Oasis Read online

  I

  can’t

  breathe.

  The water is painfully cold, making my muscles lock as I desperately try to get my head above the surface. But I can’t. I don’t know how to swim, and my legs won’t work, and all I can feel is my lungs screaming and the water is everywhere, and I am sinking. My body goes numb, and something tells me I knew this was going to happen all along.

  How long did I expect to survive?

  I see Aaron’s face, golden-lit, blue-eyed and smug. He smiles as my body shuts down, as I pull at the water and continue sinking, sinking, sinking.

  My eyes are closing, and I’m ready to die with that image printed inside my head when I feel something clawing at my shoulders, and I blink up at the boy with dark hair who’s swimming above my head, pulling on me too hard, and I wonder why he’s looking at me so desperately, but then––

  Nothing.

  6

  Pain is in every fibre of me. I wake up slowly, but I immediately want to fall back to sleep, just to get away from the agony. There is burning in my lungs and throat, a searing pain in my left elbow, and I feel like I’ve been beaten all over.

  My eyes flutter open and my mind is trying to grasp something, anything to make sense of what is going on. There is light coming through the walls of a small room, and it takes my sluggish brain several seconds to realise I’m lying inside some kind of tent.

  I hear voices. Someone is standing outside the tent, or several someones, and I’m struggling onto my hands and knees, my heart thundering in my chest. But a wave of dizziness hits me before I can get to my feet, and I fall back against my elbows, the world spinning around me. I try to blink away the fuzziness in my vision, but my body is rebelling against me.

  I can hear the voices getting closer, turning into whispers, and my breath catches in my throat. I glance around desperately, and then notice my bag thrown in the corner of the tent, along with the grey fabric of my uniform. I lunge across the distance, flipping my satchel open and pulling out the screwdriver just as a boy not much older than me walks in, taking a small step back at the sight of me.

  I try to stand up, the screwdriver gripped so tightly in my trembling hand that my knuckles are white, but I stumble backwards, the ground dipping beneath me.

  ‘Careful,’ he says, lunging to catch me by the elbow before I take the entire tent down with me.

  ‘Get away from me,’ I growl, pointing the screwdriver at him. He takes a hesitant step backwards, eyes on the screwdriver, not me.

  Good. I’m glad. It’s good that he’s scared. Aaron always said that if someone was scared of you, it meant you didn’t have to be scared of them.

  At the thought of Aaron my stomach turns, memories washing over me in a tidal wave, turning dizziness to nausea in a split-second. The boy must see it on my face because he takes another huge step back, giving me access to the opening of the tent.

  I barely make it out before I vomit. There’s nothing in my stomach but river water and bile, burning its way up my oesophagus as I retch, my entire body heaving with the effort. Hot tears burn my eyes as the spasms slowly die down, leaving me exhausted and disgusted, stumbling backwards.

  ‘Careful,’ he says again, gentler this time. I glance up, and finally something clicks in my brain as it all floods back – the water surrounding me, dragging me down, and the small, traitorous part of me that swelled with relief because I wouldn’t have to fight anymore.

  And the boy who saved me, who looked so frantic underneath the water, his dark hair billowing around him as he tried to claw me upwards, towards air and light and this. My gaze flicks around me, to the darkness closing in on top of us as the sun sets, the cold of the air around us almost as bitter as the cold of that rushing water, and some dark, hopeless part of me asks a question that I cannot ignore: would it have been easier if he had just left me there?

  I try to straighten up, to find my balance, but the world starts tipping again. My head feels heavy and I lean backwards, like the ground is pulling me greedily down towards it.

  ‘You need to lie down,’ he says calmly.

  ‘Stay the hell away from me,’ I hiss, but he’s nowhere near me.

  I don’t want to lie down, not when I can see people moving in the distance and my brain is full of so many questions it feels like my head is going to explode. But I don’t know if I have a choice. My body is shutting down of its own accord, so before I collapse onto the ground, I move towards the tent, trying not to look vulnerable as I pass him.

  The minute I’m inside the tent I start shaking, and I don’t know if it’s fear or cold or exhaustion. I crawl under the blanket that’s left on the floor and before I can make a decision about what I should do next, I’m asleep, the screwdriver still gripped in my hand.

  7

  I wake to warmth on my face, and sit up to see the dawn rising along with me. A brief glance around my surroundings only confuses me further. I can’t make sense of these disjointed buildings, making a muddle of what’s left of my sanity. Eventually, my eyes land on something familiar, a blonde head and square shoulders, turned towards the sun. There is contemplation in those hands, clasped behind his back.

  Aaron.

  He is wearing a suit, a grey suit, finely tailored, and like everything else Aaron has ever worn, it fits him perfectly. I can’t help admiring him from where I sit.

  He turns around, and I immediately notice his shirt and tie are the same grey as his suit, but he is walking towards me now, and I don’t have time to ask myself why that bothers me so much.

  ‘Quincy,’ he says, stretching out a hand to me to pull me up. Once I am standing, he utters my name again, a single, quiet, deeply intoned and horribly disappointed, ‘Quincy’.

  Although his hand is still in mine, his eyes are bonded to the ground beneath us, his bottom lip held between his teeth like he’s trying to work up the courage to say something difficult.

  ‘Aaron,’ I say, not in the way he said my name, and not in an angry way.

  I am begging.

  ‘Quincy,’ he says again, this time like he’s starting something.

  ‘Aaron, look at me.’ Panic appears inside of me, something savage and primal, screaming at me unintelligibly.

  ‘Quincy. You are not. Allowed. To. Leave. Me.’ He grinds out the words, his teeth grating off each other as he stares at the ground like he’s trying to intimidate it.

  ‘Aaron, look at me!’ I wail, and now panic has me by the throat, has crawled inside my stomach and is burning me alive from the inside out. ‘LOOK AT ME!’ I scream.

  He does. His eyes are grey, and I remember.

  Aaron never wears grey.

  My blood is on fire.

  Someone is screaming, but I can’t concentrate on anything but the crushing pain in my chest and my veins like searing wires within me, contorting my limp body in agony.

  Someone is talking to me, trying to get me to drink, but I vomit the minute it passes my lips.

  I fall back into the darkness.

  I’m drowning again, but the water is turning red. There are cuts on my arms, and they colour the river until I can’t see anything but Aaron, a single, clear image staring at me, mocking me through the water.

  I gasp awake, sitting up straight, and I feel like I’m drowning all over again. My head swims, and I throw out my hands for something to steady me and find a hand, an arm, a dark-haired boy staring at me.

  ‘You had a fever,’ he says, urging me to lie back down. ‘You need to rest.’

  ‘Where–’ Oh. I remember everything again, but backwards: the boy with the dark hair, drowning, leaving Oasis, Bea getting shot, Aaron, escaping the Dorms.

  ‘I’m not dead,’ I say, slowly, because I’m not entirely sure.

  ‘You’re not dead,’ he says, and there’s something at the corners of his mouth like he wants to smile but he refuses to.

  ‘I thought. I thought it had activated,’ I say quietly. I know by the way his expression changes tha
t he knows what I’m talking about.

  ‘It’s okay,’ he says. His eyes are dark, too, a deep, intense brown that makes me feel dizzy. ‘It was just a fever.’

  I nod, relieved.

  ‘What’s your name?’ he asks softly.

  My rules pop into my head, but a fierce kind of rebellion follows straight after it. I don’t care. I left Oasis behind, and my rules along with it.

  ‘Quincy,’ I tell him, watching for a reaction, as if there’s going to be one.

  ‘I’m Kole.’ His voice is more gentle than it was before, and I don’t trust it. I sit farther back in the tent, desperately trying to put some distance between us.

  I can tell by the way he’s watching me that he notices what I’m doing. He bites his lip like he’s trying to decide how to calm a feral animal, his dark eyebrows drawn down over his eyes.

  ‘Do you think you could eat something?’ he asks, averting his eyes. I don’t know why, but the act makes me feel a little less uncomfortable, less monitored.

  I nod slowly and he stands up, unfolding himself, and I realise how tall he is, though he looked small while he was talking to me, his knees drawn up under his chin.

  He’s gone for several minutes and the longer he’s gone, the more frantic I get. What is he doing? Who else is out there? Why is he taking so long?

  But before I can do anything, he steps inside the tent again, holding a small tin in his left hand. He hands it to me silently, and the warmth of the tin immediately starts seeping into my frigid fingers. It’s cold in the tent, despite the blankets across my legs, and I’m glad of the heat.

  Before he can pull his hands away, I see it: his knuckles are crisscrossed with many overlapping scars. He catches my eye, and I don’t know what he sees in my face, but he pulls his hands away from me so quickly the tin almost falls as it’s passed over. He stuffs his hands deep in his pockets.

  The silence lasts for several minutes, and he doesn’t move as I eat the soup, drinking it down ravenously.

  I look at him now, with his jet-black hair falling across his forehead, and his long limbs bundled together like he’s trying to make himself small, and somehow I can’t differentiate between the him that is here in front of me right now and the image in my head.

  The image of him screaming at me underwater, even though I couldn’t hear him.

  ‘When I pulled you out, I thought …’ he says out of the blue, almost to himself.

  ‘… that I was dead.’ I fill in the blank he’s not willing to fill in himself. There’s a harshness to my voice that I didn’t mean to be there, but I can’t help feeling distrustful of him.

  Why would he risk jumping in the river for someone he doesn’t even know?

  ‘You weren’t breathing,’ he says, getting to his feet. I try to get up too, because he is too tall when I am sitting down, but my head starts spinning again.

  ‘You’re still weak.’ He hunkers down beside me, picking up the soup container where I left it down and standing back up. ‘Get some rest,’ he says, his voice devoid of emotion, and then he’s gone.

  8

  I must have fallen back to sleep because when I wake up the sun is getting low again. I sit up, bringing a hand up to my forehead gingerly. The headache has eased some, but I still feel the fog over my brain, like a mist cast over my thoughts, obscuring them.

  I hear quiet voices outside the tent, and I move forward tentatively on my hands and knees, listening. They couldn’t be more than a metre or two from the tent because for the most part I can hear everything they’re saying.

  ‘It’s not worth the risk,’ I hear someone say, the voice distinctly female.

  ‘Clarke, she’s just a kid!’ a man’s voice replies, and there’s a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach.

  ‘A kid who we know absolutely nothing about, Mark.’

  ‘We all need to calm down a little,’ Kole’s voice slips in, and even through the lining of the tent I can hear the way he’s using his voice to draw them in. ‘We’ve dealt with situations like this before.’

  ‘Not like this kid. She could be an undercover Officer for all we know.’ The girl, whoever she is, uses the term ‘kid’ as an insult.

  ‘Do you really think she could be working for Oasis, Clarke?’ Kole asks, his voice laced with dark amusement. ‘She was almost dead when we found her. She’s not a threat.’

  ‘You don’t know that.’

  I hear someone moving away, but I can still hear the others, the leaves beneath their feet crunching as they fidget from one foot to the other.

  ‘She’s just scared.’ The unfamiliar male voice says, so gentle I can barely hear it.

  ‘I know,’ Kole says, releasing a long, exhausted sigh.

  There’s a long silence, and the sound of footsteps walking away from the tent. After another moment, I hear someone approaching, their footsteps light against the grass.

  ‘Is she coming?’ a girl’s voice says, concern bleeding into her voice, though I’m not sure for whom.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Kole says. ‘I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.’

  ‘What are your instincts?’

  A pause.

  ‘She’s just a girl,’ he says, and I feel strange, listening to them talk about me. ‘She’s terrified out of her mind, and she’s just as likely to be a threat as anyone we’ve taken in.’

  ‘So we bring her with us.’

  ‘It’s not that simple. Ever since the attack, everyone’s been on edge. They don’t trust her, and they shouldn’t have to, but if I side with her, they’ll see it as a betrayal.’

  ‘Kole, they may be scared, but they trust you. They’re not going to feel betrayed if you do for this girl what you did for all of them.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he murmurs, then growls in frustration. ‘It was never this complicated when Rob was here.’

  ‘I know,’ the girl murmurs.

  I move away from the walls of the tent. I can’t listen to them plan my life anymore. They never thought to ask if I wanted to go with them, wherever that even is.

  But then I think of the days I spent in the forest. Almost killing myself with those berries, starving and cold and then almost drowning, and I wonder if I have a choice. If I stay out here, I’m not going to survive more than a few more days.

  I think of dying out here, alone, the forest slowly eating me alive, and I shudder.

  I can’t go back to that. I can’t do that again. I can’t.

  9

  ‘How are you feeling?’ a soft voice murmurs, as someone steps inside the tent.

  I am woken from my daze by a blonde girl, coming towards me with another can of soup. She’s tall and thin, with high cheekbones and long eyelashes and the palest blue eyes I’ve ever seen. I wonder if that’s what Bea would have looked like if she’d lived to be that age. My heart twists, and I glance down at the food in her hands to distract myself.

  ‘I’m fine,’ I say, a little too sharply. The girl just smiles at her hands as she sits down on the floor of the tent, a short distance from where I’m kneeling.

  ‘Can you eat?’ she asks. I nod, my eyes following her every movement. She pushes the can over to me on the floor, and I keep watching her as I eat.

  ‘My name’s Lacey.’

  ‘Quincy,’ I murmur.

  Back in Oasis, every day on the way to work I passed the same buildings. Over and over again, twice a day every day for two years. I remember there was this dog, halfway between the Dorms and the power station, with mangy brown-grey fur and a bite gone from one ear, tied to a fence with a chain, and he looked like he was just about dead every single time I passed him. He was leery and territorial, but always too exhausted to try to attack me. I remember he always barked at me twice. Two sharp barks and that was it.

  And that’s what I sound like, barking my name at Lacey like a senile old dog, half searingly aggressive, half just plain terrified.

  ‘We have to leave soon,’ she says gently, and she’s doing th
at thing that Kole did, keeping her eyes on the floor as if she’s trying not to provoke me.

  I don’t say anything.

  ‘I don’t know what you were planning on doing, but you’re welcome to come with us if you want.’

  I laugh, and I’m not sure if I’m laughing at her suggesting I had something better planned to do out here or at her acting as if I’m welcome.

  ‘You don’t have to pretend you want me here,’ I snap, placing the tin down beside me. Lacey looks shocked, pulling her head away from me slightly as she finally makes eye contact.

  ‘Quincy, I—’

  ‘Stop, okay? I heard Kole talking to those other people outside, and I get it. I’m too much of a risk.’

  ‘Quincy, everyone has a rough time in the beginning.’ She looks away again, like she’s gathering her thoughts, then looks back at me, an intensity in her eyes I didn’t expect.

  ‘We’re vulnerable right now, okay? I don’t know what Kole told you, but we were attacked last week. That’s why we’re on the move. People don’t like being out here in the open where we can’t defend ourselves. Some people are going to take some convincing, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t come with us.’

  ‘You were attacked? What do you mean? By who?’

  She looks down at her hands again.

  ‘A team of Officers attacked us nine days ago. It was in the middle of the night, and we didn’t see them coming. It was a scout group, not a full squad, but we lost twelve people. Two Officers got away, so we had to leave before they could alert anyone and start tracking us.’

  My head is reeling with this information, and I can’t catch up with it quickly enough to say anything. What she’s telling me is that Oasis knows there are people out here, not only knows it but comes out here and attacks them physically. Suddenly everything I’ve spent my whole life believing isn’t true, and it feels like the ground that was beneath my feet a moment ago has disappeared.

  I don’t want to believe her. I want to tell her she’s crazy, but she’s here, and that’s proof enough. Oasis told me she didn’t exist either, that outside the walls of Oasis life had ceased to be. And here she is. Heart beating, lungs breathing, just as alive as me.