Pandora Jones: Deception Read online

  This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.

  First published in 2014

  Copyright © Barry Jonsberg 2014

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or ten per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.

  Allen & Unwin, 83 Alexander Street, Crows Nest NSW 2065, Australia

  Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

  Email: [email protected]

  Web: www.allenandunwin.com

  A Cataloguing-in-Publication entry is available from the National Library of Australia

  www.trove.nla.gov.au

  ISBN 978 1 74331 812 6

  eISBN 978 1 74343 552 6

  Cover & text design by Astred Hicks, Design Cherry

  Typeset by Midland Typesetters, Australia

  For Ava, Abigail, Alice, Augustus and Maxwell

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Also by Barry Jonsberg

  About the Author

  Prologue

  It was difficult to know when the nightmares ended and the waking world began. The boundaries were vague as fog.

  Pandora Jones, like every student at The School, knew this. In dreams you could not close your eyes against terror. All you could do was endure, watch the monsters of your mind, swallow screams and understand that horror was loaded on a loop, destined to repeat forever.

  Pan sees, for the hundredth time, the death of Melbourne. A relief teacher, fighting for breath and losing, her last exhalation a mist of blood that coats Pan’s face. The bodies in the streets, a police officer closing his lips around the barrel of a gun and the smell of burned flesh as his head explodes.

  Running.

  A park and a woman on a bench. Pan’s mother, the ground beneath her feet dotted with crimson coins, coughing, coughing. Her brother Danny on a swing, its arc through the air slowing, fading with his life. A sense of being lifted into the air, blades thrumming above her head. And other memories, strange memories, of when the city was alive. Men in suits chasing her, a police car coming to her rescue, a needle in her leg and a voice echoing as darkness falls. ‘I’ve always wanted to say that.’

  A time where nothing exists, a void with darkness as intense as death. Cold intrudes into the numbness of her mind. Hugging a thin robe and standing in a Garden, gazing over a bleak landscape, her figure dwarfed by mountains. A wall and beyond it the sea. Below her The School.

  The School.

  Real or imagined? In the prison of her nightmare, Pan cannot tell. An old man at the front of a class reading aloud. Other lessons, practical lessons. Someone says, ‘We need to rediscover the old technologies if we are to survive. The world has gone. The virus took it when billions died. Now there are ten thousand of us left, scattered in arks across the globe. Arks known as Schools. We must learn, and when the world is clean again we will go forth and re-populate. And we must not make the same mistakes. We must learn.’

  Scattered fragments of broken times.

  Running around a track. A boy with dark, curly hair. His name is Nate and he loved her. And betrayed her? She looks into his eyes and feels scared and secure at the same time. There are other people as well. They are close, but not as close as Nate. A girl with a quiver over her shoulder, bow in hand.

  ‘Your intuition can save the world, Pandora.’

  ‘The world is dead.’

  ‘Your intuition can save the world . . .’

  Pan stares at a rock face centimetres from her eyes and is scared. The smallest slip, the briefest loss of control, will send her falling to where there is nothing, not even nightmares. The rock face glistens with ice crystals and the cold is in her bones. What brought her here? A girl. A friend, but then, not quite a friend.

  Pan closes her eyes, but in the dream she sees still. Only this time she is far above the scenery, lord of the mountains, turning the world as she sees fit. I am inside a falcon. I see through its eyes. I am the falcon.

  ‘You must embrace your gift, Pandora. Everything depends on it.’

  Pan sees a girl. Halfway up a mountain in an area where survival cannot be. The girl’s name is Cara. And now Pan is inside a clumsy body, clinging to the side of a mountain, praying her gift is an illusion and Cara is safe. But she climbs and sees her. Sitting against the mountain, facing The School and the endless sky. Dead. Pan kneels before her and the dead girl opens her eyes.

  ‘The watches are wrong,’ says Cara. ‘Everything is wrong, Pandora. Examine your dreams, the ones that make sense, and you might understand.’

  And then Pan is standing on top of the wall, Nate beside her. To her left is The School and to her right the village and, beyond it, the sea. Climbing down a rope and then a bright light lancing her eyes, men with guns, a needle. Darkness. She has had that before in the dreams that don’t make sense. Or maybe they do. A police officer with a gold tooth who turns from the front seat of a car and says, ‘I’ve always wanted to say that.’

  Another light wakes her. A summons to a journey through the night. Her team goes through the wall and onto a boat, leaving The School behind. The wind tastes of salt and freedom. But, lingering as the faintest aftertaste is the tang of death. They give Cara’s body to the sea. Her eyes are open as she drifts down and they speak.

  ‘My death must not be in vain, Pandora. Find the wrongness.’

  Pan is in the water, striking towards shore and danger. She knows it. The group. Her friends. Her love. All pushing through forest, wet, tired, carrying a cloud of mosquitoes that drift like smoke. Then a clearing and bodies that pulse and hum with black and bloated flies. A gunshot splinters a tree. Running through the forest, her group on the edge of exhaustion. A man in a clearing with an arrow in his neck. Wei-Lin has a bow in her hand and horror in her eyes. Her face is daubed with guilt.

  Pan is in the ocean once more, treading water and waiting. For a boat and for Nate, but she doesn’t know which will arrive first. Then there is a figure on the shore, running, running, a group behind him. But this is Nate. He can outrun anyone. Surely he can also outrun a bullet? Pandora Jones is wrong. The bullet catches him and he is gone. But it’s a lie.

  Pan sits in the boat and knows she cannot trust anyone. Lies are everywhere and she breathes them in. They coat her face like sweat. And through the glittering shards of reflected light, The School comes into view. The biggest lie of all, a nightmare that refuses to fade.

  She feels a scream swelling . . .

  Pan jerked upright. Her face was slick with sweat and her heart hammered
in her chest. She glanced down and saw her fists had gathered the bedclothes into tight knots, her knuckles white with tension. It took minutes of concentration before her hands relaxed. She wiped her face with the corner of the sheet.

  The Infirmary. Where the group had been brought after they returned from the island. She remembered coming back through the village and the wall, the long climb up the steps to The School’s hospital and the examination by Dr Morgan and Dr Macredie. They had given her a tablet to help her sleep, and that was the last thing she remembered.

  The ward was deserted, though one or two of the beds were rucked as if they had recently been occupied. The French doors were ajar and the familiar backdrop of dizzying mountains lay beyond. Pan swung her legs out of bed and winced at the pain in her calves and hip. Someone had changed her clothes. Or maybe she had done that herself. She couldn’t remember. Much wasn’t clear. The trip to the island had the cast of a bad dream, like an old movie whose plot she could only dimly recall. But she remembered Nate running along the shoreline, and the way his body froze and then flopped as he was striking through the sea towards them. That was crystal clear.

  She thought about her epiphany as the group returned to The School. Her body was exhausted, but her mind was sharp.

  A water carafe was on her bedside table, an inverted glass resting on its neck. She reached towards it.

  What should she do now? Suspicion was all well and good. But it couldn’t compete with proof.

  Chapter 1

  Pan took her glass of water out onto the Garden on Top of the World – a rocky plain high above The School and, beyond that, the wall, the village and the ocean. In the Garden there were a few chairs and tables and an array of scattered pot plants. Splashes of colour against grey, individual touches of beauty against a backdrop of ugliness, like a symbol of The School itself – bleak in the main part, with the odd, surprising touch of joy. She sat at a table and looked down over The School. She didn’t even glance up when someone joined her. She knew who it was.

  ‘Only six will leave,’ said Jen. ‘You got that right.’

  I didn’t, thought Pan. At least, not in the way you think. Only six left the island, but Nate is alive . . . It was too difficult to explain, so she kept quiet. Nonetheless, she smiled inwardly at the irony. The one time she suspected she’d got it wrong was the one time Jen appeared convinced that her intuitive gift was not an absurd fiction. They sat in silence for a minute.

  ‘I’ve been sent to get you,’ said Jen.

  ‘Get me?’

  ‘There’s a meeting.’ Jen sighed. ‘Of the team, or at least what’s left of it. Dr Macredie wants to hold a counselling session, where we discuss our feelings, bawl and blub, and come out cleansed. Tellya, Pandora. It sounds like a nightmare.’

  It sounded like a nightmare to Pan as well, and she’d had enough of those recently. What she really needed was time to think.

  ‘When?’ she asked.

  ‘Fifteen minutes. Everyone’s making their way to the nurses’ station.’ She chuckled. ‘Even Sanjit, it seems. He’s had his ankle checked out. Just a sprain.’ Her voice lowered and Pan almost didn’t catch the next words. ‘An expensive sprain.’

  Pan didn’t know what to say so she said nothing, watched the smudges of darkness circling against the sky. Birds riding the wind and the warm air.

  ‘How are you goin’?’ asked Jen eventually.

  ‘Glad to be off the island,’ said Pan. ‘Strange, really. I never thought I would be happy to be back at The School.’

  ‘I meant how are you going about . . . Nate? Do you want to talk about it? I mean . . . we all knew what there was between you guys. I just thought . . . Look, tell me to mind my own business if I’m out of line, okay?’

  Pan leaned back in her chair and studied the mountain ranges that towered to her right and left. Much of the snow had melted, though towards the peaks there was still a thick covering, like icing on a cupcake. Pan supposed there was some snow that never melted, a permanent cap of winter. But dotted over the mountain sides were patches of green, new life struggling to assert itself, refusing to accept anything other than survival. Or maybe it was simpler than that. A cycle of life and death that had coexisted since the beginning of time. Comfortable together. She had thought this before, she realised, the last time she had been at the Garden. It seemed profound but, actually, served no purpose.

  ‘Isn’t that the aim of the meeting?’ said Pan. ‘To discuss how we’re feeling?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Jen. ‘But I’m not playing that game. I want to talk to Dr Macredie, sure. But she can shove the touchy-feely crap. I want answers to what happened out there. I want the truth.’

  Pan thought the truth was something that would prove slippery, but there was little point in saying it.

  ‘So why are you asking me about Nate?’ she replied. ‘Isn’t that exactly the touchy-feely crap you hate?’

  ‘I’m not asking you to blub all over me.’ Jen sighed again. ‘But if I learned one thing on the island, it’s that we’re a team.’ She snorted. ‘A weird, screwed-up team, no doubt, but Dr Macredie isn’t one of us. No one in The School is one of us. They can all go to hell.’

  Pan shifted her chair and looked Jen in the face. Jen wasn’t one for sharing her emotions. That was a weakness to be guarded against. Jen was concerned with only one fundamental principle – her own survival. Pan remembered the first time they’d come into conflict, at Gwynne’s weapons-training course. She also remembered the discussion led by Miss Kingston, the tough team leader of Personal Fitness, in her very first lesson in The School. The group had discussed whether it was sensible to sacrifice a weak member for the greater good of the group. Jen had been adamant that only the strongest deserved to survive. Yet during their time on the island, Jen hadn’t spoken out against the protection of Sanjit. When Nate had been shot [had he been shot?] she’d tried to throw herself over the side of the boat to get to him. Did Jen have a soft spot that she went to considerable lengths to avoid exposing? And could she be trusted?

  ‘You killed that man, the guard at the cave,’ said Pan. ‘How are you going about that?’

  ‘You’re avoiding my question.’

  ‘Yes. But you were the one who brought up feelings.’

  There was silence. Pan let it stretch.

  ‘Do you want the truth?’ said Jen.

  ‘No. Lie to me. Of course the truth.’

  Jen laughed. Pan realised it was the first time she had ever heard Jen laugh. It transformed her face, gave it a warmth that was normally lacking.

  ‘It was harder than I thought,’ said Jen. Her voice was uncharacteristically reflective. ‘And much easier, as well. God, that’s not like me. That kind of sloppy thinking.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘I slid over the edge of the cliff and into the cave. I figured speed was important, that he would hear me coming. But he didn’t. He was asleep in front of the dying embers of that fire. He only woke when I was within a metre or two of him. He tried to get to his feet. His hand was scrabbling for something. A weapon, probably. So I slid my knife into his stomach.’ Jen stared off into memory, back in a dark cave and face to face with a dying man. ‘He grunted. Blood ran over my fingers. It was so hot and there was so much of it. But I knew he wasn’t going to die. Not immediately, anyway. So I stabbed him again. In the heart. Or where I guessed his heart would be. He sort of folded then. I stabbed him one more time.’

  ‘How did you feel?’

  This time the silence stretched for longer.

  ‘You asked for the truth,’ said Jen. Her voice was low. ‘When Wei-Lin killed that guy. The arrow in the neck. I felt . . . this is shitty. I felt jealous of her. She’s just a wimpy kid, but she’d killed someone. It was like being beaten by a person you know is inferior to you.’ Jen turned and looked into Pan’s eyes. ‘Just like the time you beat me in that fight. Is this making you hate me?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Strange. I think I hate m
yself.’ Jen turned back to whatever images floated behind her eyes. ‘But that’s how I felt. And I was keen to even the score. It turns out killing someone is so easy. But then there’s no turning back. And no way you can ever undo it. That’s what’s hard. It’s so goddamn final.’

  ‘Jen? What do you remember about life before The School? Before you were rescued?’

  Jen rubbed at her eyes.

  ‘What’s with all these questions, Pandora? Your attempt at bonding? Hey, girlfriend, there’s one thing you need to understand about me. I’m not a sleepover buddy, I don’t want to braid your hair and I do not giggle about boys.’

  Pan smiled. ‘I’d already worked that out for myself. But you started this.’

  ‘You’re making me wish I hadn’t.’

  Pan raised an eyebrow.

  ‘You don’t answer my questions,’ Jen continued. ‘But you hit me with a load of your own. What gives?’

  ‘The truth?’

  ‘No. Lie to me.’

  ‘I need to know if I can trust you.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I’ll tell you when I can trust you.’

  Jen sighed. ‘I don’t understand trust. Distrust is much healthier.’ She got to her feet. ‘Walk with me, Pandora.’

  They didn’t have a great deal of choice for a walk. The Garden on Top of the World was a rectangle, bordered on three sides by precipitous drops. They walked to the edge furthest from the Infirmary. The sun was partly veiled by cloud but was warm on Pan’s back. She couldn’t remember the last time she had felt truly warm. The season was changing and she welcomed it. The girls stood at the edge and looked down at the buildings far beneath. Directly in front of them, the wall was dark, blank and foreboding. Beyond that, the sun reflected fitfully off gentle ocean swells. Boats bobbed at the distant harbour.

  ‘I remember pretty much what everyone else remembers,’ said Jen. ‘Death. Ugliness. Struggle. Then again, that’s been the story of my life.’

  ‘Everyone remembers what everyone else remembers,’ replied Pan. ‘Doesn’t that strike you as strange?’