Marginal

2

HE'D NEVER forget his last day in Craigdhu, no matter how hard he tried. Hunched in the darkness, his words playing over and over in an endless loop, until he couldn't tell what was real any more. By the time they were finished with him, his own voice sounded alien.

He remembered stumbling out into the daylight and wondering how long he'd been in there. Hours, days, weeks? Time lost all meaning in there, refracted on itself. The moments became agony, sheer agony.

He'd seen others emerge from the Pit looking broken, like walking shadows. Now he was one of them: sixteen years old and as frail as an old man. Bjorn had always insisted it was a mercy. 'I'm calling them back to who they are,' he'd said when Rob asked him about it. 'They know that, deep down. They just forgot it for a while.'

So that's what it felt like. Once upon a time he'd likened it to being cleansed, purified by the force of his own words. Instead he felt annihilated, torn apart.

*   *   *

His mother didn't have the strength to shun him tonight. He saw her try when he entered the bunkhouse. Saw her turn away from him like she was supposed to. She couldn't bring herself to do it, not this time.

She kept glancing back at him, then trying to occupy herself with something in the kitchen: now putting away cutlery, now drying a mug. Now leaving the room, now setting herself down on the bed. Now taking a deep breath to calm her nerves.

'Oh, God,' he heard her murmur from the other room. He'd not followed her: he knew what was expected of him too. Knew how this was supposed to play out. The others were expected to shun him for the next twenty-four hours. To give him a chance to reflect on who he truly was, that true self to whom he'd been forcibly reintroduced in the darkness. They weren't to look at him, not even when they served him his meals.

Twenty-four hours of agony, of being cut off, and then the immediate re-embrace of the commune as though the exile had never occurred. There was a pattern to it, a ritual whose contours he'd once found strangely comforting.

Her voice came again from the next room. 'Oh, Lord.' He felt it then. She was coming to him. She'd fold him in her arms, pull him close to her, whisper that she'd protect him. That it would be their secret, and that nobody else need know. He could see it as clearly as though it had happened already - and then, without warning, the picture changed.

A slamming door, and the thud of teenage footsteps on a wooden floor. Marcus stomped past him, not saying a word, his face a steely glower. Strode into their shared bedroom and began talking in a voice that was low and furious. There was something authoritative in it, like he was speaking to a subordinate.

He'd seen some of the older men mentoring Marcus, teaching him how to manage a team and how to take on responsibilities around the camp. But this wasn't that. There was no compassion in his brother's voice.

'Don't indulge him,' Marcus said. 'Don't you dare. He's only just out of that place, and he's vulnerable. You know that. He needs time alone. To ground himself.'

His mother was silent, and he imagined her stunned - wearing a look of disgust at this child of her own body. But when he heard her speak again she sounded cowed, tentative. 'I. I know. I understand. It's. it's hard, that's all.'

'It'll be a damn sight harder for you if you lose him for good, don't you think?' Rob wanted to go to her, to charge in and tell his brother to shut his fucking mouth, but what good would that do? He could yell and scream and the best-case scenario was that Marcus would look straight through him as though he wasn't there. More likely he'd be sent back to the Pit, forced to listen once more to the hateful sound of his own voice, calling him back to the life he'd forgotten. 'You know that's what's at stake here. If the world gets its claws into him, if it distracts him from what he's learned here, he's never coming back.' Silence. 'Say it, woman. I want to hear you say it.'

'Yes,' she said, faintly. 'Yes, I know what's at stake.'

'So what are you going to do about it?'

Silence again. If only he could see his mother's expression, see the way she looked at Marcus. Was she scared? Disgusted? Defiant?

He hated his brother sometimes, but that was normal, wasn't it? Everybody hated their siblings eventually. They knew everything about you, knew how to push your buttons. They were like your doppelganger: you saw yourself in their distorted mirror. What parts of himself did he recognise in Marcus? His drive, charisma, sense of purpose. All of them were in Marcus first, perfected in him. That should have brought them closer, but it only exacerbated his brother's cruelty.

All Rob wanted was for someone - someone - to tell him they understood. To say they knew that shunning was the shittiest way to treat a person, and this was no way to build a better world. Write it down, for God's sake. Slip it under his door. Except that was the last thing anyone here could do. Doing so would get them sent to the Pit.

He wanted to cry. Wanted to curl up on his bed and weep. Couldn't even do that in peace. Marcus would be there soon, on the top bunk, listening. Reporting everything back to Bjorn and Cat.

There was nowhere Rob could go to be alone: nowhere, maybe, except the vault. You could lose yourself down there, among the rows of shelves. It was vast, so much bigger than it needed to be. To make space for all that we'll create, Bjorn had said when Rob asked about it. It had been a shooting range once, Marcus told him. That was why it was so big. Bjorn had repurposed the space when he came up here, built that maze of desks and shelves and cubbyholes and then encouraged them to let their imagination run free. It felt a bit ridiculous when there were so few of them, but even Rob knew it wasn't a good idea to say that aloud.

'I'll do what's right,' he heard his mother say to Marcus. 'You can trust me.'

Marcus was silent for a long time. 'I hope so,' he said. When he stormed out of their shared bedroom, he didn't even glance at Rob.

*   *   *

His mother woke him in the middle of that night. Standing at his bedside. Her hand on his shoulder, a finger pressed to her lips. In the bunk above him he could hear Marcus snoring gently. In the moonlight her face was all shadows, but he could see the fear in her eyes. She pointed towards the kitchen, and he rose from his bed and padded across the room, horribly conscious of the creaky floor. What would Marcus do if he caught them? Rob had seen his aggression firsthand more times than he cared to remember. He'd never laid hands on his own mother, but it wasn't much of a stretch to imagine Marcus doing so.

She followed him, her footsteps nimble and catlike, lifting his heavy fleece-lined shirt from the end of his bed as she went. He knew what she was going to say the moment she did that. But then he saw the supplies laid out on the table, the knife beside them.

'I can't,' he said, although even as he said it he wasn't quite so sure anymore. Down there in the Pit, he'd felt a kernel of resistance, had grasped something he could hold on to, the memory of a love that went beyond the commune's stultifying confines, and he'd gripped it tightly as his own words swept over him again and again. 'I can't go without you.'

'You have to,' she said. Her voice was a hushed whisper, and she couldn't stop herself glancing over at where Marcus lay in his bunk. 'I can distract them, keep them from finding you, but to do that I've got to be here.' She put a hand against his cheek then, but instead of tenderness in her voice he heard only fear. 'You have to go without me,' she hissed. 'There's no time.'

Through the window of their kitchen he could see the cloudless sky, a bright moon hanging in it. There would be no cover, nowhere to hide until he hit the treeline. If anyone spotted him, he was fucked.

'You can do this,' she said, as though she'd read his thoughts. 'Everyone's asleep. Out the door, head for the gate, and then into the trees. Keep the road on your left, and don't stop until you see the village. When you get there, you call the police. Understand?'

It was all he could do to nod mutely. She took the knife and slipped it into his pocket. 'I hope you don't need this,' she said, 'but if anyone tries to take you back, you stop them.' She held his face. 'You understand me?'

Again he nodded. His mind felt slow, unable to focus, like some part of it was still listening to that recording. She took a foil-wrapped sandwich, and slipped it into his shirt's other pocket. 'Hey,' she said with a new tenderness. 'You need to be brave for me, you hear? It's going to be okay.'

'What should I tell them?'

'Tell them what this place is like. Tell them about the Pit.' She shook her head, a look of helplessness in her eyes. 'I don't know, Rob. The words will come when you need them. Tell them to get me out.'

*   *   *

The woods were a block of thick darkness. He hesitated for a moment at the door of the bunkhouse, feeling the silent pull of his bed behind him. A day of discomfort and he'd be accepted again. Rotas to participate in. Digging the gardens, chopping the carrots, clearing the tables. Boring, but simple. He...