The Dying Fall

Chapter 13: Family

NOTE:

This chapter is a bit longer than the others so there is a chance it might not load properly, particularly on the Substack app. If it gets cut off before the end, let me know in the comments, or by messaging me directly, and I’ll re-send it in two parts.

---

Song for this chapter:

Chapter 13: Family

Carrie balanced the glass bottle on a box, blew into her hands, rubbed them together and then tried again to tie the garden twine around the neck of the bottle. It was too fiddly a business to manage with gloves on, but, without them, the cold had quickly numbed her fingers so that she swore under her breath as she struggled with getting the knot tight enough. Eventually, she managed it and hooked the bottle onto a nail she’d hammered into the back wall of the shed. Carrie had spent the past few hours, whilst her mother was out helping a friend, hanging glass bottles from nails in the shed wall. She’d finally worked out from the instrument booklet the measures of water she needed for different notes. There had been some trial and error to it because the bottles weren’t all the same size or thickness. Her next challenge had then been working out where to hang the bottles so she didn’t keep falling over them and spilling their contents. In the end, she’d decided to try hanging them from the back wall. Her mother wouldn’t notice the additional nails and she could easily put the bottles up and take them down again whenever she needed.

There were just eight more nails and bottles to arrange, but those would now have to wait for another afternoon. Carrie was supposed to meet Meg in twenty minutes and she wanted to get out of the house before her mother got home. Unhooking the bottles, Carrie placed them carefully back in a spare box she’d found and placed an empty suitcase on top. Then she scooped up Savannah’s journal and wriggled her way to the shed door.

The bottlephone had become a love-hate project. Because she’d started on the challenge, Carrie felt compelled to finish it and the idea of completing something that might actually work gave her a thrill. At the same time, it felt like a fairly pointless exercise now that Nano’s production equipment was practically up and running. Over the past couple of weeks, Carrie had managed to pick up some of the items he’d requested, including an entire HDMI cable; and on Wednesday, Nano had told her he expected to have ironed out the last of the programme’s glitches by the weekend. Once that was accomplished, Carrie would be able to use the programme to add proper music notations to Savannah’s song and she wouldn’t need the bottlephone.

As she went upstairs to put Savannah’s journal away, there came a knock on the front door. Carrie hesitated on the stairs with the journal in her hand, wondering if she should ignore the knock. When the rap came again, she dashed upstairs, calling out a hurried “Just a minute!”, shoved the journal under her bedcovers and then ran down stairs again to open the front door. She jerked back in surprise when she saw Mrs Giles on the doorstep. Before Carrie could say anything, Mrs Giles held out a parcel, wrapped in brown paper, with an encouraging nod. Realising the parcel was for her, Carrie took it from her neighbour and peeled back the paper. Underneath the wrapping was a caramel-tan, thick, knitted jumper.

Carrie held the jumper up against her torso and gave Mrs Giles a questioning look. The elderly lady signed something to Carrie that she didn’t fully understand, but guessed was an explanation that the jumper would keep her warm in the cold weather.

“Thank you,” Carrie said, embarrassed that she didn’t know how to adequately respond to this unexpected kindness.

Mrs Giles simply nodded and shuffled back to her house. Carrie took the jumper up to her room and laid it on her bed. She looked at it for a moment, wondering when Mrs Giles had decided on this project and what had prompted such a gift. Then, without further pause, Carrie took off the ropey pullover she’d inherited from Savannah three winters ago, and wriggled comfortably into the caramel knit. Fishing Savannah’s journal from under the duvet, Carrie slipped it into the overnight bag she had packed earlier, took out her green cloth bag, and counted out some cash, which she slipped into her back pocket. She stuffed the green bag into the sleeve of her winter coat, where it hung on the back of her door, and then pulled on her jacket. Grabbing the overnight bag, she hurried downstairs and reached the last step just as the front door opened and her mother stepped into the hallway.

“Where are you going?” Molly asked as Carrie slipped past her.

“Meg’s,” Carrie replied without stopping.

“When will you be back?” Molly called after her.

“Tomorrow!”

Carrie put her head down and kept up her pace as she walked up the road without looking back. Neither of those answers she’d given had been lies, but she still felt guilty. She was going to Meg’s for dinner and then they were going to the new undersound, which was opening this evening. Afterwards, Carrie was sleeping over at Meg’s so that she could go to Nano’s the following morning and work on Savannah’s song. It wasn’t just that this all required lying by omission so she could indulge in her illegal habit without her mother knowing anything about it; it was the fact that she had hardly been at home for the past fortnight and had only seen her mother for their somewhat tense dinners. It didn’t matter that even if Carrie was around they were rarely in each other’s company—either working on separate chores or in their own rooms—what mattered was that whilst Carrie was out, she knew her mother was sitting by the log-burner, trying to keep warm as she balanced her accounts or wrote out the shopping list, entirely on her own in a cold, empty house. Knowing this made Carrie feel like a traitor every time she left the house to indulge her own selfish impulses.

Being at Meg’s didn’t banish the feeling. Meg lived with her sister, Talissa, and Talissa’s three children, so their house, not much bigger than Carrie’s, was full of communal activity. Within half an hour of arriving, Carrie found herself brushing and plaiting the six-year-old’s hair whilst Meg bathed the youngest and Talissa prepared dinner with the help of her eldest. Much of the conversation around the dinner table was about the children: their friends, their school work, their curiosity about the stray cat that had gone after a robin in the garden that morning. There was some debate about whether the cat would be discouraged from chasing the birds if it were provided with regular food, or whether the bird population would be better protected if the cat was allowed to starve to death.

“No matter how much you feed it,” Talissa had to admit in the end, “The cat will still go after the birds.”

“Why?” Dimanche, the eldest, asked.

“Because it’s in the cat’s nature, honey. Cat’s are predators—they can’t help it and you can’t change it.”

“It doesn’t need changing,” Meg added, mopping up dribbled sauce from three-year-old Jono’s chin. “It’s perfectly natural.”

“But the poor birds!” Dimanche protested.

“Bad kitty!” Jono agreed, splashing his spoon into his bowl so that more sauce sprayed onto his front. His sisters giggled and he seemed pleased at their response.

“Oh, Jono!” Talissa sighed as he splashed his spoon again.

“Can’t the cat just not chase the birds?” Bethany asked, stroking her plaits like they were silk ribbons. “Can’t they just chase the rats instead?”

“Poor rats,” Carrie murmured.

“Sorry, sweetie,” Meg said, starting to stack up the empty dishes. “Birds sing, rats gnaw and cats hunt—that’s nature for you.”

“And little girls and boys go to sleep before Lights Out,” Talissa added, scooping Jono out of his seat.

Carrie helped Meg clear up the kitchen whilst Talissa put the children to bed, and then the three of them sat down in the lounge under blankets to drink tea and talk. Carrie watched Meg and Talissa closely, trying to remember if her family’s dynamic had ever been this light and warm. She had a vague sense of easy laughter and conversation before her father left; but tainting those memories was an underlying tension—a look here and there, whispered exchanges in the hallway. Carrie wasn’t sure if this tension had really existed or was the colouring of her memory by that afternoon the Patrol had turned up at their door to arrest her father and instead found only her mother, sitting at the kitchen table, strewn about with buds, sheets of music and brightly-coloured album covers. After that, it felt as if the invisible link that had connected them as a family had broken. With Savannah gone now too, the last thread that connect Carrie and her mother was stretched to its breaking point. Meg and Talissa had lost their mother five years ago and Talissa’s partner had cut all ties only a year after that, yet their losses seemed to have only brought them closer together.

Eventually, Talissa got to her feet, folded her blanket and collected their empty mugs. “I’m off to bed,” she said, stifling a yawn. “Try to be as quiet as you can when you get back. And make sure you lock the door behind you.”

“Sure thing,” Meg agreed.

“Don’t forget to put the lamp out before you go,” Talissa added as she shuffled to the kitchen.

Carrie waited until she heard Talissa ascend the stairs and then turned to Meg with a curious look. “Does she know?”

“That we’re going to the undersound?” Meg said casually, “Yeah. Tal hasn’t been to one since she had Dimanche, but she likes to hit up on a bud every now and then. We’ll give it another half an hour before we head off… want to get the party started early?” She held out a black disc and a controller.

Carrie hesitated for just a few seconds before taking the proffered controller, syncing it with the bud and popping the little black button into her ear. The music kicked her out of the drowsy state she’d slipped into and shook off some of her reservations about tonight’s venture. Carrie was a little loath to spend some of her hard-risked cash on the undersound, but the thought of immersing herself back into a sea of music was too hard to resist. The promise of this evening had propelled Carrie through the week and it was what kept her up with Meg a little while later, when they were jogging through silent streets, from one shadow to the next, to an office block that towered out of a courtyard of smaller corporate buildings.

“Where is the undersound?” Carrie whispered as she and Meg stood flush against the wall of a nearby building.

“There’s an underground carpark,” Meg explained. “There will be an entrance somewhere on Level Zero. And then we have to find Stairwell Three.”

“Okay,” Carrie said. “It looks from those signs that the carpark is to the right of the block.”

They scanned the courtyard carefully to check the coast was clear.

“Right, let’s go—” Meg began.

Carrie grabbed hold of Meg’s jacket as she spotted a pair of figures dart from between two buildings on the other side of the courtyard and make a run for it down the right-hand side of the office tower.

“Let’s follow them!” Meg exclaimed.

Before Carrie could stop her, she ran out from their hiding place towards the spot where the two figures had disappeared. Carrie had no choice but to follow after her, checking over her shoulder for other stealthy figures that might suddenly detach from the shadows. They were just in time to see a fire door closing a little way down the side of the building. When they reached it, there was no handle on the outside—just a cloth tab that someone had stapled to the door. At a pull of the tab, the door opened, the push-bar mechanism on the inside having been disabled so that the door fell silently shut again behind them.

They found themselves on the top level of the carpark, lit only by green security strip lights that blinked on and off as they scurried past them, looking for Stairwell Three. They found the stairs easily enough and descended several levels before a distant hum thrummed through the concrete walls like the sound of an engine running somewhere beneath their feet.

A couple more levels down and the sound became a distinct bass beat, coming from behind the double doors on Level F. These doors were locked and Meg had to pass a scrap of paper with the password on it under them before they opened. A woman in black jeans and t-shirt took their money before allowing them to pass. Level F was clearly the lowest level of the carpark, a concrete chamber bearing the weight of the block above on steel-enforced pillars, four of them spaced evenly on either side. Like the three levels above, it hadn’t seen a car for more than a generation, instead serving as rented storage space. It must have been between contracts and the undersound was taking advantage of its availability. Being underground, there was no need for soundproofing this time, but the same mixer platform, bar and seating from the previous site were set up in the space between the pillars.

Carrie and Meg were fairly early to the party so there were only about sixty people clustered in front of the mixer’s stage. It didn’t take Carrie long to spot Nano by a pillar, making a deal with a customer.

“Come on,” Meg said, as she noticed Nano too, “I’ve got to get a fresh stash.”

Meg marched off across the concourse and Carrie trailed slowly after her. Carrie deliberately hadn’t brought much cash with her so she couldn’t buy a new bud. The MIX one had finally run out of charge the day before yesterday so she was relying on the kick from the undersound to get her through to next week when pickings from the Plant might be better. This week had been pathetic and she was still a little way off making up the deficit in the money tin caused by the fine. It was hard not to borrow back some of the cash she’d put in the tin over the past few weeks; the tin was just sitting on the kitchen counter and her mother hadn’t had time recently, between her extra shifts, to count out the contents. She’d never know if Carrie helped herself to a few notes. But Carrie was determined not to touch that money unless it was an emergency—and going without a high for a week or two wasn’t an emergency. It wasn’t like she couldn’t hit up on a bud at Meg’s and there was nothing quite like the high she got from working on Savannah’s song on a Sunday morning with Nano—and that didn’t even involve listening to any music yet. Once the production programme was up and working properly, she’d be able to get her fix through that.

Carrie hung back as Meg made her transaction with Nano. It felt like a violation of privacy to watch someone else making a deal, but she did catch Meg handing over something that looked like a bodyfit device. Carrie glanced away quickly and noticed that the wall behind the pillar was graffitied with the same image she’d seen the community service volunteers cleaning up in the alley several weeks ago: a chain of stick people with their heads locked in the roots of a seedling. Something about the picture still poked at Carrie, as if she should be making a connection between it and some memory or fact that was currently evading detection. Perhaps it was just that it was such a sinister image—each static figure being throttled by the plant. What was it supposed to mean?

Carrie’s attention was drawn back to Meg as she walked away from Nano, her eyes practically shining with delight.

“He ripped me right off,” she said as she slipped a bud into her pocket, “But I don’t really care—I’ve been dying for some classic POP for ages.”

“How many buds do you own?” Carrie asked.

“Live ones?” Meg replied. “Five.”

People must leave some pretty expensive items lying around their offices, Carrie thought. She caught Nano’s gaze and he quirked an inviting eyebrow at her.

“I’ll be back in a sec,” Carrie said to Meg.

“I’ll get the drinks.”

As Meg made her way to the bar, Carrie joined Nano at the pillar.

“It’s finished,” Nano said, leaning one shoulder against the pillar and putting his hands in his pockets.

Carrie’s heart hopefully skipped a beat. “The programme?”

“I tested it earlier. All good to go for tomorrow morning if you’re still up for it?”

“Usual time?” Carrie asked, trying not to show too much of her excitement.

“Ten o’clock,” Nano agreed. “Can I interest you in a bud to celebrate?”

“You’re relentless.”

“That MIX bud has got to be done now.”

“Are you keeping track?”

“Always.”

Carrie nodded at the graffiti on the wall behind him. “What does that mean?”

Nano glanced over his shoulder and shrugged. “Some political group’s propaganda,” he said, a little too casually.

“Political group?” Carrie asked suspiciously.

Nano shrugged again. “Well, not a legal political group,” he said. “Do you not follow the news?”

“Do you mean the insurgent group whose base the Patrol raided recently?”

“I dunno, maybe” Nano said with an indifferent air. “One of those groups who are unhappy with... well, everything. Some people express their dissatisfaction through graffiti, others by attending undersounds…”

“And some do both,” Carried added dryly. She couldn’t help thinking the graffiti was deliberately targeting the undersounders: the paint looked fresh, which suggested the image had been produced for this occasion.

Nano suddenly let out a strong expletive and stopped leaning on the pillar. Carrie followed his alert gaze to her right where a couple of figures were strolling in their direction. One of the figures wandered off to the mixer’s platform but the other continued his line directly towards where Nano and Carrie were standing. He was a heavy-looking man, about the same height as Nano, in his forties with close-cropped hair and a heavy-featured face. He was wearing a pair of old jeans, workman’s boots, a checked shirt and an open puff-jacket that had seen better days. His stride was purposeful and his stare unabashed as he approached. Carrie realised who he was a few seconds before he reached them and by then it was too late to slip away without appearing rude.

“Dryce,” Nano acknowledged.

Dryce held out a paper bag, which Nano hastily took and shoved in his jacket.

“See if you can’t get rid of these tonight,” Dryce said. “I’ve got guests I’m entertaining ‘til late, so you can bring the cash tomorrow.”

Nano nodded and tensed as Dryce shifted his focus to Carrie.

“I don’t think I’ve met your friend.”

“This is Carrie,” Nano said cautiously.

Carrie mustered half a smile, uncomfortable at how much this encounter felt like meeting a friend’s parent for the first time.

“You’re the Plant worker?” Dryce asked—though this wasn’t really a fact he needed confirming.

Oh, shit, Carrie thought as she nodded mutely. I’m in this way too deep if Dryce knows who I am on sight. She felt stupid for being surprised: of course Dryce knew exactly who was working for him, however remotely and however small their contribution to his empire.

The volume of the background music suddenly jumped up several decibels so that Carrie had to partly lip-read Dryce’s next question.

“Been to one of these before?” He indicated the concrete space between the pillars that was filling up with newcomers.

“Once,” Carrie replied.

Dryce’s lips parted in a toothy smile that for a second diminished his otherwise intimidating presence. “Enjoy your night, Carrie. I’ll see you around.”

He renewed his purposeful stride as he walked into the growing crowd, leaving a momentary awkwardness between Nano and Carrie.

“Well,” Nano said. “Now you’ve met my landlord and boss.”

“Yep.” Carrie nodded, wondering whether Nano had talked to Dryce about her or whether Dryce did his own research on his customers… and suppliers. “I should catch up with Meg,” she added.

“Sure.”

Carrie moved toward the bar, looking over her shoulder just once to see Nano already occupied with another customer. At the bar, Meg had got drinks with backroom-brewed alcohol in them. Carrie sipped hers ruefully as they joined the heaving wave of dancers and Meg introduced her to a friend of Talissa’s. It didn’t take long to become absorbed into the collective worship of rhythm and melody; Carrie found it easier this time to let the music move her body, letting it crash over her, pushing her back and forth, and sending a riot of signals from her brain to every expectant nerve, from her head to her toes.

After a while, when the alcohol started to make her head tingle, and her body began to feel like a furnace, Carrie left Meg in the crowd and retreated to the nearest pillar. Leaning against it, she pulled at the neck of her top in a futile attempt to cool off. She had already discarded her jacket in a corner and her jumper was tied about her waist, but the very air seemed superheated by the breath and movement of so many bodies crammed together, and she could feel sweat trickling down her spine and the backs of her knees. Feeling a nudge on her arm, Carrie looked up to see Nano at her elbow.

“You drank the vodka, didn’t you?” he said with a smirk.

“Is that what it is?”

“Safest to stick with the non-alcoholic option,” Nano advised, holding up his own bottle of flavoured water. His smirk dropped slightly as his gaze scanned the hall. Carrie followed his look and saw Krev Angelo, the customer who had nearly knifed Nano under the bridge, wandering around the outside of the dancers. His left arm was in a cast and he moved slowly, his eyes flickering furtively around.

“What’s he doing here?” Carrie asked.

“He’s on his last chance,” Nano said.

“You still deal to him?”

“Dryce has moved him to another dealer.” Nano’s mouth twisted wryly and then he leant in and said in her ear: “Want to get some air?”

“Yes!”

“Come on…”

Carrie followed Nano down the narrow space between the pillars and the wall, towards the back of the carpark. They passed the partitions that divided off the last quarter of the carpark from the undersound, where the boxes and trolleys for the sound equipment were kept. A couple of men were sitting around a box, half watching a laptop screen whilst they played cards.

“Are we allowed back here?” Carrie asked as they snuck to a set of double doors marked Stairwell One.

Nano gestured upwards at the whole block above them with an amused air. “We’re trespassing wherever we go, Carrie. Are you really more worried about upsetting Dryce than you are the Patrol?”

“Yes,” Carrie said, as if this answer was obvious.

Nano led the way through the doors, past a lift and up the stairs to a fire exit at ground level. This exit had also been tampered with so that it could be opened from outside. Carrie guessed this must be the entrance the undersound team used since it gave them access to the lift. Now they were on the other side of the block, Carrie and Nano walked a little way towards the back of the building, which faced a dark side road, lit only by the security light on the building opposite. They sat in the shadows on a low wall that was the boundary between the office block’s land and the pavement, and Nano offered Carrie his bottle of water.

Carrie took a couple of long, grateful gulps before handing the bottle back. They sat for a moment without saying anything, enjoying the chill of the night air on their skin. Then Nano began humming Savannah’s song with a mischievous smile and Carrie gave him an unimpressed look.

“In a few hours that tune is going to be out of your head and in the real world,” Nano said when he’d finished humming.

Carrie supressed a shiver. “How long does it take to lay down a track?”

“I don’t know, I’ve never done it before.” Nano paused before adding: “We don’t have to wait until tomorrow.”

Carrie tilted her head at him. “What do you mean?”

Nano glanced back at the block behind them before he replied. “We could go to my place now and get started.”

Carrie stared at him for the few seconds it took her brain to weigh up the temptation and its downfalls. “I can’t just leave Meg,” she said.

“We can be back before the undersound finishes.”

Carrie did a quick calculation. “You’re place isn’t that close,” she concluded reluctantly. “By the time we’ve dodged the night patrols…” she hesitated. “We can’t just wander back and forth across town during curfew.”

“So leave Meg, come to mine and I’ll make sure you get home before morning.”

“I’m supposed to sleep over at Meg’s—I can’t leave her here and then rock up at hers later having abandoned her.”

“Meg will probably be so high she won’t even notice you’ve gone,” Nano scoffed. “But fair enough—we’ll wait until tomorrow.”

“What is that? A whole nine hours?”

Nano grinned and went to reply but stopped as there came noise from the street. They both froze, hoping that if it was a night patrol their patch of shadow wouldn’t be disturbed by torch beams. Three figures appeared on the street at one end, carrying several boxes and bags between them. They weren’t Patrol and from their stealthy manner they were up to something that wouldn’t bear close scrutiny should the Patrol appear on the scene. A van suddenly turned into the other end of the street, its lights off and engine a mere whisper as it reversed towards the three figures. The van pulled up almost directly opposite where Nano and Carrie were sitting and the three figures began loading their boxes and bags into the back of the vehicle. One of the figures climbed into the back of the van and a second closed the doors after them before stepping back to speak to the third. The two remaining figures happened to stand under the security light so that it became clear that one of them was Dryce and the other a man in his late forties or early fifties with a greying beard. The latter was wearing a tan-coloured woollen hat and had his coat collar turned up to his chin, but, in the few seconds he was exposed under the light, Carrie recognised him as the man she had seen in the crowd on the news bulletin of the raid on an insurgent base. And then the man shook hands with Dryce and got into the front of the van. Dryce turned and strolled in the opposite direction as the van drove up the street the way it had come and disappeared silently into the night.

Carrie had been very young when her father had left, but the photo she had found in Savannah’s journal had sharpened her memory, and seeing the man from the television in the flesh only made the resemblance to her father more convincing. A soft expletive involuntarily escaped her lips. Rather mechanically, she stood up and fumbled with the jumper around her waist.

“Are you okay?” Nano asked, getting to his feet too.

“I’m just cold,” Carrie said, pulling on her jumper and noticing the similar colour between it and the woollen hat the man who might have been her father was wearing. Surely that was just a coincidence?

Carrie looked up at Nano and was grateful to see from his neutral expression that he was keeping to his usual policy of minding his own business. He simply offered her the water bottle and she took a couple of swigs, realising she was much thirstier than she’d realised. Nano waved the bottle away when she offered it back.

“I’m good,” he said.

Carrie finished off the drink and then they headed back to the fire exit, having come to an unspoken agreement that they would pretend they hadn’t just witnessed Dryce making one of his shady business deals. The men in the van had to be the ‘guests’ Dryce had mentioned; and with their presence and the insurgent graffiti on the carpark wall, Carrie was beginning to realise she was standing on the edge of a world that was more than just breaking the Degenerative Recreational Drug Laws. If the man in the woollen hat was the same man who had been standing in the crowd outside the raided insurgent base, then it was possible Dryce was a member of that very insurgent group—or was at the very least profiteering off them as much as he did the addicts who bought his music buds. If the man in the woollen hat was her father, was he now an insurgent? Perhaps he had always been one and she’d never known it?

Carrie’s mind kept whirring with the same questions, trying to come to a clear conclusion, but only becoming more uncertain instead. Even the music-filled undersound couldn’t draw her thoughts away from the topic and a relentless ache began in her head.

Nano had gone back to selling buds, working through the crowd, simultaneously a part of it and yet not—like a predator recruited from the community of the prey. Carrie didn’t want to drag Meg away from the undersound early, so she picked up her jacket and excused herself to go and sit in the green light of Stairwell Three, a little way up from Level F. It was cold and quiet on the stairs, with just the thrum from the undersound keeping her company. Resting her head against the wall, Carrie tried to let her agitated emotions sink back into the numb state she had been functioning from for the last eighteen months. She half-wished she had never found Savannah’s journal or the photograph of her father. She wished she’d put that plastic bottle from the veg patch straight in the bin and never embarked on stealing from the recycling plant. She also wished Nano was just her dealer and hadn’t invited her to produce music in his basement with him. And she wished most of all that she didn’t need music the way she did. And yet, all she wanted right now was to curl up in the darkness on her bed, activate a bud in her ear and disappear into the overpowering strain of a melody.

After half an hour, a few people began passing Carrie on the stairs, heading up from the undersound to ground level. These were the early leavers, keen to beat the exit queue. Meg appeared shortly after, looking for Carrie. Seeing Carrie’s strained and pale face, Meg insisted it was time for them to leave as well. Carrie protested that she was just a little tired, but Meg had made up her mind; she disappeared momentarily to fetch her belongings and then, with her hand on Carrie’s arm, marched them up the stairs and out into the night.

The journey back to Meg’s was a little dicey and they had to duck into a side road and wait twenty minutes for a Patrol car to move on before they could make the risky run across the street and into the shadow of a doorway.

“Shit-shit-shit!” Meg breathed between her teeth.

A little nearer to Republic Street, they came across a pair of Patrol officers strolling along the pavement with their hands resting on the weapons at their hips.

“Is it me or are there more of them than usual?” Carrie asked as they decided to try a different route.

“It’s because of the protest rumours,” Meg replied as they paused at the corner of a street.

“What rumours?”

Meg didn’t reply until they’d hurried through a couple of empty backroads and finally into Republic Street. “Haven’t you heard the rumours that there might be protests against the new quotas and bringing WiLS forward without warning?” she whispered.

They dashed to her house and Meg let them inside and lit a candle that was waiting by the door.

“Protests here?” Carrie asked in surprise as they crept upstairs to Meg’s room.

“Everywhere, I guess,” Meg said vaguely.

They changed into their nightwear and then Meg climbed into her bed whilst Carrie wriggled into a sleeping bag on an inflatable mattress on the floor.

“All okay?” Meg checked.

“Yes.”

“Goodnight, then.”

Meg blew the candle out and Carrie pulled the sleeping bag up until it covered her nose and she could feel her breath warming the inside. The sleeping bag smelt damp from where it had been in storage for too long and she could hear Meg wriggling in her bed above her; with her head still aching and thoughts still churning there was no way Carrie was going to be able to sleep. She thought about what Meg had said about the protest rumours. There had been a few grumbles amongst her colleagues at the Plant about the quotas but she couldn’t imagine anyone bothering to protest. When would they have the time? Where would they get the energy? People generally needed something to inspire them to action and what was there to be inspired about?

It was hard to protest a system that ultimately existed to save you—to ensure the survival of the human race and the planet it depended on. They were living in a state of emergency—albeit a state that had lasted longer than anyone had anticipated. But just because the current situation felt never-ending, it didn’t mean the urgency had gone. And some changes to how things had once been were necessarily permanent; there was no going back.

This was what Carrie had been taught. And yet her education hadn’t meant much when it came to flouting the rules that felt so contrary to her natural instincts. She’d been taught that unregulated, unapproved music had dangerous effects; and yet it was these dangerous attributes that had her hooked—how easily a tune could move her, change her physiology, change the chemical balance in her body, inspire and motivate her to do things she wouldn’t have otherwise dared to dream. It was dangerous that composers and artists from generations ago, almost from the start of human history, could reach her here and now—wielding a kind of power over her through something as simple as a few notes. And it was even more dangerous that tomorrow morning she would go and wield this power of her own, in spite of everything she had been taught.

---

Next weekend: Chapter 14—Graffiti

---

Author’s Notes:

I had fun coming up with new places to hold the undersound. If you were going to host one locally, where would you want to hold it? I live in the countryside, so it would have to be somewhere deep, deep in the woods—sound travels a long, long way across open fields.

Chapter 14: Graffiti, coming next weekend.

PJ