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Chapter 1
Sixteen years earlier
There was a killer prowling around their terraced house, Esther’s mother told her. It pressed itself against their windows, slithered over the bricks and licked at the door-knocker.
The only thing to do was escape.
‘We are going to go far away and live amongst the trees. Would you like that? The trees?’ Mother asked, wrapping a scarf around five-year-old Esther’s mouth and nose so she couldn’t have answered even if she had wanted to.
Esther had no opinion on trees. She had opinions about the best food to eat for dinner, the best colour in the universe and who Mr Wiffles, her toy whale, had fallen out with that day. But trees? She saw a few scraggly ones from her bedroom window. They moved in the wind and shook their branches like they were laughing at her.
Maybe they were.
But, tonight, all Esther could see were the flames.
‘You’re going to have to carry some things. The rest we’ll leave behind.’ Her mother pulled Esther’s arms through the rucksack, which she had picked all by herself. It had whales on it too.
She could have helped hoist the bag onto her own shoulders, but she remained a dead weight. She wanted to stay here, at home. Even with the killer. Home had her bedroom with its deep-sea diver wallpaper and the bit of carpet that pulled up to reveal a hiding space under the floorboards. There was going to be no carpet in the new house; all the floors were going to be smooth, dust-free and easy to clean, so Mother said.
That was Esther’s fault.
‘But, Dad—’ Her father had raced off into the night, Mother had told her, gone to help, straight into the heart of the fiery monster that lay beyond their living-room window.
‘Your father will follow us; he promised. Right. We’re going to open the door now. Then it’s straight to the car. But you can’t take the scarf off even when you’re in there. Clear?’
Esther’s fault.
‘The new house is so much safer for you, Pips. I should have done this years ago.’ Because the killer outside, it wanted her particularly. The new house would protect her. It was a fortress, built to keep out the enemy. Except the enemy wasn’t a horde of people with guns and bombs, it wasn’t a nuclear blast, or flood or even the fire outside.
It was the air.
‘Got it?’ her mother asked and Esther’s hand instinctively went to her pocket where she kept her inhaler, even though she didn’t need to check – it was always there.
Her mother handed her the goggles and she put them on. Esther liked them at least: it made her feel like the divers on her wallpaper in the room that she didn’t want to leave.
She wasn’t ready to dive.
But it was over in seconds. Her mother pulled her, and, caught in her current, she bobbed along in her wake. Outside, their world had changed.
There was smoke, of course. But there had always been smoke. Esther felt the grip of that hand that squeezed her chest and she wheezed, reaching for the comforting shape of her inhaler, each breath something that threatened to squeeze out all the air from her body.
The sky was no longer black but a fiery, cloudy orange. Her mother bundled her into the back of the car, belted her into her child seat and started the engine at the same time as clicking her own belt into place. It was hard to turn her head in the scarf, but Esther did her best, trying to look back one last time at the small house that had been theirs.
And then, briefly, she really was under the sea, except the sea was made of faces, hands and fumes and the car swam through it all.
But soon that passed too. Hours sped by until dawn lightened the night sky. Concrete turned to wasteland and then bloomed green. Well, greener. Esther slept through much of the journey.
The roads finally ended. They bumped and jolted over a dirt track. Esther ran a finger around the edge of her scarf, her skin itchy and hot, but she wasn’t brave enough to inch the material back and let in some cool air because the killer was in the car with her.
It kept her company all the way to the House.
As soon as Esther saw it, she knew it needed that capital H. They had to leave the car and walk the last part, her mother scooping her up and running for most of the way. They could leave their home and everything they knew behind but that wouldn’t save them – save her and her weak little lungs that couldn’t even do their one job properly. Things had gone too far, her mother told her. The air was too poisoned, wherever they went. Except for one place, and one place only.
Finally, she stood before it, clutching her mother’s hand. ‘Our hideaway.’ Her mother dragged her closer. Set into the hill with earth making up most of its walls and roof, the front of it was a blank concrete face with two narrow windows.
‘To keep you safe, Pips.’ Her mother pulled her forward, into the shadow of the House. ‘Like you’re a toy, hmm? A special one. All snug in your packaging.’
But Esther had opened lots of those toys, the figure within pressed face first against the plastic and every time she’d almost heard each one gasp in relief as she freed them. Snug was not a new word to Esther, but that day, standing in front of the House, it did not mean cosy and protected.
It meant trapped.
***
Just her and her mother in the House in the hill. A prayer each day:
‘To what do we give thanks?’
‘The House.’
‘What protects the air we breathe?’
‘The House.’
‘What gives us plants and water and power and comfort?’
‘The House.’
‘What keeps us safe?’
‘The House.’
Princesses in their towers always pined for their escape in the fairy tales her mother used to read to her and for a long time she had not understood why. Out There was a smog-filled thicket of thorns waiting to wrap around her throat.
There was nothing for her there, her mother said. The House was her world, and she would never need to leave it again.
And that is how it was for the next sixteen years.
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Chapter 2
A demon lived in Esther’s chest.
It squeezed her lungs and she heard that too-familiar wheeze. Water dripped down her bedside cupboard from the glass she had knocked over and she thought to herself that she would need to wipe that up before Mother saw it, but then her windpipe collapsed to a thin straw and no matter how hard she tried to suck in a breath, she couldn’t get enough air.
Panic bubbled.
She knew that all she had to do was stagger or crawl over to the inhaler somewhere on her dressing table and, in a few puffs, a blessed ease would spread through her chest. She’d done it before; she could do it again.
Breathe.
Breathe.
This was why she did not leave the House. The air was cleaner here amongst the trees in their hillside bunker, but cleaner did not mean clean. Not for her. Not anymore. The demon in her chest spent much of its time dozing because of the carefully filtered air that was pumped around the House. As she got older, Esther appreciated the time and planning that had gone into their home, everything from the backup filtration system run by a generator to the tubs that grew fresh vegetables and the water supply piped from a nearby well.
The House kept her demon drowsy. Out There, it would wake up.
The concept of Out There was quite a hazy one, Esther had to admit, built on the old films she watched, none of them dated beyond the millennium. She knew the world had moved on since then. The thing was, she also knew she would never be able to move on into it, not now, with its polluted skies that would make her demon roar into life with glee.
Stumbling, she gripped on to her bedspread, bunching it into her fist, the whole thing sliding off, dragging Mr Wiffles with it until he was almost touching her nose. Then, somehow, she was on the floor, but that was okay because she could pull herself up to the table and grab it if everything would stop spinning and the straw that passed for her windpipe would loosen up a little. There was nothing to fear.
Oh, but there was. The demon pressed down on her, squatted on her chest, put its clammy lips around her windpipe and then bit down hard.
She heard birdsong. Fake. Esther’s mother sometimes played ambient noise to stop the silence taking hold. The birds had been some of the first to go, she’d told her, even in the countryside, away from the suppurating heart of the city, though there were breeding programmes to protect what was left. In captivity of course. The skies were no place for them now, though Esther had seen shapes in the distance every so often, wheeling and graceful smudges in the sky. There were still people Out There. Esther knew it wasn’t some sort of B-movie apocalyptic wasteland beyond their door because people were like parasites, her mother told her – they survived anything, even poisoning their own air. It was the poor innocent creatures that suffered the worst: the animals, the children. Cities limped on, as did the people, their lungs blackening with each breath.
That was why Mother had built this place for her.
The House purred. It had better lungs than Esther: the beautifully engineered air-conditioning and filtration system that kept the air inside at optimum purity. And it had roots: a series of storage tunnels underneath that held everything that two people might ever need.
Esther swung out her arm and swiped for the inhaler, her hand grasping nothing. It was not on her dressing table. She needed to think. Where had she put it, before she went to bed the night before? But thinking was becoming difficult.
It was in those moments that she was closest to her father.
A hero, her mother told her. A man who had lost his own life saving others.
Her mental picture of him had, over the years, shrunk to photograph size, bordered white. A man forever stilled in a dozen or so poses, next to a tree, holding a hat, pushing the hair out of his face. Esther couldn’t remember what that hair smelled like, or whether the skin on his hand was rough or smooth, or what he looked like when he wasn’t frozen in a smile.
She might not have known those things about her father but she knew how he must have felt as he died saving those other people from a fire that then killed him, choking for a breath that wouldn’t come. Frankly, as mementoes went, she would have preferred a pocket watch or something.
She sat on the floor by her bed, Mr Wiffles eyeing her from her blue bedspread, chosen when she was a child because she had wanted it to be his sea.
‘I … I …’ she tried out the words.
The cuddly whale gazed back at her, unblinking, his stitching a little looser now than it was sixteen years ago. Like everyone’s.
‘My inhaler …’ she tried again.
‘Well, how am I meant to see that from here?’ she grumbled for him in her head. ‘I’ve been lying on this bedspread for the best part of a week now and all I’ve had a chance to see is your sock drawer.’
She had to admit, Mr Wiffles had become more bad-tempered with age.
Then she heard it, the blessed clacking sound that signalled rescue.
‘Esther?’ A familiar voice. Her mother. ‘I’m here, I’m here – breathe …’
Esther hauled herself up like an old person as she took a puff, slumping around the dressing table leg as relief hit. Her breathing slowed and she pushed her hair away from her sweaty forehead.
‘Thanks …’ Esther said, her voice hoarse. ‘I nearly had it …’
There was a cool hand on her cheek as her mother’s face loomed into view. ‘It was on the floor by your bedside table. Lucky you have me, eh?’
‘Yes.’
She was. Every day Esther reminded herself how grateful she was to her mother, for this filtered air, for the House. Each breath made the demon in her chest smaller and sleepier until she could kid herself that it didn’t exist at all.
‘Ready?’ Her mother helped her up.
Esther was.
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Chapter 3
‘Happy birthday, Pips!’
Mother appeared with the time-honoured slice of fig and cranberry loaf topped with a birthday candle that had done sterling service for the past sixteen years because it had never once been lit.
Birthday Breakfast was sacrosanct. Mother even wore her least shabby cardigan, though she never went so far as to change out of her stained work trousers and battered leather slippers. There was the special loaf, as dark as fruitcake. Bread and cakes required flour, which they only had in a limited supply, so this was a treat, served with jam and the best tea, its leaves slowly uncurling like feathery fingers in the infuser.
This birthday was a special one.
‘Tiara!’ Mother said, her own already in place, balanced precariously in the wire nest of her hair, its pink plastic jewels only slightly scuffed.
Esther could have tried a weak protest, but the tiara was ready...
