The supervisor sighed wearily and marched Raffy back in; as Raffy turned, he mouthed, ‘I’ll be there tonight,’ before disappearing. Evie watched them go, then walked quickly up to her own Unit.
‘It must be love – you look awful,’ Christine whispered sarcastically as Evie sat down at her desk a few minutes later. ‘Can you really not bear to be without him for even a minute?’
Evie blushed hotly as she turned on her computer. She didn’t know the answer to the question. She knew Christine was talking about Lucas, but all Evie could see was Raffy’s lips, the anger in his eyes, the hurt. All she could hear was Lucas’s voice telling her that Raffy would be under close observation. And she knew with a thud that it was time to stop, that she and Raffy were over. Because he was never going to gallop into her Unit on a horse to whisk her away to a place that she knew didn’t exist. She was going to marry Lucas, and to hope that it wouldn’t happen would only make it worse for everyone.
The Brother pushed back his chair and stood up, his large belly protruding as he made his way around his desk, past the sumptuous sofa that he liked to take a nap on every afternoon ‘in order to think deeply about spiritual affairs’ and towards the window, a large bay that provided the perfect view of the east of the City. His City. He felt he owned it just as much as he owned his robes or his house, his large house with a bathing pool, hidden from view by a high wall. He had been there at the start, at the very beginning of the City – one of the first to understand that the Great Leader was right and that the New Baptism was all that lay between humankind’s terrible past and a wonderful future. Salvation. Hope.
That’s what he had given his flock. They were safe, they were happy; they had hard work to occupy them.
And if he surrounded himself with the best the City had to offer, if he allowed himself the odd luxury, an indulgence from time to time, it was only right; it was perfectly understandable. He had a great weight on his shoulders; he needed comfort around him to give him the strength to lead.
He had been a religious man, in days gone by. He had believed that his faith would protect him, that God had a plan and that He would not forsake his people, but would only test them in order to show them the true path.
And then the Horrors had started, wreaking devastation and chaos and taking human lives in their thousands, millions, indiscriminately and horribly. And the Brother had realised in a moment of true clarity, just as the church he was worshipping in exploded around him, that there was no God, that there was no heaven or hell or greater plan or rhyme or reason. There were just people. Good people. Bad people. Kind people. Selfish people. Modest people. Proud people, violent people, nasty people, stupid evil bastards who wanted to destroy them all, who didn’t care about pain, or children screaming for their dead parents, or cholera spreading amongst the survivors of the bombs, or good, honest people losing everything.
It had been a year before the Horrors juddered to a close, before the annihilation had reached a natural end point. A time in which the new world of wasteland, disease and desperation co-existed with the old world of Google, cars and coffee machines. And the Brother, who had heard of the Great Leader already (although that was not his moniker then) and had rolled his eyes at the papers he had published in independent medical journals, unable to get the established journals to take him seriously, suddenly saw that this man, unlike any other, spoke the truth. And so he turned to the world’s remaining modern inventions to track him down, emailing him, driving up to Manchester, meeting him in a barely standing coffee shop that was still, miraculously, serving coffee.
Fisher had been reluctant at first. He had turned him away, told him that it was too late, that the world as they knew it was over and that they had missed their chance. But the Brother was not someone who believed in defeat. He knew it was not too late; knew it was up to him now. And so, using the skills he’d honed at the pulpit, he described a world for the Great Leader – then known as Mr Fisher, formerly Dr Fisher before he was struck off the medical register – a new world, a new start, where everyone was good, everyone was safe, order reigned and humans could live as they did in the heaven that they’d imagined for so long. A world that not only would not tolerate violence, but one where violence did not exist. A world that was in their grasp, if they worked together, if they got organised now and if they believed. A world that, later, the Great Leader described in his Sentiments using these exact same words, although the Brother would never remind him of such a thing.
It would mean, he told Fisher back then, that the evil in the world made sense. It would make sense of all the devastation, because it led somewhere, because out of the fire would fly a phoenix, a new future – a true garden of Eden.
And now here he was, he mused as he watched his citizens toiling, producing, working happily, co-existing without dispute and without competition, without hatred or fear.
There was a knock at the door. He turned and walked towards it, opening it to find Lucas there, just as he’d known he would.
‘Lucas.’ He smiled warmly. ‘You are well, I hope?’
‘Very well, Brother.’
‘Good. And your brother?’
Lucas smiled tightly as he always did when Raphael’s name was mentioned. The Brother reached out, touching his shoulder reassuringly. ‘Would you like me to talk to him?’
Lucas shook his head heavily. ‘You are kind, Brother, but Raffy is my responsibility.’
‘He still tells the same story? That the glitch was a link to some other System?’
‘He is a fantasist,’ Lucas replied evenly. ‘He always has been. I suspect this is a cry for attention, that’s all. I blame myself – I should have been more of a father figure to him instead of dedicating myself to the City.’
‘No, no, it is not your fault,’ the Brother said quickly. ‘It is because of you that he works for the government, after all.’
‘Yes, Brother, it is,’ Lucas replied, his face tensing slightly at the intentional reminder that he was the reason Raphael was not in a lowly position elsewhere. It was hard for Lucas, the Brother thought to himself. A K for a father. Difficult for someone to live with shame like that.
‘Have a week, Lucas,’ he said. ‘After that, if he still insists that the glitch was planted by someone, if he still refuses to take responsibility for it himself, then we will need to leave the decision up to the System. Are you up to this, Lucas? He’s your brother, after all.’
‘My father was my father,’ Lucas answered, his eyes as clear blue as always. ‘And yet I provided you with information on him. A week, Brother. Leave it with me.’
He left the room; the Brother waited for the door to close before wandering over to his sofa. There were always problems to be dealt with. Always inconveniences that rose up from time to time. But by and large the City was the place he’d dreamt of all those years ago. And men like Lucas helped him keep it that way.
He pressed the buzzer on his secretary’s intercom system. ‘Sam, I’m going to have some thinking time. Please ensure that I am not disturbed.’ Then he lay down on the sofa and closed his eyes.
There were different kinds of evil. But the worst was the evil that deviants carried around in their hearts, hiding it from others as they nurtured it and encouraged it to flourish, because they were too weak to fight it and they didn’t care enough about the City. These were the people that the System protected the City from; identifying where evil lived, even if the person housing it didn’t know it yet, even if they were unaware of the dangerous thoughts or feelings deep within their brain. The System knew who these people were, labelled them as D’s, so that evil’s influence could be minimised and these people would know that they had to fight, to strive to rid themselves of their corrupt thoughts, otherwise they would be shunned at best, and at worst . . .
Evie didn’t like to think about ‘at worst’. ‘At worst’ was when even D wasn’t bad enough. When the label K was given. K meant beyond redemption. K meant that evil had flourished once more.
She sometimes wondered what her label would be. Eventually. When the System caught up with her. She suspected it already had; she found herself thinking that it was just watching, waiting, to see exactly how corrupt she was before it made its decision. D? Or K? She shivered at the thought, her throat constricting. Not K. Please not K.
K’s were inhabited by evil; they were evil personified. K’s were taken away and never seen again. K’s were like the Evils who lived outside the City walls. People who had been damaged by the Horrors, people who had been consumed by evil. These people were a constant reminder to the City’s inhabitants of what it protected them from. Evie had never seen an Evil, but she knew they existed because, like every other City dweller, she had heard them. Their terrifying moans and wails carrying through the air at night made her shiver under her bedclothes and promise herself never to transgress the City laws again, to finally rid herself of evil, to be good and pure and everything she should be.
The Evils wanted to destroy the City; they feared a place where evil had no place. There was no goodness left in the Evils, no trace of the values that those within the City walls considered to be human. For as the Brother reminded them, the values of the City were not intrinsically human values; they were the values of goodness, and humans – other humans – were more predisposed to adopt the values of evil and terror. Without the City walls, without the New Baptism, without the constant vigilance, they, too, could become like the Evils – full of anger and hatred and violence, intent on destruction and devastation. Just like the humans who had started the Horrors. Just like most humans that had ever lived.
The Evils didn’t come to the City very often. They knew that there was no point, that they would never get in. The City was too well guarded, its four gates too heavily armoured. But not with weapons of destruction, like the pistols and revolvers and other tools of violence that humans used to rely on, the scary, unfamiliar objects they’d been shown at school. The City was protected instead by the strength of its walls, built by its citizens and continually reinforced. By a volunteer police guard who patrolled the wall at night when intruders tried their luck. And by four key holders, men known to be valiant, brave and good, who kept the keys hidden, safe, so that no one passed in or out who wasn’t sanctioned by the Brother himself. Because people still came to the City, people from far away looking for a new future. And a very small number were let in. Once a week the South Gate would open and a few lucky new citizens would enter, embracing the New Baptism and the chance of a new future full of hope. Evie never met any new people, but she saw them sometimes, filing in on a Tuesday, walking through the streets to the hospital building. They went to work on the outskirts of the City, her father told her. Newcomers had to prove themselves before they were allowed to assimilate.
But the Evils never came through the gate; they only ever stood outside, wailing, crying and threatening the citizens inside.
They came because they hated goodness and they longed to destroy the City and everyone inside. And they came to vent their anger when K’s were taken away for reconditioning. Evie’s father told her that evil always knew itself and tried to protect itself, too; that’s why they always came whenever someone was labelled a K. Because they were angry that the K was being reconditioned, angry that evil would never win within the City walls.
The Evils always knew when to come; they could smell evil, her father said. Whenever there was a K change, word always got round; mostly people would lock their doors and try to close their ears to the screams and wails of the Evils as they arrived in huge numbers to vent their rage. And the next day there would always be a Gathering, to purify the City once more and help everyone get through the terrible knowledge that another of them had fallen, to give them the strength to renounce evil even more strongly.
Evie always knew about K’s earlier than most, because her father was a key holder, one of four men who held the keys to the East, West, North and South gates of the City. He always kept vigil on the nights that the Evils came. Just in case the K escaped before they could be reconditioned, and came looking for the key to let the Evils in.
Evie knew that what lay outside the City walls was worse than anything she could imagine late at night when she tortured herself with terrible images. And she knew that if she didn’t renounce evil for good, that was the fate that awaited her.
She also knew that if the System hadn’t been watching Raffy before, it would be watching him now. He had found a glitch in it. Would the System be angry? Grateful? Did it even have emotions or was it more like Lucas? Evie didn’t know, but it didn’t matter. What mattered was that she didn’t want to be a K. She’d told herself all this time that she didn’t care, not enough anyway, about what happened to her. She’d told herself that her feelings for Raffy were more important than anything else, that the joy she felt in their precious moments alone were worth the punishment to come. But now, now she was afraid. Now, tonight, knowing that the System would be watching Raffy, she realised that she wasn’t as strong as she’d thought.
Which was why that night, she lay down on her bed and went to sleep, ignoring the gnawing knowledge that Raffy would be waiting for her and ignoring her promise to him to meet him in the tree. She couldn’t do it any more. She wouldn’t do it any more.
It was time to stop. It was time to be like Lucas. To stop caring and to stop loving.
To start being good.
The next day was Saturday: the day of the Gathering. Evie woke and went straight to the bathroom to wash and to stare at her reflection. Her clothes were already laid out; since it was Saturday, she would be wearing a thick, velvet dress and lace-up boots. Girls all wore the same thing to the Gathering – different colours, slightly different styles, but ultimately the same. She could have worn a skirt suit like her mother because she was seventeen now and nearly a woman, but the suits were expensive and since she still fitted into her dress, it had been decided to delay such a purchase until it was essential.