Hurricane Heart

Hurricane

Carl shook the disgusting mental images of the Operation and cocked his head to the side thoughtfully.

‘What do they do with people once they’ve had the Operation?’

I thought about it. I had heard all the stories—stories about the zombie factory workers and shelf stackers, but no one had absolute confirmation that those stories were true. So for now, they really were no more than theories, and I was happy for them to stay that way. I did not know for certain, and, to be honest, I did not want to know, but once again perhaps that was typical of me and my ‘running.’ I wanted to discover the truth all the time, until the truth became too unpleasant, and then I would resort back to blissful ignorance once again. But I shouldn’t. That was never the way forward.

‘No one ever hears of them again; I know that much,’ said Tobias. ‘But people are pretty certain that they make them work. They’re like zombies, but they still have the capability of following orders, doing mundane tasks. I hear they make them work in factories or stacking shelves or in warehouses and things—basic, routine jobs that offer no variation and require very little thought process.’

‘It’s horrible,’ I murmured in agreement. ‘In a way, that’s even worse than just keeping them locked up. They’re destroying their lives and then making them work for the economy because they don’t have the power to refuse!’ I clenched my fists tightly together, my nails digging sharper and sharper into my skin until I was sure I was going to draw my own blood if no one stopped me.

I took a deep breath, and then began to take my rage out on my hair instead, running my hands through it, close to my scalp, tugging at it, drawing pleasure from the pain.

‘Hurricane,’ Carl whispered. I relaxed my hands a little, still keeping them entwined in my long hair.

‘Well what do you expect me to do?’ I snapped. Talking about the Operation never put me in a good mood. Combined with everything else I’d learnt tonight made it even worse.

‘Shall we move on?’ Carl suggested meekly. ‘To what we’re actually here for?’

‘Sure,’ I mumbled, continuing to run my hands through my tangled hair, bringing my knees up to my chest and huddling into myself. Tobias looked relieved to finally be able to talk about something else.

‘Well,’ Carl said, lowering his voice, I guessed, so that Arjan wouldn’t be able to hear. ‘The Master knows for certain that the Soulless are tracking you.’

This sounded like a bit of an anticlimax. ‘I thought we knew all that already?’

‘Theories, Hurricane,’ he said dismissively. ‘They were all just theories. Likely, yet not proven.’

‘Whatever,’ I grunted, not in the mood for one of Carl’s intelligent lectures right now. For once, Tobias seemed to be on my side in that he wasn’t happy about hearing Carl’s ‘theory’ talk either.

‘The Master says that, whilst he does not know exactly why they want the boy, there is a piece of information that is required from him, for whatever reason.’ He lowered his voice even further. ‘You need to get him to trust you enough, either to tell you that information outright, or for you to ask, and for him to reply honestly. In fact, the Master thinks you’re going to have to even get a bit romantic.’

‘Romantic?’ I turned my nose up. I left romance behind at the same time I’d left everything else. ‘What the hell?’

‘I think it’s quite funny,’ Carl murmured, and I gave him a venomous glare. ‘Sorry.’

‘It ain’t funny,’ I muttered. ‘It’s inconvenient. It’s the hardest task any of you lot have ever made me do.’

‘And you wonder why I never chose to join the front line?’ asked Carl rhetorically.

‘I like it,’ I said defensively. ‘Well, I did up until now. You get to kill Soulless and inconvenience the government; what’s not to like?’

‘Let’s agree to disagree,’ Carl suggested, before continuing. ‘The Master thinks that Arjan holds, and I quote; ‘the key to something important.’’

‘A key? What, you mean a specific piece of information? What about? And why him?’

‘We know so little now,’ Tobias said, his voice sarcastically apologetic. I was ready to hurt him. ‘But he thinks that something happened earlier on in Arjan’s life that either the government or the Soulless, or both, have found out about that they think is either useful or a threat to them.’

‘But you think that if I ask Arjan outright then he’s not going to tell me?’ I asked.

‘That’s if he can remember,’ Carl said, his tone probing for more information.

That opened the door to a whole new world of possibilities.

‘What do you mean?’ I’d heard of memory-erasing drugs, and of course amnesia, but I didn’t know how it worked. Could the government really just make someone forget a specific memory by giving them a pill to take and sending them to sleep? If so, why did they not do it to the Dreamers—make them forget everything about imagination and being a rebel, but keep them remembering everything else about their life? At the moment, their amnesia induction on the Dreamers was only ever temporary. I wasn’t complaining; I was just curious.

‘I have no idea,’ Carl said unhelpfully. ‘But he wants you to get to know Arjan better than he knows himself—‘

‘But I’ve already been told all this!’ I argued. ‘You’re just telling me more of the same stuff.’

‘He thinks you’re getting somewhere though,’ said Carl. ‘Evidently, he’s been watching you when possible, though the cameras down here aren’t exactly top quality, and we’ve all been keeping an eye out for anything useful that he might say.’

‘Or that you might say,’ Tobias added, ‘and that brings me to something else: you’ve told him rather a lot about us, haven’t you?’

I pulled my hair across my face, hiding my sudden and incredibly rare awkwardness.

‘I’ve only told him who we are; he has a right to know,’ I challenged.

‘You’ve condemned him,’ Carl said, looking sympathetic towards me, as though I was blameless, but I suddenly realised the consequences of what I had done. My heart skipped a beat and my throat began to clench. I hadn’t even thought about it.

The poor guy would never see his family again...not now he knew this much. I had been foolish and ignorant, and I had told him far too much. I couldn’t take it back, and now he was our prisoner forever.

‘No,’ I whispered in desperate denial. ‘No, I haven’t...’ Why was I so sad for him? Why was I being apologetic like this? He wouldn’t be my burden to bear down in the Dreamer world; not once we’d finished this quest.

‘Well you ain’t bloody letting him out,’ Tobias warned. ‘I won’t let you. I’ll hunt him down and kill him myself if I have to, but I won’t endanger the rest of us for your...boyfriend!’

‘He’s not my boyfriend!’ I snapped in outrage, standing up abruptly, fire in my eyes. ‘Shut up, or get out!’

‘Right,’ Carl said, getting to his feet as quickly as I did. ‘I think that’s everything—let’s be going now, Tobias.’

Tobias got mechanically to his feet, his frozen eyes never once moving from mine. Even when Carl grabbed him he shook off the skinny arm with a casual shrug and continued to glare.

‘Come on!’ Carl insisted, growing desperate. He looked at me. ‘Just remember to keep on guard and keep moving.’

I whipped my glance away from Tobias, and he blinked as though he had fallen out of the enchantment.

‘Yes,’ he said curtly. ‘Let’s go.’

‘You lot are so resentful,’ muttered Carl.

‘Don’t judge until you’ve been in There,’ Tobias snarled, giving the word ‘there’ special emphasis. They walked in silence up the stairs, and I followed, watching as they showed themselves out.

‘I’ll call if I know anything more specific,’ Carl called, inappropriately cheerfully, opening the front door.

‘Ok,’ I agreed, watching them leave and then turning away.

I had expected the two of them to stay overnight at the very least; they’d driven for hours to get here, but evidently they were as keen to get out as I was for them to go. I realised that for the first time in a long time I was exhausted; the conversation, though it had in reality been quite short, had been immensely draining. I couldn’t bear to hear some of these things sometimes. No wonder I detached myself from life so often; no wonder it was so much easier to go on without emotion.

But Arjan had something that made him important; possibly a memory, which he could be hiding from me, or might have actually forgotten...but forgotten memories could be jogged with the right persuasion.

The task suddenly seemed even harder. I couldn’t go back home until I had this piece of information, and then I would receive orders from there depending on what this thing was. Then, I would either hand him over to the mercy of the Soulless, or take him back with me. But one thing was for sure: he was not going back to his family. It had always been an unlikely outcome, but only now was it impossible.

I sank back onto the sofa, clutching at my hair in silent rage, punching the stiff cushions to let it out, slipping sideways and lying on my side, facing the room at a ninety degree angle.

I was content to just drift into sleep here, and I was minutes away from doing just that, when I ripped my eyes open and forced myself to sit up. There was something I needed to do first.

I staggered slightly as I got up, using the sofa as support as I moved across the cold concrete floor, wearing only socks on my feet, and through the curtain leading into the other corridor. It was even colder through here, and dimly lit, and I felt sleep slowly consume me even as I moved. Life was too much sometimes. Arjan, and the Soulless, and the Institutions, and the Operation, and all this corruption and deception and secrecy and fear. I could just drift away, plunging into the dark depths of dreams that, even in their darkest moments, were so much better than this cold world, and never resurface. What did it all matter? If there was an afterlife, then this life really was a mere journey. And if there wasn’t, then so be it. Death was better than imprisonment and torture and Operations.

But something kept me going. And I didn’t know what it was—I never had done, and I was no closer to finding out, but it was the same thing that kept all the Dreamers alive. Perhaps it was hope; hope that things still had the power to change; we could start a revolution all of our own one day; but in reality it was something more. Hope was the best and worst emotion known to mankind, linked to imagination in many ways, because it could both create and destroy.

And whatever it was that kept me going propelled me to the end of the corridor, so that I tapped in the code to the room at the far end on the left, taking the handle and turning it, stepping into the small, concrete room that, before I had let a shaft of light from outside in, had been completely pitch black.

This little shaft of light highlighted a small sliver of the features on Arjan’s face, glinting across each individual hair on his head.

‘Hurricane?’ he whispered, looking up through gloomy, despairing eyes clouded with fear.

And then I said something that I had never said before.

‘I’m sorry.’