"I think that went well," Jonathan announced. "If I do say so myself."
"Very well," Natalia looked amused. "People are happier today than they've been in a long time."
"Yes, I noticed that," Jonathan frowned. "Why?"
They were walking along from the youth commanders' corridor to the mess hall, dressed in fresh clothes. Jonathan had made an important discovery that morning: they had clothes for training that weren't uniforms, and were much more comfortable. He intended to wear them more often.
"Because we're finally doing something," Natalia spread her arms wide. "We've spent years knowing that nothing was going to happen till you woke up! And nothing was going to change either. I was only filling in. I wasn't actually in charge. You were. And now you're awake and things are happening and...everyone's expecting a major change."
"What kind of major change?" Jonathan asked, interested.
"They think we're going into battle," Natalia grinned a pointed-toothed smile. "They've never been so excited."
Jonathan frowned but didn't reply. Some of them were far too young to be so happy about the idea of rushing to their deaths.
"Don't be old," Natalia nudged him. "They romanticise. Anyway, they've been trained all their lives to fight and kill and now they think they might be able to for once. It's like we have a purpose again."
"It certainly feels more awake," Jonathan agreed.
There was no denying the change in the air. As they walked into the mess hall, it hummed with conversation. Voices were louder. Plates clattered. Laughter rang out. There was a sense of energy that had been lacking, an edge of excitement.
Jonathan wondered how it had felt these past few years, or perhaps forever, not really having any purpose to your life. How could you even know yourself if you didn't know what you were going to have to do? He couldn't imagine being a soldier without a battle to fight. It would be wrong in every way.
"Evening," he announced, dropping into his customary seat. "How are you?"
"Absolutely peachy," Carmen gave him a thumbs-up.
There was a large bruise turning purple on her cheek and she had abandoned her brief effort to braid her hair. Her eyes glowed and there was a flush to her face. Jonathan knew it and felt it. Activity was good for them. Idleness was not.
"It was pretty incredible, actually," Nigs agreed. "There's a lot I still need to learn but...I found myself remembering things I learned here, as well as things I learned back home."
"I know what you mean," Carmen agreed. "There were some movements that were just automatic. I remember that whole hall. Kaede was telling me about tournament days. I think I'm starting to get my memories back."
Miriam said nothing and Jonathan gave her an apologetic glace which she returned with a rueful smile. She too had known what was going on whilst locked in combat, obeying her instincts. But the ability she seemed to possess hadn't lessened her dislike for it.
"Apparently this is where we sit?"
Jonathan turned to see Sandy standing behind him, a tray of food balanced on one hand, the other hand firmly holding onto Ebb's sleeve. The other boy was hanging back, his face speaking volumes.
"Yes," Miriam recovered quickest. "Yes, of course."
Sandy took his seat in silence and Ebb reluctantly sank into the one opposite. For a moment, there was an uncomfortable silence at the table. Whilst the four had developed an easy kind of friendship in the past few days, nobody had seen hide nor hair of these two and they remained strangers.
"Where've you been?" Nigs asked, as politely as he could. "These past few days, I mean."
"In the infirmary," Sandy replied. "I am a medic, after all. Lots of them eat in there."
"What about you?" Miriam smiled at Ebb. "Are you alright? We were told you were ill."
Ebb stabbed his fork viciously into the meat on his plate and ignored her. Sandy glanced at him briefly but said nothing. Miriam's smile faltered.
"Well, we're glad to see you're better," she made a brave attempt. "Do you...um...did you enjoy today?"
Ebb looked up briefly. "No."
"Oh," Miriam frowned. "Ok."
Something of the good mood had died and everybody was now watching Ebb with an uneasy dislike, except Sandy who kept his eyes on his food and occasionally sighed slightly as if continually disappointed.
The instant Ebb was finished, he dropped his cutlery on his plate and turned to Sandy.
"I'm leaving," he said, abruptly. "Walk with me?"
Sandy nodded, hastily shovelling down his last mouthful. Without another word, Ebb stood up and strode away. Sandy cast the table a brief look that was not exactly apologetic but aimed at least to diffuse some of the tension. Then he was gone, hurrying to where Ebb waited impatiently by the door.
"Well," Carmen raised her eyebrows. "There's a cheery bunch."
"I thought Sandy was alright," Miriam said, sadly. "He was so happy the day we woke up."
"Yeah, well, now he's found out what he woke up into," Nigs said, irritably. "I don't mind him so much, but I can't stand that Ebb. He looks at you like you haven't died soon enough and he's taking it as a personal insult."
Carmen nodded her agreement. "I don't like him."
Jonathan said nothing, thinking about what his past self had said in the video, that he would need all these people as allies and friends. At some point, he was going to have to reach out to the unfriendly boy and he wasn't looking forward to it.
Sandy kept pace at Ebb's side as the younger boy strode down the corridors, every footsteps slamming into the floor like he was trying to break it apart.
"Now you see why that was a bad idea," Ebb snarled. "They don't like me. I don't like them. I don't want to have anything to do with them."
"It's not about what you want," Sandy retorted, exasperated. "It's about what's right. We're going to have to work with them at some point. You know we will."
"I don't care," Ebb replied. "I don't care about any of this. It doesn't matter to me."
"It should matter to you. It's your life."
Ebb turned to face him. "Is it? Is it really? I remember it all, Sandy, and I don't remember it being good. I fucked up this life and I fucked up the dream one too. What's the point in playing the game anymore? Why even bother?"
Sandy rubbed his eyes and tried to formulate a response when all he really had was agreement.
"You've got to try," he said, at last. "If you want to survive."
"And do I?"
"Do you what?" Sandy blinked.
"Want to survive?"
For a moment, they stared at one another, stationary in the corridor, Ebb's face contorted into a look that was as fragile as it was furious.
"You all woke up with your scars magically washed away," he said quietly, softly, like shadows. "I woke up with new ones."
"Ebb..."
"Do you want to see?" Ebb pulled up his sleeves. "Take a look. Pretty savage, isn't it?"
Sandy reached out and caught his arm, pulling the white sleeve back down over the noughts-and-crosses board of long-healed scars that had, briefly, made his stomach turn and his heart rise up to beat inside his throat.
"You don't have to be like that again," Sandy said, seriously.
Ebb jerked his arm away as though Sandy's touch had burned him.
"I wasn't like that before," Ebb answered. "Not when I was dreaming. I was happy there."
"You were out of your mind."
"Better that than this," Ebb shook his arm vaguely in Sandy's direction. "Thing is, I don't even know why. I can remember so much about this place, but not those things. I don't know what was going on in my head but it wasn't pretty. So I don't think this life is the little paradise second-change you seem to think it is. I think this is just another hell."
Sandy looked at him for a long time, just looking, taking in the way his voice changed from a hoarse half-scream to soft and deadly within a sentence, the way his lip curled and his eyes burned with hatred and rage and something more like misery.
"You should sleep," he said, at last. "You're still weak. You need rest."
"I need to fly," Ebb said, dreamily. "I need to fly."
Sandy didn't reply to that. He just began to walk away and Ebb followed, silent, torn somewhere between anger and daydreams.
Sandy put him to bed like he was a small child, folding the blankets over him and shutting out the light. Ebb's eyes fell closed almost immediately and Sandy could hear his breathing change at once. He was always so tired. Everything cost him twice as much as it did anyone else. He had the lucky talent for instantaneous sleep.
Sandy watched him and felt...nothing at all. Or perhaps everything. It didn't occupy his mind, it was hardly a distraction. It was like the pressure of a ring against your finger: you never noticed it, once it had been there a while, until you looked at it and realised it had never gone away. He had had a song stuck in his head for days now, and it had taken him this long to realise it was only there because he associated it with Ebb. This was not a pleasant realisation.
Sandy was not surprised by any of this, perhaps because so many strange things had happened to him recently that this childish crush on a scrawny, fifteen-year-old drug addict was comparatively run-of-the-mill.
And that was what it was: a crush. It was like being a child again, sneaking second looks at someone who you adored in a way that was complicated and yet overbearingly simple. So it was now. Sandy didn't want anything from Ebb. He just wanted Ebb to exist.
He couldn't quite decide why this was. Ebb was, in all ways, hopelessly flawed. Perhaps that was part of the attraction, that his flaws made Sandy look whole. Ebb was cold and angry and unfeeling, hooked on a delusion, determined to hate everyone. He was unlovable.
And yet, and yet, how easy it was to want to do things for him. How easy for caring to sneak up behind Sandy as he tried to ease this patient's pain. How simple for affection to tie itself around his neck and tighten while he tried to hold a conversation, just to keep the boy thinking, just to keep him alive.
Out of nowhere, Sandy was lost in a land he thought he would never again return to: the world of unrequited love.
He didn't want to be calling it love, either, but somehow the word kept slipping into his mental vocabulary without him even noticing. Since the last time love destroyed him, since he watched the destruction of everyone and everything that mattered to him, he had been convinced that he was now immune, now sunk so deep in emotional scar tissue that nobody would be able to touch his soul again.
Well, how quickly that illusion had ended. He was every bit as soft and vulnerable as he had ever been. He was still an innocent, and now he had accidentally placed all of his affection into the hands of a boy whose every impulse seemed to be to hurt and destroy everything, including himself.
Sandy almost laughed as he closed the door, a laugh without even a trace of bitterness. He clearly had an instinct for self-destruction. He kept choosing the paths of his life that would cause him the most pain. No, there was no reason to be surprised by this latest development.
"Goodnight," he said, softly, to the closed door, before he went to find his cell and wish that he had Ebb's ability to fall asleep without a second's pause.
Nigs stood under the pouring water of the shower and bowed his head, his hair dripping over his forehead. The water was as scaldingly hot as he could make it, as powerful as it could be. He let it ease the ache out of his shoulders.
He closed his eyes and imagined that he was walking under the deluge of the underground waterfall he knew so well, though that was colder than this and so much stronger. He tried to recall the feel of it on his skin and the smell of the underground and the way the darkness seemed to seep into your eyes.
He thought it all and, for the first time, managed to do so without remembering the white-hot pain of Raul's knife entering his chest. He smiled at it, smiled at the feeling of being back where he belonged, back underground amongst the stones and icy water and the darkness that he wore like a second skin.
This place was fun but the novelty was wearing off fast. He liked the company here, for the most part, but it couldn't beat the life he'd always known. He'd been holding it off well so far, and he was determined to remain cool and collected, unconcerned and well-adjusted, to all he might see him. But Nigs was homesick.
He leant his back against the cold tiles of the shower-block cubicle and closed his eyes. He imagined falling asleep now and waking up to be back home, in his own bed. It would all be as it was before, except now he would value his life greater and have an understanding of concepts he couldn't even imagine before, like plastic and atom bombs.
But it wouldn't do to sleep here. He might drown.
With a sigh, Nigs shut off the water and wrapped himself up in a towel. He was tired and he needed to sleep for real. Austere though this place was in terms of character, it had more comfortable beds and softer fabrics than Nigs had ever known. That, perhaps, was something he wouldn't be so willing to give up.
Nigs fell asleep sprawled across the bed, his arm tucked under his head. When he opened his eyes again, he hadn't moved but everything else had.
The white ceiling curved above, basking golden in the sunlight. The air was still and quiet and smelled of polish. Nigs rose slowly, blue blankets sliding off his shoulders. He looked around at the familiar calmness of his room, white-painted and wooden-floored, and felt quite right again.
The stairs creaked as they had always creaked when he walked downstairs. The handrail on his right was still marked by generations of dusty fingerprints. His mother was cooking in the kitchen, dressed in a bright floral print with lace at the collar, her hair as red as his own pinned back behind her head and fixed with a small pearl clasp.
"Morning, sleepy-head," she smiled. "Breakfast."
She slid a plate across the table to Nigs as he sank, yawning, into a wooden chair. He felt dazed, still half-asleep. It had been the strangest of dreams. But scrambled eggs were good to eat and he woke up slowly, eyes brightening at the thought of a new day and the approaching deal that would raise his life again.
"I'm going out," he announced. "I'll see you later."
"Have a good day," his mother said, already beginning the washing up. "Oh, and Sarah's coming round later to help me with some sewing so I expect you back for tea."
Nigs's day brightened even further. Being back for tea would be worth it when Sarah was involved. He was aware, on some vague level, that his mother and hers were attempting some kind of rudimentary matchmaking with the two of them but he was also happily aware that it was succeeding.
Sarah was Nigs's friend from childhood who had surprised everyone by turning out pretty. But she still knew how to laugh and occasionally Nigs found himself indulging the fantasy of one day marrying her and living in a house with a view of the sea together and of Sarah's help with the family business. It was a rosy little picture that meant nothing at all but he found himself thinking it increasingly often.
He found his friends down by the harbour side, a motley collection of boys in misshapen jackets and ill-fitting boots. They hollered out a greeting to him and he approached with his usual swagger, always the master, ever in control. He lived a life far above them and they all knew it.
"Have you heard?" one began. "The old cottage has been let, to a man and his daughter."
"We're gossiping?" Nigs said, amused. "Actually gossiping?"
"You haven't seen her," the friend said, seriously. "She's...."
His eyes widened and he stared at something over Nigs's shoulder. Nigs swung round and saw a girl approaching, a glorious city-bred creature dressed all in green. He opened his mouth to greet her but then, before his very eyes, she had Carmen's face.
"Hello, Nigel," she said, lightly. "How's it going?"
"What are you doing here?" Nigs burst out. "What's going on?"
"Nothing's going on," Carmen frowned. "This is how it's always been. Remember? Oh look, it's Natalia!"
Nigs felt as though he'd been given an electric shock. Natalia approached, wearing a grey dress and smiling but she saluted him when she stopped in front of him.
"Soldier," she nodded.
"I'm not a soldier!" Nigs burst out.
"What are you talking about?" asked his friend, who suddenly had Jonathan's voice. "You've always been a soldier. We're all soldiers."
"No! No! This isn't how it's meant to be!"
"There is no right and wrong way, Nigel," Miriam declared, emerging from a shop across the road. "Everything just happens."
"What are you talking about?"
"Nigel?"
Nigs spun round to face a girl with a tear-streaked face and big, desperate eyes.
"Nigel?" she asked, again. "Is it you? Are you here? Why did you do it?"
"Why did I do what?" Nigs backed away. "I don't know you. I've never met you. I swear!"
The girl's eyes filled up with tears. "No...no, that's not true...don't say it..."
"You'd better deal with it," Kaede appeared at his shoulder. "It's your responsibility."
"My responsibility? Why?"
"Well, she's one of yours, isn't she?" Kaede shrugged. "You've got to look after them."
"I don't understand! What's going on? I don't understand!" Nigs cried.
But they were all around him now, faces merging, voices smearing, turning into ghosts and swirling, swirling. He reached out to grab them but they were mist in his fingers. He caught hold of the jacket sleeve of the crying girl and shook it roughly.
"Tell me what's going on! Tell me what's going on!"
The girl screamed and cried and fought in his hands and Nigs found himself screaming and crying too and then he was awake for real and clutching at the sheets twisted around him and sobbing helplessly into a pillow, sobbing like a small child, because it wasn't real, because he wasn't home, because this was reality and it was every bit as bewildering and horrible as his dream had been and there was no waking up.