Perfect

The man is amused.

The man is Carrick.

I’m buzzing as I follow Dahy back to the farmhouse. Carrick and his friend Lennox are behind me. I want to keep turning round to get a look at Carrick, but with Lennox there I can’t. I’ve done it twice already, and Lennox caught me both times. I feel nervous, happy, surprisingly giddy at being reunited with Carrick. Finally something is going my way. My birthday wish came true. I bite my lip to hide my smile as we walk single file back to the farmhouse; now is not a time for smiling, though they couldn’t possibly understand my relief.

“Any word from Granddad?” I ask Dahy quietly.

“No,” he says, turning round briefly so I can catch the worried look on his face. “But Dan is doing everything he can to find out.”

I’m cynical of trusting Dan, who is the farmworkers’ Whistleblower. His arrangement with Granddad to loosen the reins on the Flawed workers was more based on feeding his alcohol addiction through gifts from Granddad’s home whiskey distillery rather than common decency.

“You’ll let me know when you hear something?” I ask Dahy.

“You’ll be the first to know.”

“You’ll make sure Granddad knows that I’m safe?”

Dan never knew I was here at the farmhouse – their arrangement was never that sweet – and so he can’t possibly relay the message to Granddad that I’m alive. Maybe the Whistleblower Kate told Granddad, but placing my faith in any Whistleblower is the last possible move, regardless of whether she let me go or not. I reach out to grab Dahy’s arm so that he stops walking, my hand grips his Flawed armband. Lennox and Carrick stall behind me.

“Dahy, can you contact my family? Tell them Granddad’s at the castle? Tell my parents that I’m okay?”

“They already know he’s at the castle, but it’s too risky to tell them about you over the phone, Celestine. You know the Guild is probably listening in on the phone lines.”

Members of the Guild aren’t super spies, but if Juniper and I figured out a way to overhear our neighbours’ phone conversations through Ewan’s baby monitor years ago, and a journalist can find a way to tap phones, then the Guild certainly can.

“You have to find a way to tell them. And you have to tell him I’m okay.”

“Celestine—”

“No, Dahy, listen.” I raise my voice and I hear the tremor in it. “I cannot have Granddad sitting in a cell, or wherever they’ve put him, thinking that he has just burned his granddaughter alive.” My voice cracks. “You need to get word to him.”

Dahy finally understands. He softens. “Of course. I’ll find a way to tell him.”

I let go of his arm.

“He’ll be okay, Celestine; you know he’s made of tough stuff.” Dahy adds, “If anything, they’ll want to let him go quickly, before he conspiracy-theories them to death.”

I smile weakly at his attempt at humour and nod my thanks. I try to ignore the tears that are welling, try not to picture the terrible scenarios for Granddad that my mind keeps wanting to create. Granddad being booed and heckled as he walks across the cobblestoned courtyard of Highland Castle. People looking at him and shouting at him like he’s scum, throwing and spitting while he tries to keep his chin up. Granddad locked in a cell. Granddad having to answer to Crevan in the Guild court. Granddad in the Branding Chamber. Granddad being put through all the things that happened to me. When it’s yourself, you can take it; when it’s happening to the people you love, it can break you.

What Crevan did to me was rare, at least I think it was; it was a moment of stress, of his utter loss of control. All I can do is hope that he won’t treat Granddad as he’s treated me.

We walk back to the Jeep they parked at the farmhouse. There is no time for catching up on old times; I sense that the three of them are all anxious to get back to safety. It’s after 11:00 PM, we’re all Flawed and should be indoors. Three of us are ‘evaders’ who have disobeyed the Guild.

I have time to very quickly gather some of my things from the house: the small amount of clothes Granddad managed to successfully retrieve from Mum on a recent visit to her, the longest day of my life when he left me at the farm alone. It’s not much, a small backpack, and I suppose it’s all I need, but I think of all my clothes in my wardrobe at home, each item that meant so much to me, every one a part of me, a way of expressing who I was. I’m stripped of those now, realise I have nothing but my own words and actions to truly show who I am.

We say goodbye to Dahy, he wishes us luck and I beg him again to get word to me about Granddad as quickly as possible, and vice versa.

Carrick holds the door open for me. Our eyes meet and my heart pounds.

“We need to see to that cut,” he says, focusing on my forehead, the small wound from where I slammed into a branch moments ago. With the surge of adrenaline I didn’t feel the pain, but now I feel it sting in the breeze. As Carrick studies my forehead, I’m able to take in his face. This is the closest I’ve ever been to him, in the flesh – every other time was behind glass, or comatose after the supermarket riot. It’s like I know him so well, and yet we’re perfect strangers at the same time.

Feeling flustered, I step into the Jeep and bang the top of my head on the doorframe.

“I’m okay,” I mumble, hiding my flushed face in the darkness of the Jeep.

Carrick drives and I sit behind him, our eyes meeting often in the rear-view mirror. Lennox sits beside him in the passenger seat, equally large in stature. Both of them looking like soldiers.

“Where are we going?” I finally ask.

Carrick’s eyes meet mine in the mirror and my stomach flips. “Home.”

“Home” takes us through back roads and trails, away from towns and main roads. Every lamp-post and billboard is covered in election campaign posters. I see Enya Sleepwell from the Vital Party, a politician who attended my trial. I didn’t know it at the time, but she was there to support me. I didn’t even know who she was, until journalist Pia Wang questioned me about her. Enya Sleepwell recently became leader of the Vital Party and one of the main items on her campaign agenda is to discuss rights for the Flawed. It’s a risky topic for a politician: the Guild and the government go hand in hand. But despite her choice of issues, her popularity is growing week by week.

On the poster, her cropped hair and reassuring smile stand above the slogan COMPASSION AND LOGIC. These are my words from the trial, when explaining why I aided the old Flawed man on the bus.

Why did I help him? All the confused faces kept asking me during the trial. It was beyond belief, incomprehensible, that anyone would want to aid a Flawed, a second-class citizen.

I helped him because I had compassion and logic. I felt for him, and helping him made sense. They were the first words that came to me in the court, I hadn’t planned them. The only story that had been planned was the lie that Crevan had wanted me to tell. It feels so peculiar to me to see those words in big, bold writing on posters, like they’ve been stolen from me, and have been bent to someone else’s purpose.

I want to ask Carrick and Lennox a million questions, but I know not to ask anything. The atmosphere is tense in the car, even between Carrick and Lennox as they decide which way to traverse.

The Guild has increased the number of Whistleblowers on the ground. Judge Crevan is in a panic trying to find me; the most Flawed person in the history of the Guild is not allowed to just disappear. Crevan has widened searches to all public and private properties, the hope being that there will be less support for me when members of the public are made to look like Flawed aiders in front of their neighbours.

Crevan has even started delaying the Flawed curfew buses. Designed to bring the Flawed population home in time for their 11:00 PM curfew, people are now missing their curfews at the hands of the Guild and they’re being punished. This is all in my name. Crevan is playing a game with me. I will continue to punish the innocent until you come out of your hiding place.

Riots have begun to break out in the city. The Guild is characterising them as random outbursts from Flawed groups, but Granddad believes it’s not just Flawed who are feeling angry about the Guild. He believes regular people are uncomfortable about Flawed rules too, and that they’re starting to speak out. I know now that there is sense in what I once considered Granddad’s nonsensical rants. Whatever excuses the Guild gave to the public, I know that Crevan’s real reason for this surge in Whistleblower activity is to find me.

There are times when I’ve wanted to give myself up, for the sake of others, but Granddad always stops me. He tells me that I can do more for people over time and they will appreciate it then. It just takes patience.

We see a Whistleblowers’ checkpoint up ahead, and take a sharp left down the back of a cluster of shops, an alley so narrow we have to squeeze by the skips. Carrick stops the car and they pore over the map some more in search of a new route. This happens a few times. The relief that I experienced on seeing Carrick has now dissipated as I realise I’m still not safe. I yearn for that feeling of not having to constantly look over my shoulder.

Beads of sweat glisten on Carrick’s brow. I take the opportunity of sitting behind him to study him. His black hair is closely shaven; his neck, shoulders, everything wide, muscular and strong. Soldier is what I named him in the castle cells before I knew his real name. His cheekbones and jaw are perfectly defined, all hard edges. His eyes, a colour I’ve never been able to work out, still look black in the rear-view mirror. I study them: hard, intense, quick, always analysing, looking for new angles. He catches my stare and, embarrassed, I quickly avert my eyes. When I finally glimpse back I catch him looking at me.

“Home, sweet home,” Lennox says, and I can see them both visibly relax. But I look out the window at our destination and I tense even more. This is not the ‘home’ I was expecting. Or hoping for.

We drive towards a compound surrounded by twenty-feet-high fences with rows of barbed wire. It looks like a prison. Carrick looks back at me again, to garner my reaction, his black eyes fixed on me.

I have broken the most basic rule that Granddad taught me. Don’t trust anyone.

And for the first time ever, I doubt Carrick.

Floodlights light the sky, I can barely see past the front window they’re so bright, and a man with a machine gun charges angrily to the door of the car.

“Uh-oh,” Lennox says. He throws a blanket at me and tells me to cover up and lie down. I do it immediately.

Carrick lowers the window. “Good evening, boss.”

“Good evening?” he splutters. “It’s midnight. What the hell are you thinking? The city is crawling with Whistleblowers, and my guys here are loyal but they’ll start to ask questions if we have too many comings and goings between shift hours. Do you have any idea how much trouble you could have caused being out here at this hour?”

“Could have, but didn’t,” Lennox says.

“Sorry, Eddie. You know we wouldn’t have been out unless it was extremely important.”

He curses under his breath. “You’re good workers but not that good. I could find replacements for you at a moment’s notice.”

“Yes, us Flawed should always be grateful for every opportunity,” Lennox says sarcastically.

“Len.” Carrick silences him.

“It won’t happen again,” Carrick says. “And you know that if anything did happen out there we would never be linked back to here. You have both our words.”

“Scout’s honour,” Lennox adds. “How about you let us in now? I don’t know if you heard but it’s dangerous out here with Whistleblowers sniffing around the place.”

There’s a long silence as Eddie thinks it over and I feel the tension again. If he cuts us loose, we won’t survive one night out here, off the radar, three Flawed. No more than two Flawed are allowed to travel or be together, and it’s after curfew, and we’re evaders.

“Okay. Don’t think I can’t see a body under the blanket. I just hope it’s alive. I don’t know what you’re up to, but I’m not running a refugee camp here; he just better be a good worker.”

“The best,” Carrick says, and I smile under the blanket.

“What is this place?” I ask, after we’ve driven through the front gates and they tell me it’s safe to remove the blanket. I look out the window and strain my neck to take in the height of what looks like a nuclear plant.

“This is a CCU plant. Next door is a CDU plant. They’re sister companies.”

“What do they do?” I ask as Lennox jumps out of the Jeep before it stops and disappears into the shadows. Carrick parks the Jeep.

“Carbon capture utilisation and carbon dioxide utilisation,” he replies.

I look at him with even more confusion.

“I thought you were the whizz-kid.”

“In maths, not in whatever this is.”

“Come on, I’ll give you a tour.”

Carrick holds the car door open for me and his manners remind me of how he was raised in a Flawed At Birth institution. F.A.B. institutions are for children of Flawed parentage. The Guild’s reasoning for taking these children is to dilute the Flawed gene pool, and these special schools retrain their Flawed brains. Carrick was taken from his Flawed parents at the age of five and was raised in a state school boasting the best facilities, education and standards. The Guild, the state, raised him to be strong, to be one of them, to be perfect, but when he graduated, he turned on them by doing the one thing F.A.B. children are told not to do: he sought out his parents. He was branded on his chest for disloyalty to society.

Carrick is eighteen years old and a giant of a man; his only flaw was to want to find his parents. He walks me around the compound explaining, using a key card to access the doors.

There are a dozen metal containers that look like shuttles side by side, the kind of thing you’d see at a brewery plant, or at a NASA facility, looking like they’re about to lift off.

“As you know, the earth produces more carbon dioxide than can be absorbed. Carbon points have risen to the highest levels for eight hundred thousand years. Most of it comes from oil or coal, fossil fuels buried underground for millions of years. It’s a polluting waste product, so this CCU facility harnesses it and puts it to better use as a resource. Reusing the carbon to create new products.”

“How does it do that?”

“It captures the carbon dioxide from power plants, steel and cement works, or collects it from the air. It extracts the carbon, which provides the raw material for new products like green fuels, methanol, plastics, pharmaceuticals, building materials.”

“This is government-owned?” I ask, wondering why on earth he’s brought us here. How can we be safe in a state-owned factory when they’re the very people we’re running from?

“It’s private. This is a pilot plant, everything here is research, just testing, nothing is on the market yet. Whistleblowers can’t carry out surprise searches for Flawed without prior warning, which is, at minimum, usually twenty-four hours’ notice.”

“That’s why you chose here?”

“I didn’t choose it. I followed the others.”

“The others?”

“I’ll introduce you later. First, I’ll give you the tour. There are four units. This is the capture regeneration section.” He swipes his card and the red light on the security panel turns to green. He pulls the door open and lets me walk in first. Once inside, I see that the enormous plant is like an airport hangar, with more containers and pipes stretching in every direction, ladders climbing up the walls and ceilings to access them. Carrick hands me a high-visibility jacket and hard hat.

“This is where I work. Don’t worry, I don’t do anything important, just drive the forklift, so you’re going to get this in layman’s terms.”

“I won’t notice the difference,” I say, looking around, completely overwhelmed by the futuristic metal facility.

“This container here is where the flue gas is routed to a pretreatment section. It cools, then the flue gas is sent to the absorber column, to remove the carbon dioxide. The flue gas enters the bottom of the absorber and flows upwards.” He walks as he talks, pointing at the equipment, and I follow. “It reacts with the solvent solution, where a bunch of stuff happens.”

I smile.

“The treated flue gas is sent here to what’s called the stack so it can be released to the atmosphere. The carbon dioxide liquid leaves the absorber and is pumped to the regeneration section where the CO2 chemical absorption process is reversed. The CO2 liquid leaves the bottom of the absorber and is sent to heat exchangers where the temperature rises. More stuff happens. Then the carbon dioxide vapour is sent to the carbon dioxide product compressor. Which is over here.” We stop at the product compressor. “And there it is. Want to know anything else?”

“Yes. Who are the others you followed here?”

He nods. “We’re getting to that.”

We leave the factory behind us and take quite a walk in the enormous compound to a less futuristic side of the facility. This new section feels more residential, contains rows and rows of white Portakabins, all layered on top of one another, five levels high, ten boxes across, steel balconies and staircases connecting them. We enter a simple one-story concrete building with a reception area, with a desk that’s empty at this late hour, a few chairs, and technological and scientific magazines scattered on the coffee table. A beefy security guard is asleep in an armchair in the corner.

“One hundred employees live on-site,” Carrick explains. “This place is out of the way – the closest village or town is too far for a daily commute – so the owners thought it best to house them here.”

“Owners?”

“Private company, Vigor.” He shrugs. “I’ve been here only two weeks, but I haven’t seen them around. Whoever they are, they’re sympathetic to the Flawed. They’ve allowed a gang of evaders to work and live here. He’s one of them.” He nods at the security guard who’s snoring quietly.

He points at the poster on the wall behind the reception desk and I see the same red V logo I’ve been seeing all around the plant. The V in ‘Vigor’ is designed as a mathematical square-root sign and I’ve seen it before somewhere, though I can’t place it.

√igor. turning a problem into a solution.

“There are four different recreational areas, depending on which unit you’re in. Flawed are all employed in the same unit; it’s this way.”

He pushes open a door and we’re back in the night air and walking across to a collection of Portakabins. Despite the late hour I can hear voices and activity coming from one of them and I know that our time alone is running out for now. There’s something important on my mind that I need to discuss first.

“Carrick, I need to know something.” I swallow. “Have you told anybody about …” I indicate my back.

“No one.”

I feel relieved, but awkward for bringing up the sixth brand. Things had been easy between us, but thinking about the Branding Chamber has caused me to tense up again.

“Apart from the guards and Crevan, Mr Berry and I are the only two who know,” Carrick assures me. “I’ve been trying to contact Mr Berry, but I haven’t had any luck so far,” he explains. “It’s been hard, trying to do things while I’m off the grid.”

“The guards are all missing, Carrick,” I say urgently. “Mr Berry is missing. I was afraid Crevan had got to you too. We have so much to talk about.”

“What?” His eyes widen.

At the end of the corridor, the door opens and I hear voices, laughter, a gang of people. I’m not ready to meet them yet; I need to talk to Carrick first. I speak quickly. “I told Pia Wang about my sixth brand.”

He raises his eyebrows, surprised that I would share this information with a Flawed TV and Crevan Media journalist. It had been Pia’s duty to tell my story, and after the trial she had set out to destroy my character, as was the norm with all her Flawed interviewees, but something happened with me. She believed me. She doubted my trial from the beginning and she couldn’t justify her one-sided reporting any longer. She sensed something was amiss.

“I know it’s hard to believe, but we can trust her. She was doing all she could to gather information to write a revealing story about Crevan. I haven’t heard from her in over two weeks. It’s not just our communication that has been broken: I’ve been checking online and she hasn’t written an article under Pia Wang … or under her pseudonym.”

“Her pseudonym?”

“Lisa Life.”

Carrick whistles. “Wow. She’s Lisa Life? Okay. Now I get why you told her.”

Lisa Life is a notorious blogger, writing stories critical of the Flawed system. The authorities have been trying to find her and shut her down for weeks, but she just keeps changing servers.

“You can’t tell anyone,” I say. “She swore me to secrecy.”

“My lips are sealed.”

“Anyway,” I say. “She hasn’t posted anything for weeks. I hope she’s being quiet because she’s in the thick of writing her big, juicy Crevan reveal that will tear him apart,” I continue, “but … Pia isn’t the type of person to ever be quiet. The last I heard from her she was going to speak to the guards’ families.”

He frowns, still back at square one. “Have their families reported them? Are the police looking for them?”

“I think they’re afraid to. Mr Berry’s husband said he just disappeared. I was worried about you this whole time, afraid that Crevan would make you disappear too. Crevan has no idea that you were in the viewing room; he never saw you and I didn’t tell Pia about you, so I think you’re safe. Also Crevan had no idea that Mr Berry was filming the branding until he overheard a phone conversation between me and Mr Berry’s husband. He told me that I have the footage,” I whisper.

“So that’s why Crevan wants you so badly? He wants the Branding Chamber footage?”

I nod.

“He’s afraid you’ll reveal the video.”

“I think so.”

He looks at me with the utmost respect. “Then we’ve got him. I knew it, but I didn’t know why. He’s afraid of you, Celestine. We’ve got him.”

“You two have plenty of time to talk,” a woman calls suddenly, startling me. She’s standing at the open door of the cabin that the noise was flowing from. “Come join us, Celestine.” She has an enormous welcoming smile on her face.

I blink. Then I realise: my face has been in the news for weeks now; of course this stranger knows who I am.

“Um, thanks,” I say.

“Celestine North,” she says as I reach her. She opens her arms and embraces me. “It is an honour to meet you.” She wraps me up and I’m stiff at first but slowly relax into it. When is the last time I received a hug? I think of my mum and dad and fight the emotion that follows. “I’m Kelly – come inside and I’ll introduce you to everyone.”