straight past it all, over to the fringe where between the trees I can just see patches of the wall shimmering in the prelight.
Beyond that, on all sides, the ground rises sharply upwards to rocky hills as tall as the escarpment.
It’s only from this high up I can see over the top of them and down the other side. Right there are a whole lot of huts. Heaps of them, way bigger than ours and all lit up in whites and oranges.
Inside those huts are people like Dennis who’ve never heard of Dot. People who weren’t created by Dot and don’t believe in her and who just go on living in those sparkling huts of theirs.
The Books, Dot and all creation … it’s just like Blaze said. Not real. Maybe I’ve always known it, even if I wouldn’t let myself admit it.
It’s the most prehappy knowledge there could possibly be, and after all this time dreading it, I feel the truth breaking over me. I’m standing there on the edge of the escarpment and I know right now I have to decide.
I could jump and never have to deal with knowing there is no Dot. Or I could climb down, get out there and find out what’s really in the beyond.
I watch the lights for ages. Some of them are moving, some winking on and off. Spread out in front of me like that, they’re really kind of beautiful.
And maybe, if the images inside my head are real, one of those lights could be shining down on Julius.
It feels like the newfruit are changing course inside me yet again. All I know is, the urge to jump fades away and something else replaces it.
Suddenly I’m full of ideas about exploring the beyond, finding Julius and Mum and even FancyVividBlue. I plan on doing those things with Blaze, the guy who thinks I don’t need someone imaginary to love me.
And I realise I’m leaving Dot behind up here because I’ve found something better.
Hope maybe?
Love?
Or is it some combination of the two?
I don’t know.
____________________
If you like to run, I’ll tell you it’s even better in the prelight after lots of newfruit. Especially when you’re somewhere no person you know has ever been before, and you’re not wearing sungarb. On top of the escarpment, across the smooth cool rocks, that’s when running gets truly awesome.