The Fandom(41)

The bunks look more like shelves covered in straw. They line the back of the hut, divided by plain, threadbare sheets hung like curtains, offering little in the way of privacy. I take Nate’s hand and we wander towards the bunks, slightly shell-shocked.

The other slaves mill around us, making cups of tea, gathering up tools and heading out into the evening. They seem to take it in turns to scowl at us, and I figure there’ll be no card games. I find myself searching for Ash, for the palest blue eyes in existence. But he’s nowhere to be seen. He must be arriving on the next bus. I can’t help but feel a little disappointed.

Saskia plonks herself on one of the shelf-bunks. ‘We’ll sleep here instead of returning to the city in the day. It’s safer to stay put for a while, avoid the searches at the border.’

Nate yawns. ‘I’m so ready for a sleep.’

‘You’ll be lucky,’ Saskia says. ‘You’re Night-Imps now. You don’t get to sleep until morning.’ She turns to me, a malicious smile crossing her face. ‘And you’ll be taking that freezing cold shower tonight, girlie – I don’t want you stinking of the decontamination block.’

‘Why not?’ I ask, my brain still numb from it all.

She gawps at me like I’m an idiot. ‘Because when that sun sets, you’ll be meeting Willow Harper for the first time.’





The shower is beyond cold. I feel it in my bones, the skin on my chest mottled and blue. But at least it momentarily distracts me from my nerves. I’m about to meet Willow for the first time. I wait for that lovely feeling of anticipation, but instead I just feel like I’m competing with Rose’s ghost – and coming up short.

Rose and Willow. An epic love story. Their first meeting was just fizzing with electricity. They had this instant attraction, a connection. She waited for him in the orchard beneath a plum tree, knowing he would take this path on his midnight walk. She then attracted his attention by cutting her own hand and yelping – and I don’t mean high-pitched dog yelp, I mean stunning-damsel-in-distress yelp. Willow ran to see what was wrong, took one look into those big, brown eyes, and everything he knew about the world began to unravel. He had fallen for an Imp.

He’ll take one look at me and run screaming in the opposite direction.

Saskia teases my hair into curls and pinches my cheeks, murmuring something about Rose having more of a natural glow. I couldn’t feel more deficient if I tried. Once she’s finished prodding my face and my ego, she leads Nate and me towards the orchard, navigating the estate in the dark like a bat.

The Harper estate is large, even by Gem standards. Hundreds of acres of woodland and meadows and landscaped gardens. I imagine I could easily get lost, so I stay close to Saskia, even though her constant frown unsettles me.

We cross a paddock, climb over a fence, skirt around the edge of a lake – this route actually seems familiar, echoing the set of the movie, but I feel so far from being a film star it’s untrue. With every step, my nerves seem to build, and now they fill my entire body, making even my fingers tremor. I begin to long for that beyond-cold shower again.

You see, I’ve always been terrible with the opposite sex. I’ve been on one date, which ended with me choking on an olive, and I’ve only been kissed twice. Once I was so drunk I barely remember it, the other time it was like having a wet gherkin shoved into my mouth. It’s hard pulling boys when you’re constantly overshadowed by Alice, the human mannequin.

Violet the Virgin. Ryan Bell called me that for a whole term, until Katie kneed him in the balls and called him a skid mark.

Just thinking about Katie and Alice makes my heart feel like it’s going to explode. I have to get Willow to fall for me or we’re all stuck here. The image of my feet pirouetting through the air bursts into my conscious – in six days, I will hang – but I push it down into that shadowy part of my brain along with the olive and the gherkin and all my other insecurities.

Saskia pauses by a leafy archway, laced with trailing wisteria. ‘That’s your best bet, the orchard.’ She gestures beyond the archway. ‘His evening stroll should take him right near here. Attract his attention somehow, do your thing. Thorn trusts you, God knows why.’ She looks me up and down. ‘If you let us down, I’ll kill you.’

I suppose a ‘good luck’ is out of the question then, I think to myself.

She grabs Nate by the arm. ‘Come on young ’un, best not cramp the lovebirds.’

‘No.’ My voice comes out a little desperate.

Saskia glares at me.

‘Can he stay? Please, I don’t know if I can do this on my own.’

Nate interrupts. ‘She needs me to prepare, we’re a team, you see.’

Saskia curls her lip at the word team. ‘Whatever.’ She walks away, and I get this awful feeling she wants us to fail so she can follow through on her threat.

Nate runs through my lines with me, quoting the scene from the film. He takes Willow’s lines, using this deep, manly voice, which makes him sound like the girl who played the prince in last year’s pantomime. And I say Rose’s lines, wincing at how stale my voice sounds:





WILLOW


Are you OK? Are you hurt?





ROSE


No, thank you, I’m fine, it’s just a little graze. You must be Willow.