New Keepers. Jayne Bauling

if I tell Ricochet and Leoli about Meyi believing we have to go in a certain direction, they’ll be able to tell us what’s there,” Lizwi says.

      It’s starting to feel like the whole enterprise is slipping out of my control. It was my idea, they’re my clients, but that’s not how it feels. I was so impatient to get company for my search for the mountain, I didn’t really think the thing through properly before sending out my text ads.

      “I’m sure they will,” Halo tells Lizwi, and I realise how gentle her voice is.

      “We need to get going then, if we’re going to see them,” I say, trying to take back my role as leader. “I want to reach the Margins tonight.”

      “Listen to the big man giving us orders,” Orpa taunts.

      “Well, he’s the oldest, or do you just look like you are, Mr Jabz?” Ril chimes in, all pert, with her head on one side as she looks at me.

      “I’m eighteen.” I sound gruff, with no idea how to talk naturally to most of these Sprawllers, the girls especially.

      “Me too,” Lizwi says.

      “And me,” Halo joins in.

      “I don’t see that freakin’ eighteen is so much more adult than seventeen or sixteen,” Orpa snaps.

      “Well, I’m seventeen, but I don’t feel very adult,” Ril says. “That’s from being a Pet.”

      “What’s age got to do with anything?” Boa speaks for the first time. “Like if we’re going into the Wildlands? We’ll be needing strength out there, is my idea.”

      “And speed and brains,” I suggest, because it doesn’t seem like he has either, the slow way he moves and speaks, though that thing about needing strength makes some sort of sense.

      “And a thousand other things.” Ril looks at me. “Please don’t judge my brother, Jabz.”

      It makes me feel bad, because that’s exactly what I was doing. There are plenty in the Margins like Boa, who’ve proved their worth in numbers of ways, so who am I to think he won’t be an asset on either a crawl through the Sprawll or a breakout into the Wildlands?

      We start comparing ages. Meyi is youngest at fourteen, then Boa, then Silver.

      “Shouldn’t we be going?” Silver comes out of whatever dream he disappeared into.

      He and Lizwi both fish out a whole lot of tokens and have a polite little argument about who’s paying for the blue fizz. Silver wins. Lizwi pulls Meyi out of his chair and whispers into his ear when he starts rocking backwards and forwards. He lifts his left arm so he can bury his face in his fake feathers. Lizwi gets a cap out of one of their backpacks and settles it on his head, pulling the peak down so his face is mostly hidden. That seems to soothe Meyi.

      I have a moment of thinking I understand him.

      We go out into the Sprawll’s unchanging twilight. Halo, Lizwi and Meyi walk in front, slowly because of Meyi. Every so often he tries to go off in a different direction, but Lizwi keeps her right hand round his stick-thin arm and hauls him back.

      Silver and I come next, with Orpa, Ril and Boa behind us. I can hear Ril chattering to Orpa, her voice light and fast, always with a laugh underneath it. Orpa isn’t exactly friendly in response. I catch a few snippy remarks.

      The conversation up ahead isn’t any easier to listen to. Halo and Lizwi are talking about the Breeding Control Centres.

      “I’ve heard of girls who don’t even wait for the draw,” Lizwi is saying. “Because of the forced sterilisation of the losers immediately afterwards. They disappear into the Wildlands, and sometimes their boyfriends go with them. I suppose some of them are already pregnant and avoiding a forced termination, but I think most of them are just scared of the draw in the first place. I’m due in soon.”

      “Me too,” Halo says.

      “I keep thinking – what if I’m not drawn? If I have to go for sterilisation? I know it’s wrong to say this, but I hate that the lucky ones get to have two kids each. But the Minders say only children will become a social problem.”

      “Except that they’re forever contradicting themselves, creating one-child families with all their Parkings, and taking kids away to be Pets, and all the other stuff,” Silver mutters to me.

      “I know,” Halo is answering Lizwi. “One child each, and more of us could be mothers.”

      “Never mind that it’s only women put into the draw, and our boys and men can end up fathering a whole pack of kids with different women, or none at all, depending.”

      “At least the draw is democratic.” Halo is so tolerant.

      “I know, girls in the Margins, Stains, the lot, they all go in. My father, he’s a Minder, he says they let the Stains have the same chance to breed as everyone else so there’ll always be reminders of the Disobedience, only he doesn’t know what that was.” Lizwi lifts up her shoulders, then lets them fall.

      I make a sound through my nose. Even I don’t know what my forebears’ Disobedience was, but it must have been something extreme for the Minders of those days to infect them with our hereditary Stain.

      “I’ll never be a father,” I mutter to Silver.

      “Me neither,” he says in an absent way.

      “Even if I’m drawn, I’ll still be so scared,” Halo tells Lizwi. “Yes, all right, we’re living in the Prosperity, but Repairs are getting seriously expensive if my children turn out to need them.”

      “My father keeps dropping hints about the ingredients for some special muti running out.” Lizwi blows out a big breath. “It’s making them stricter about Parking damaged kids.”

      “Parking or putting down?” Halo’s voice is very low.

      “Whatever. Removing. I’ll tell you something.” Lizwi moves closer to Halo. “If I’m lucky enough to get drawn, I’m hiding my children until they’re too old to be disappeared. Then, if they turn out to be damaged or flawed, they’ll just have to let them go for Repairs. Like Meyi and Silver.”

      People stare at us passing, stare at me especially, it feels like.

      I envy Meyi his cap.

      “What are you looking at, freaks?” I glower at a pair of Bleeders.

      “It’s because we’re a mixed group,” Silver says. “A Skin and Feathers and all the rest. Hey, maybe we’ll set a new trend.”

      “So fashion is everything in here, is it?”

      “Because of the Prosperity.” Silver’s eyes drift all over the place, and he sounds vague, but he’s kind of making sense. “It’s made everything too easy. People haven’t got enough to do. Like my parents. Every new thing, they have to be it or have it. I think it stops them thinking too much about their disappointment.”

      “Disappointment?”

      “Me being flawed.” He doesn’t come across embarrassed, saying it. “And my baby brother being Parked or whatever, because after I was diagnosed when I was already too old for Parking, there was always some Minder checking on us and they caught him early enough to take away.”

      “Parked or whatever?” I’m curious. “Don’t you know?”

      “We’ve never seen him again.”

      “So maybe us Stains aren’t so cursed.” I’m surprised to hear myself saying it. “I mean, we’re the most flawed of all, but we get left alone to get on with our lives as well as we can in the Margins.”

      “What’s it like there?” Silver asks, and I hear a harsh yap of laughter from behind us, letting me know Orpa is listening to us. “I was surprised someone from there could text and read.”