The Fandom Rising Read online

  ‘She suspects Nate though,’ Katie replies. ‘We need to be careful.’

  ‘Agreed.’ Because despite what Nate did to Baba, despite the rat tattoo festering on his arm, he’s still the only hope I have of saving my little brother back home.

  ‘Who’s that?’ Katie asks, pointing to the river. Almost directly in front of us, halfway towards No-man’s-land, bobs a rowing boat. I swear it wasn’t there a moment ago. Even stranger, standing in the boat is a tall, black-haired man. He doesn’t seem to move, as if he’s somehow immune to the motion of the water. I can just make out his face. Defined, beautiful, East Asian. He’s undoubtedly Gem, his features symmetrical, his suit tailored and expensive. He blinks at me, slowly, knowingly, perhaps.

  ‘Where did he spring from?’ Katie whispers. ‘That is just creepy-weird.’

  He begins to wave. No, not wave . . . beckon.

  ‘Is he . . . ?’ I ask, tailing off.

  Katie nods. ‘I think he wants us to follow him.’

  If my heart wasn’t beating so hard, I would laugh. ‘What? Just wade into the Thames and climb aboard?’

  A sudden noise draws our attention: the trill of birdsong and the swoosh of wings. We look up to see a flock of crescent-shaped swallows passing overhead. They move as one, heading over the city and into the distance.

  And when we look back to the river, both the boat and the beckoning man have vanished.

  18

  VIOLET

  I’m floating. Suspended in a pool the exact temperature as my body so I can’t tell where my skin ends and the water begins. For a moment, I wonder if I am water, unable to hold any shape or form. Am I dreaming? My eyes are closed, and when I open them, the face which hovers above mine takes my breath away, reminding me that I am so much more than the water which surrounds me. It belongs to the beckoning man. I start to marvel at the fact his hair isn’t falling forward, in spite of the fact he’s suspended over me. Then I realize we’re both standing upright and the world makes a little more sense. There is no pool. Just an endless stretch of black. I glance at my feet and see that there’s no ground. And when I look up, he’s smiling.

  ‘Who are you?’ I ask.

  ‘Yan,’ he replies, taking my hands in his.

  ‘Yan,’ I repeat softly. Then I say it again, a little stronger. ‘Yan.’

  ‘You need to trust me, Violet. Can you do that?’

  ‘I . . . I don’t even know you.’

  He laughs. ‘Not yet, but you will. I’ve been sent by a friend.’

  ‘Baba?’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  As he looks around him, colours begin to appear, swirling around each other like paint in water, shapes gradually taking form. We’re standing in the orchard, in Baba’s favourite spot. His presence only draws attention to her absence, making my chest sting with loss.

  Tears spring to my eyes. ‘Why did she save Nate?’

  ‘The same reason you’re trying to. Because of love.’

  My emotions overwhelm me and I have to gasp for air. It hits my tongue – fresh, sweet and tart all at once. ‘Can I bring him home?’

  ‘I believe so.’

  Warmth seems to run through my veins. There’s still hope.

  Yan smiles. ‘The transfer process should work. Though they are very different boys right now: the boy asleep in the hospital bed and the boy who just betrayed Baba.’

  ‘Is that what Baba meant when she said I had to save the Nate from this world?’

  ‘I think so,’ he replies.

  I rub my eyes, hope quickly turning into frustration. ‘Can you tell me how the story ends? So we can get home.’

  He shakes his head. ‘I can tell you no more than Baba.’ He sees the disappointment on my face and rests a hand on my shoulder – calmness spreads through me, radiating from his fingers like warm nectar. ‘I’m sorry, Violet. The future is so difficult to see at the moment, there are too many different outcomes battling for space, it is impossible for me to carve a clear path. I do have an important message for you though.’

  ‘From Baba?’

  He smiles, lowering his voice so I can barely hear it above the breeze. ‘See the red-breast bird take flight. Count to three, move to the right.’

  I let the words hang between us, hoping Yan will elaborate, or at least explain further. But he just looks at me with his lovely brown eyes.

  ‘What does it mean?’ I eventually say.

  ‘I don’t know.’ He looks upwards. A flock of birds pass overhead, swallows I think, and he whispers to them in a faraway voice, ‘You must save the boy in this world before you can save the boy who sleeps back home.’

  ‘That’s what Baba said.’

  He grips my arms with strong, precise fingers. ‘Hurry, Little Flower. There isn’t a second to lose.’

  And suddenly, I’m standing on the shore looking out over the river. The dark of night surrounds me, but I can just make out Yan beneath the moon. He stands in a little boat, halfway towards to no man’s land, and very slowly, he begins to beckon.

  I wake with a start, the walls of Thorn’s spare bedroom barely visible through the fuzz of sleep and a single, dying candle. Yan’s words beat in my head, over and over. Hurry, Little Flower, there isn’t a second to lose. I find Katie by touch and shake her awake.

  ‘What . . . what? Violet?’ she mumbles.

  ‘Come on, sleepyhead. I’ve just had a visit from a brand-new, alarmingly sexy precog. It’s that beckoning boat-dude. Long story short, we need to find Nate.’ My eyes grow accustomed to the murk, and I can just make out that she’s blinking.

  ‘What, like, now?’ she says. ‘It’s the middle of the night.’

  I press my finger against my lips, aware that only a thin sheet of bricks separates us from Thorn. ‘Exactly.’

  ‘Wait . . . you’ve got a new precog?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘And he’s . . . sexy?’

  ‘I’ll tell you more on the way.’ I throw the covers off the bed, hoping the blast of cool air will help rouse us.

  ‘On the way where?’

  I’m already slipping my feet into my shoes. ‘Keep up . . . to find Nate.’

  ‘But he’ll be asleep.’ Even as she says this, she’s busying herself with her shoes, as though already resigned to losing the argument.

  ‘Will he? If Nate’s the traitor, he must be communicating with the Gems somehow, and he couldn’t risk using technology – Thorn will have all sorts of gadgets to detect that. So he’s doing it the old-fashioned way.’

  ‘Carrier pigeon?’

  ‘No, you plonker.’ I love that Katie can always make me laugh. ‘Face to face.’

  ‘But we don’t know anything . . . like where or when.’

  I’m pulling my shirt over my head, my voice catching in the folds of cloth. ‘He said he saw Baba in No-man’sland. That’s why he was Thorn’s witness at the burnings – I heard some Imps talking about it earlier.’

  Katie smiles, connecting the dots. ‘You think it was the other way around? Baba saw Nate in No-man’s-land?’

  ‘It’s worth a shot, and if they were going to meet, it would be under the cover of darkness.’

  ‘This is a lot of ifs to be getting out of bed for.’

  I head to the window, sliding it open as gently as I’m able. ‘I think it’s why Yan was in the river, beckoning to us. He was leading us to Nate.’ I lean out into the night. The air feels fresh, even though it tastes of sewage and cold. ‘The house is alarmed downstairs, windows and everything. There’s only one way down.’

  ‘You’ve got to be shitting me,’ Katie mutters.

  Climbing down that knackered drainpipe is almost as difficult as climbing up that bastard tree the first time I was here. It threatens to fall off the wall every time I put my weight on it, and I end up using the pits in the mortar to get my footing. It’s only two storeys high, which goes some way to calming my nerves; falling would probably result in a few broken bones, and not immediate death, but I’m s
till ridiculously relieved when I reach the ground unscathed. I look up at Katie, who leans precariously from the window. She offers me a crooked smile, and I wonder if she’s appreciating the fact that it could only be in this universe that a few broken bones seems like the better of two options.

  Katie’s about as athletic as me, and she seems to really struggle even getting out of the window. At one point she sends a shower of brick dust into my face, her footing giving way beneath her weight. She hangs for a second from her hands, and I position myself under her in case she falls, but somehow she manages to right herself.

  She reaches the ground in one piece. ‘OMG, we did it,’ she whispers.

  ‘Don’t get too cocky, we’ve still got a long way to go.’

  We softly pad through the streets. Thankfully, the clouds are fine, so we have some ambient light to help us navigate.

  ‘How will we find him?’ Katie whispers.

  ‘He’ll need a boat.’

  She grins. ‘And we know where they’re docked, because we used them the first time we were here to escape across the river.’

  As we head towards the river’s edge, I tell her about the strange riddle Yan told me. She repeats the words a few times, frowning. ‘I guess the red-breast bird refers to a robin,’ she finally says.

  ‘I guess,’ I reply.

  ‘Well, other than that flock of swallows, so far I’ve only seen some evil-looking gulls and some scrawny pigeons.’

  The water comes into view, a great trench of black, catching the stars on its surface and shaping them into something even more beautiful. Urgently, quietly, we wind our way towards the docking bays. Alleyways and arches all look kind of similar, especially at night, and I worry for a moment we’ll get lost, but the landscape soon begins to change, the buildings seemingly appearing from nowhere as we reach the part of the city where the bombs didn’t reach.

  My heart begins to thump against my ribs, my legs begin to shake. What if this entire expedition is for nothing? What if Thorn discovers we’re missing and we still don’t find Nate? By the time we reach the stretch of bank where the boats are docked, I’ve convinced myself this was a waste of time and that Thorn will already have sent out an angry search mob. Tentatively, I peer over an outcrop of rock and spot a jagged line of tarpaulin covers – the rowing boats. There’s no sign of Nate, and I’m flooded with exhaustion and disappointment. The scent of oilcloth and fish calms me for a moment; our campsite in France smelt just like this.

  ‘We should go,’ I whisper to Katie.

  She takes my hand and squeezes. ‘No pigging way, I got out of bed for this shit, we are going to sit this one out and see if Nate shows.’

  We settle on our bellies hidden behind some shrubs – a mesh of branches segments the riverbank into a patchwork of greys and blacks. My heart rate slows and my breath settles, the earth reassuringly solid beneath my chest. We wait for what feels like an age. The night grows cold, and whilst I was grateful for the poor cloud coverage when we needed the light, I now curse it, the clear sky allowing the day’s heat to escape into the cosmos. Katie and I still wear our summer clothes from Comic-Con. I can feel her shivering beside me.

  ‘Maybe we’ve missed him,’ Katie eventually says.

  My heart sinks. ‘Or maybe he just isn’t coming. Never trust a sexy precog.’

  Defeated, I’m beginning to lever myself upwards when I hear a voice in the distance, singing a familiar lilting tune. It belongs to a male and contains more sorrow than a single voice should ever hold. I squint into the night and see a figure – a patch of dark within the dark. He moves closer and I can just make out the words to his sad lament. My heart feels like it’s about to burst, and not because of the anguish running through every line, but because I know that song. Mum used to sing it to me.

  She used to sing it to Nate.

  ‘Let me fix your broken wing,

  A swallow should fly free, my love.’

  He drops from the steep bank on to the beach. He must be dressed in black, because when he turns towards us, his face shines like a plate in the moonlight. It’s definitely Nate. His tawny brown eyes glisten with tears. I suddenly feel a huge swell of pity for him. What if I’m right and a crazy author from our world made him betray the Imps and blame Baba, and now he has to bear the weight without ever knowing he’s just a puppet. It’s such a horrific thought that I almost can’t bear it. I’m suddenly glad for the cold; the unforgiving pain in my body makes me feel closer to him.

  Nate begins flipping the tarpaulin from a nearby rowing boat, still singing Mum’s song.

  ‘For you were born to dance and sing,

  And you will soar with me, my love.’

  Does he remember things from his other life? Is my little brother in there after all? Excitement chases away the cold in my bones. He crouches down, using his weight to pull, and begins edging the boat towards the river. It’s tough going on his own, and the big sister in me wants to rush over and help him. I have to focus on tensing my muscles until the urge passes. He reaches the shore, and then does something really strange. Instead of pushing the boat into the water so that it bobs free, he pushes it only partway into the river. Then he climbs into it and pushes the oars into the mud of the shore, inching it slowly the rest of the way.

  ‘Is he seriously worried about getting his trousers wet?’ Katie hisses.

  I shake my head, confused. We wait for him to finally float into the water. He pauses for a moment, probably catching his breath, then he begins to row. The rhythmic splosh of his oars gradually fades as he moves away from us.

  Silently, we drop down on to the beach and set about uncovering another boat. There aren’t any. The other tarps are covering stacks of wood and salvaged debris. This wasn’t part of the plan.

  ‘Now what?’ Katie says.

  I look at her and shrug. There’s only one answer.

  ‘No twunting way,’ she says.

  ‘Come on, we survived it once.’

  ‘Barely,’ she says. ‘And if memory serves, you got heaved out by a hovercraft.’

  ‘We’re both strong swimmers, the night’s still and the current’s weak.’

  We look at the river. It looks wider than it did a second ago . . . wider and choppier.

  ‘We can drown in this world, can’t we?’ Katie asks.

  ‘Only if we sink.’ I begin pulling off my clothes.

  Katie does the same, and we strip till we’re down to our undies. We both put our shoes back on – they’ll slow us down, but not as much as a piece of glass or a jagged rock. The last thing we need is an open wound in this water; it looks and smells like a sewer. We take small, shaky steps into the river. It’s so cold it takes my breath away. Something slips past my ankles, a piece of polythene or something more disgusting like an eel or a water rat. I just want to turn around and run back to Thorn’s house, but then I think of my brother, laced up with tubes, and some form of courage solidifies in my stomach. We have to do this.

  We walk until we’re waist deep. I’m shivering all over and can hardly breathe. My teeth chatter – I hadn’t realized that actually happened.

  ‘We need to start moving or we’re going to freeze to death,’ Katie manages to say, though her voice stop-starts.

  ‘For Nate,’ I say.

  She nods. ‘For Nate.’

  We push into the water together.

  Icicles drive into my naked skin. The pain makes me gasp and my mouth immediately fills with river. I splutter and swallow. It tastes so much worse than it smells. I manage to stop coughing and move my limbs even though every inch of me stings.

  We make good headway, both naturally adopting breaststroke because it’s easier to keep our heads out of the water. I’ve always enjoyed swimming; the rhythmic action becomes almost soothing, like being rocked. But I’m used to the swimming baths, where the water’s near body temperature, smells of chlorine and isn’t the colour of tar. Where the echo of children’s laughter bounces off the tiled walls and the divin
g board twangs. Right now, all I can hear is my rasping breath, sucked immediately into the night sky. And yet there’s something strangely beautiful about that sky. There’s no light pollution, no clouds, and the stars burn vivid and true.

  It isn’t far, but swimming against the current, weak though it is, robs all the strength from my muscles. I can tell we’re drifting downriver. I risk glancing back over my shoulder and I see that the beach where Nate hid his boat is nowhere to be seen. I’m about to tell Katie when something floats past. It’s one in a list of many items, some of which have bumped up against me or wrapped themselves around my shins. Generally, I’ve tried to ignore them, averting my gaze and letting my brain infer that it’s seaweed, plastic, debris or lumps of human waste. But this item really catches my eye. It’s a human arm. Grey and mottled with some of the flesh gone; I can see each of the fingers, each of the nails. I inhale a mouthful of water. It stings my throat and goes up my nose, burning my sinuses and my eyes. I cough it up again.

  ‘What was it?’ Katie asks.

  I somehow manage to swallow. ‘Just a branch,’ I lie.

  I’ve never been more relieved than when my feet hit solid ground. It squelches beneath the soles of my shoes, and I let myself fall forward so that the water still supports me a little. My whole body shakes with cold and exhaustion.

  ‘We’ve lost him,’ I say, hopelessly looking up and down the shore.

  ‘He’s there,’ Katie says, pointing upstream.

  In the distance, I can just make out the lines of a tiny boat.

  We stagger on to the shore. I suddenly remember we left our clothes on the other side of the river. Katie and I are both really pale and our skin seems to glow beneath the starlight, turning us into giant white targets. We’re like half-drowned swans just waiting to be shot. Feeling very vulnerable, we crouch low and track the shore towards the boat.

  No-man’s-land looks nowhere near as menacing close up. The dark, twisting shapes are just bombed-out buildings and crumbling walls, same as the city we left behind. But there’s no polythene, no rags, no lines of smoke or bursts of laughter this side of the river. It’s still and silent and stinks of death. It feels like a window into the Imps’ future somehow. An eerie snapshot of their non-existence. It’s spooky as hell, but I can’t deny, the silence makes it easy to find a boy lugging a boat on to the shore.