Dark Eden

wrong? He was no fool. He figured out how to make warm wraps. And my own Jeff figured out how to turn a buck into a horse for them to ride. (David would never have thought of that, never, not if he lived for a thousand wombs, though he was happy enough to steal the idea from Jeff.) So who was to say that they didn’t make it over to the other side?
    There was a new part in Any Virsry now. There was a special bit where bloody old Lucy Lu got up and started telling us the messages she’d had from Angela and Tommy and dead Stoop and all the other Shadow People.
    ‘John is with them now,’ she told us, ‘John Redlantern, and all his little gang. They froze up on Dark and now they’re Shadow People with the rest of them. But none of the other Shadow People . . .’
    She broke off here, rolling her eyes and screwing up her face as if she was in terrible pain. That woman has always been a liar and a faker, ever since she was a little kid.
    ‘Gela’s heart,’ she cried, ‘Gela’s dear good heart, but they are
lonely
lonely. None of the other Shadow People talk to them because they broke up our Family. And they
know
now they did wrong. They know it, because all is revealed in the Shadow World,
all
is revealed. And they feel ashamed ashamed, and they hate themselves and they hate each other, and that’s how it’ll always be for them, poor things, poor poor things, for ever and ever and ever.’
    David stood up, one hand on the back of his buckhorse. Michael’s names, I
hated
all this. It was
my
boys they were talking about, my boys and their friends. How dare they talk about them like that? But I knew from the past what would happen if I tried to speak out. Everyone would yell at me and shout at me. People would warn me I’d end up being an enemy of Family too if I wasn’t careful. People would ask whose side was I on. People would hiss that they could see where my boys got it from. So I kept quiet, with only silent tears to show how I felt inside.
    ‘Yeah,’ David said. ‘Dying in the cold and hating themselves forever. That’s what you get for trying to break our Family, and that’s why we have Guards now to make sure it never happens again.’
    ‘Oh I know, I know,’ wailed Lucy Lu, ‘I know it has to be. But when you see them as I see them, you can’t help feeling sorry for them: always lonely, always miserable, always with the cold of Snowy Dark creeping through them and always . . . always . . .’
    She stopped because we could hear shouting voices coming from forest behind us on the Peckham side of the clearing. In came three more of David’s Guards, dragging along another young man, with a buck on a rope following behind them.
    The Guards didn’t take any notice of the fact that an Any Virsry was going on, and they paid no attention to the person in middle of Circle who was supposed to be Family Head.
    ‘David! David! Look who we found skulking around outside Family. Look who it is!’
    Who
was
it? He looked familiar – that narrow, clever face with the wispy blond beard – but we hadn’t seen him for a long time, and he’d grown, and we’d never seen him looking so scared before. But Gela’s sweet heart, it was one of them! It was one of our lost kids!
    ‘Let go of me,’ snapped Mehmet Batwing, ‘I wasn’t skulking. I came down here to talk to you. I’ve got things you might want to know about.’
    ‘Talk then!’ growled David. ‘Talk!’
    ‘Never mind David, Mehmet,’ I yelled. ‘Talk to
us
! Where’s our kids? Where’s Gerry? Where’s Jeff? Where’s John?’
    Other people started calling out and coming forward too, mums, sisters, brothers. The Guards quickly stepped in to keep us back and away from Mehmet and David, but they couldn’t stop us calling out.
    ‘Where’s Tina and Harry? Where’s Jane?’
    ‘What about Dix? Dixon Brooklyn, I mean? And Gela and Clare, are they alright?’
    ‘No, talk about Lucy first. Lucy Batwing. Tell us about her!’
    David raised his hands for quiet before Mehmet could answer.
    ‘One at a time, one at a time!’
    He turned to me.
    ‘And you can forget John,’ he said. ‘He’s not part of Family any more. He’s none of our business.’
    ‘That’s right,’ chipped in Lucy Lu, staring at us all with her weepy eyes. ‘Tommy and Angela told me themselves, remember? They told me we should forget that John Redlantern ever existed, and never speak of him again.’
    ‘Oh shut up, Lu, you silly woman, you just told us they were