Poison Read online

  I can’t bear to look up. The goggles push off-kilter, and it’s only then I realise I’m tracing the jagged bumps of the scar on my cheek. Sympathy tugs at me briefly, but I force myself to push it aside. In my memory, I see the Seeders on the night they killed my mother; now our positions are reversed. I shouldn’t even care he’s dead, but for some reason, my head is spinning and there’s a phantom weight on my chest.

  I barely have time to get my breathing under control before two of the Reapers flip the Seeder over, tear apart his shirt with a blade, and proceed to carve their brand onto the flesh under his collarbones. I’m horrified, but I can’t look away. As a surgeon’s daughter, I’m no stranger to gore. But there is a gaping difference between my father’s precise incisions in the Citadel’s spotless hospitals and witnessing these Reapers mangling a corpse.

  They don’t lack strength; that’s for sure. If anything, they’re much too heavy-handed. It’s skill they’re missing. Each tug of the blade runs much too far. The double helix is lopsided, but I guess they’re not concerned with intricacy. In a matter of seconds, blood soaks the top half of the Seeder’s shirt and smears across his neck.

  The acrid stench of charred flesh hits me like a punch. The Reapers have started pouring what looks like yellow acid onto the man’s chest. As soon as the acid comes into contact with his flesh, the skin sizzles and pops like grease in a pan. A cavity appears in the Seeder’s chest. His bones crumble into shards. One of the Reapers plunges a gloved arm through the hole, and with a mighty yank, he rips out the dead man’s heart.

  My insides wobble like jelly. They say Reapers are driven wild by organ lust, and what they don’t use to replace their ailing bodies is eaten. Relief floods through me as the Reaper places the heart into a concealed pouch at his hip instead of in his mouth.

  Impromptu surgery completed, the Reapers regroup. They enter into a series of hand gestures and tilts of the head. It goes against my instincts not to run. But I’d be nothing more than an easy snack for a blood fury, and their sonar is notorious for its accuracy.

  So I watch and wait.

  It’s not long before the group of Reapers disperses in four separate directions. The blood furies’ warning whistle blares again. I shudder in my spot and shift to release my bunched-up muscles. It’s then I realise one of the Reapers is heading in my direction. I can tell he’s male by the breadth of his shoulders and length of his gait. My pulse clamours up another scale. Please don’t see me. I freeze, hoping the dense foliage and my camouflage hunting gear will be enough to hide me.

  The Reaper stops beside the tree I’m in.

  I’m not breathing. He crouches over and picks up an object from the floor. It’s the throwing knife I dropped. His head turns upwards and his gaze fixes on the exact branch I’m perched upon.

  The goggles automatically zoom and adjust to filter out background disturbance. My world narrows until all that is left is the uneven silhouettes on his face. A mouthpiece is embedded into the mask he wears. That solves the communication question. He arches an eyebrow.

  Am I imagining it, or does the Reaper’s left cheek lift into a telltale smirk? He spins the knife on his palm and begins to carve a pattern into the wood. When he’s done, he drives my weapon so hard into the trunk I have to hug the tree to keep from falling. By the time I regain balance, he’s gone. Melted back into the undergrowth as seamlessly as he came.

  My watch says I stay in the tree for two hours. My head says it’s much longer. Dawn is beginning to lighten the horizon in burnt-orange hues by the time I decide it’s safe to descend. Every muscle in my body aches.

  I rub my legs furiously to ward off pins and needles and go to retrieve my throwing knife. They’re difficult to replace, and I’m down to my last set. It’s then I see the picture the Reaper has tattooed into the bark. I thought it would be another double helix, but it’s not. The cracked bark makes the design rough, but the intention is there. Three small leaves making up the sides of a triangle. The last time I saw this emblem was the night my mother died.

  It’s the mark of the Wanderers.

  Three

  Before the Famine, the Wanderer mark was used on food packaging to signify no genetic manipulation had gone into a product. After the Last War, triggered by the Famine and failing genetically modified crops, those refugees who made it to Australia and refused to bow to Seeder rule adopted it as their sign. So they would know each other if they crossed paths in the forest. So they would always remember the fate of a world gone mad with greed.

  For a time, the Seeders tolerated the Wanderers and let them walk freely in the forest and between the regions. Then came the rotting sickness, the Rebellion, and the murders. Now the three-leaf symbol means one thing: a death sentence.

  I press my left hand against the scratchy symbol with such pressure that when I pull away, it leaves a white impression on my palm. My fingers reach up and stroke the uneven welts of skin from the apple of my left cheek to the cartilage in my ear. As though I’m hoping the symbol will somehow transfer from the bark to my cheek and replace the one the Seeders burned off.

  All the while, my mind shuffles from one question to another. Where did the Reapers come from? Why were they here last night? Is it a coincidence their showdown with the Seeder happened right on top of my bunker? And most importantly, why did that Reaper carve this symbol?

  I find myself standing directly above the bunker’s dirt-encrusted airlock hatch. I drop to one knee out of both exhaustion and grief. The metal is warm to the touch from the explosion, but the heat doesn’t seem to permeate my heart. My eyes close as I picture the inside of the refurbished bomb shelter.

  I see the polished eight-rung ladder leading down into a reinforced rectangular room. On two sides are steel shelves that once held expired tinned food. Row upon row of glass terrariums of every shape sit on the shelves. Synthetic lights set up to imitate the rays of the sun hang above the tanks. Each tank held a plant specimen I was working on. Some were herbs for healing. Others were hybrids of poisonous plants from the forest that I hoped to one day bring back into food production. On the floor, against every last surface, were small bags of fertiliser and potting mix that I smuggled by the fistful from the base of the trees in the orchard. All of it gone.

  There’s no question of opening the hatch so soon after a detonation. If the broken glass doesn’t cut me into a thousand pieces, then the chemicals in the fertiliser released by the blast will make me sick.

  I want to crawl into a ball beside the hatch and go to sleep. Instead, I shake myself, take a few deep breaths, and then I’m running through the forest, tracing a path that’s as clear to me as it is when the sun is high in the sky. My legs don’t falter as I zigzag between the trees. My backpack slaps against my shoulders, and the scent of pine wafts in the air as I crush the fallen needles beneath my boots.

  My mother’s books say that hundreds of years ago, before the widespread Famine that drove the world to a war that devastated our planet, this area was a national alpine forest of some kind. In the winter, the rain would turn to gentle snow and people would do something called skiing. Now there are too many trees to make that kind of thing safe.

  Puffs of crisp fall air condense on my breath and morning dew settles on my eyelashes. Once upon a time, this forest would have put on a dazzling display of autumnal colour as the trees shed their leaves in preparation for winter. But a bare forest doesn’t suit the Seeders’ desire for containment through fear. When they arrived in Australia, a land somewhat spared from the devastation of the war because of its distance from the rest of the world, the Seeders set about moulding the landscape to their specifications. Why wouldn’t they when they owned the last of the world’s viable seeds? Now most of the trees in the canopy are tall, evergreen, and dense. All the better for predators to hide in.

  I stall in the shadow a towering gum tree casts on the three-metre brick wall that surrounds Gideon’s Landing. Sunlight cresting over the clouds bounces off the barbed
wire, lighting it up like spun electricity. Technically, it’s not illegal to go into the forest. The Seeders like to keep up the illusion of freedom by allowing access at all hours. The difficult part is staying alive long enough once you’re outside the wall.

  I wait for the longest interval between the guard rotations and then slip inside the gate. The guards aren’t there to monitor our movements, only to ensure theft of seeds doesn’t occur. Unfortunately, that is the very thing I’ve been doing since I found my mother’s notes on seed saving and plant propagation. This isn’t the only gate I can use to get into the forest, it isn’t even the closest one to my home in the Merchant district, but it’s the only one not accompanied by a watchtower. Plus, it opens up onto a dirt track between two apple orchards in the Farmers’ district, where the weeds grow unattended because the Farmers neither have the time nor the inclination to keep it tidy. I’m a constant shadow in these parts of the Landing, often knee deep in dry grass, searching for free plants to sell in the apothecary.

  My flight into the town square takes me through the corn and wheat fields, their fat sheaths and cobs swaying gently in the breeze. I bolt past row upon row of pumpkins recently cut from their vines and left to dry in the sun. Every horizon I can see is laden with produce painted in all the colours of the rainbow. Trellises groaning with beans and cucumbers, melons and gourds. For a moment, I let myself imagine this bounty belongs to the region. That over half of this food won’t be tithed to the Citadel to be replaced with processed food from their factories.

  Then I see the Farmer children bent over between the lanes of strawberries, and the illusion dissipates. Some of the children are as young as three or four, all of them woken up by their weary parents before first light to help gather the harvest. There’s no school for the Farmers in spring or fall because those are the busiest times on the farms. I don’t have school either, but that’s only because Portia needs someone to look after the store, and she sure as heck isn’t going to do it herself.

  My heart is hammering wildly and my shirt is soaked with sweat when I finally slip through the servants’ entrance at the back of my redbrick home in the Merchant quarter. My stepbrother Micah sits waiting for me on a stool in the maids’ kitchen. As usual, he’s bent over an array of electrical wires and circuit boards scattered across the wooden tabletop. The juxtaposition of his blue robot pyjamas and legs that barely reach the stool’s footrest against the high-powered soldering iron in his hands is almost comical. On top of a wooden bowl of bananas is a pair of night-vision goggles that I’d asked him to fix. He turns his head in my direction, registers my subdued expression, and frowns.

  “What’s the matter?” he says, ceasing his intricate repairs. Yellow light from the pendant lamp overhead halos around his wheat-coloured curls and highlights the heavy circles beneath his cerulean eyes.

  I slump down beside him, trying to rally myself and come up with a good enough lie that he’ll believe. That’s the problem with having a prodigy for a brother. Any other eleven-year-old would be satisfied with a flyaway story. Micah is all about the details. Especially when the details involve his electronic creations.

  “The bunker’s gone, Micah,” I say. The soldering iron drops from his hands and his rounded cheeks deflate. I read the obvious question in the despair in his eyes. “One of the guards found it and set off the self-destruct.” As soon as the words leave my mouth, the enormity of their meaning hits me all over again. Everything’s gone. All of my mother’s hope, all of my defiance, all of Micah’s genius. And then there are the Reapers. How am I going to explain that to him? My gaze falls to the floor. Stinging tears well in the corners of my eyes, but I clench my jaw and blink them away.

  I hear Micah’s bare feet lightly thump on the stone floor, and then his cheek mashes against my shoulder. I draw him into my arms and feel him shake from restrained tears. Then suddenly his hands fly to his mouth and his cheeks swell with compressed air. He looks like a squirrel that’s been startled whilst feeding, but I know he’s trying to suppress a fit of coughing. At times like these, I despise Portia more than usual. She was rolling in coin before marrying Papa, yet Micah’s coughing sickness has been left unchecked. Despite his best efforts, he begins to splutter.

  “It’s okay,” I say, though he’s loud enough that I can’t help looking towards the door. “Just let it out.” I feel the knobby bones of his spine on my palm as I rub his back and wait for the bout to subside. He’s getting too thin. Then I catch sight of my own fingers and realise we could both do with some fattening up.

  The poor thing pulls his pyjama top over his mouth to muffle the sound. His back arches like a crippled old man’s. Tears build up and trickle down his cheeks as he fights to breathe. This isn’t just an average coughing fit.

  I let him go and race past the foyer and down the corridor to my bedroom. I slide open the false bottom of the top drawer of my bureau and reach inside for a clear glass bottle of yellow liquid.

  Micah’s face has turned a bright red by the time I return. As soon as I yank the cork, the heady aroma of honey and vanilla fills the air. Micah knows the drill by now. He all but snatches the bottle from me and inhales with all his might. Almost immediately, his coughing stops. Slowly but surely, the ragged wheezing eases and some of the redness in his cheeks clears.

  He eyes the bottle longingly as I replace the cork and put it away. A wave of guilt and pity washes over me, but I drop the vial into my backpack before I give in and let him have another sniff. I’m not doing him any favours by being kind to him. It’s just like the mantra written in my mother’s neat scrawl in the Seed Savers book says: In nature, all things exist in balance. A little of something could be a miracle. Too much could be poison. I know all too well how true this statement is. Once I spilled a drop of Micah’s elixir on the windowsill and I came back to find a pair of dead mice on the floor.

  Over Micah’s laboured breath, I hear Sully growling. Before Micah and I can react, she lets out three short barks and then whines. Micah swallows hard.

  “Three short barks and a whine. Enough to warn you. Not enough to annoy a Seeder so much they shoot her.” That’s what Papa had said when he trained Sully to signal.

  “The serum!” Micah hisses.

  I turn to run, but it’s too late. There’s a loud bang followed by the sound of wood splitting. Red dots dance up and down the walls, indicating the Seeders’ firing line. Cold dread wraps around me as I relive the night the Seeders came for my mother. My lungs constrict as if a vise is squeezing them shut. Thundering footsteps beat across the floorboards in the foyer.

  My eyes close and my mother’s voice is clear in my mind, urging me to run. Running didn’t help me then and it won’t help me now, but I still have to force myself not to bolt. Behind me, the knob on our back door drops to the floor.

  I drag Micah backwards so we’re standing against the hallway and out of immediate stampede danger. His hands rest on my own, squeezing tight to stop mine from trembling.

  Raids at the apothecary happen all the time. They’re usually quick and done as procedure. We’re a prime target for the Seeders and their zero tolerance of seed saving. I’ve learned to grit my teeth and bear through them. A home raid is rare and only done when the Seeders are looking for something. Like when they suspect a resident may be saving seeds from this harvest.

  The back door is flung open and two Seeder guards march in with their rifles raised. They turn on all the lights, lifting the darkness. Another pair of guards storms through the front door. They’re dressed as if they expect to walk into a biohazard zone. As if anyone in the region has access to anything close to a threat. The hoods of their forest-green cloaks are raised and each breathes through a gas mask.

  “What’s going on down there?” Portia calls from the landing. Her arrogant posture deflates as she registers the scene.

  “Madam Waverlee,” says one of the Seeders. “Don’t you have another daughter?” The Seeder unclips his mask, revealing his swarthy com
plexion and steel-grey eyes. It’s Owen Jobling, the Seeder who took residence in Gideon’s mansion after the Wanderer Rebellion. He does a mental sweep of the room, and then his focus falls on Micah cocooned in my arms, and his lips twist into a sickening grin.

  Micah’s grip on me tightens, and then a movement behind Owen’s left shoulder captures my attention. One of the Seeders, the tallest of them with the incredibly broad shoulders, draws his hood down and removes his mask.

  I gasp aloud because the guard is Aiden.

  He’s the spitting image of a younger Gideon, and for a moment, I think I’m seeing a ghost. His devastating black eyes focus on me, and I take an involuntary step forward, almost pushing Micah off balance. Everything else falls away and there is only me and this boy—no, he’s a man now—who is both utterly familiar and a perfect stranger. Aiden tilts his head sideways as he regards me, and I think maybe after six years he’s forgotten who I am.

  His gaze rakes up and down all five feet one of me and inevitably lands on the angry, puckered scar that discolours half of my left cheek. I tense and release the side of my neck so what remains of my earlobe dances a little. He doesn’t even flinch. A deep-seated resentment and anger that I had thought long buried begins to resurface inside my chest.

  “Hello, Rory,” he says, and the coldness in his tone tells me that not only does he remember who I am, but the feeling is mutual.

  Four

  As part of their mandate to ensure a healthy populace, the Seeders implement a rigorous physical education program in all elementary schools. It’s the only time the Farmer and Merchant children are allowed to have contact at school. When I was five, one of the Farmers pushed me off a rope climb and I managed to land on my feet. I was taken to the nurse, who did what I had thought had been a routine checkup. The Seeders assessed my height, my weight, my eyesight, my reflexes, and a dozen other things I can’t name. They took my parents into an office and spoke to them in hushed, clipped voices.