I see Ash in the Imp-hut later that night – this was the point when he first met Rose in canon, completely unaware of her true identity as a rebel, completely unaware of her relationship with Willow. He offered to show her the ropes and took her apple picking. He looked so affable, so naive. But this Ash, my Ash, looks positively suspicious, pissed off even. I guess it isn’t just Gems who disapprove of Imp–Gem relationships.
I pretend I don’t notice him, and instead focus on Saskia’s instructions. She sits opposite me and Nate at the pine table. We warm our hands on mugs of hot tea, and she inadvertently blows steam at us while she speaks. ‘So if you want to blend in, you need to get on with chores for the rest of the night. Some of the Night-Imps choose to travel back to the city come morning, the ones with families and responsibilities, but we’re better off sleeping here, minimize your contact with the guards as much as possible.’
The mention of the guards sends a shiver down my spine.
Saskia pretends not to see. ‘Nate, you can help mow the lawns, Violet—’
Ash cuts over her. ‘I could always do with a hand picking apples.’
This surprises me. Judging from his expression, I’m the last person he wants to spend time with. Maybe I’m due an ear bashing.
Saskia shrugs. ‘Yeah, whatever, just don’t work her too hard, Squirrel.’
I step from the dank air of the Imp-hut. The moon casts the estate in a milky glow and the stars stretch into for ever. I follow Ash across the paddock and around the lake, which sits like a giant opal in the night. The air feels at its coldest, and the scent of smoke finally dwindles, overpowered by wet leaves and soil. I resist the urge to rub my eyes, the lack of sleep and the stress gradually pulling at my seams.
At this point in canon, Ash bombarded Rose with questions, hanging on her every reply, studying her face with large, puppy-dog eyes. So, what’s your name? What part of the city do you come from? But right now, I’m met with an awkward silence. I begin to wish we could follow the movie script, but with our history, it would make no sense.
‘So why did Saskia call you Squirrel?’ I finally ask. I know the answer of course, but I can’t bear the tension any more.
He continues to plonk one foot in front of the other. His reflection in the water shoots away from him like a spike. ‘It’s just a nickname.’
‘Yeah, I guessed that, but why?’
Finally, he meets my eye, causing a tiny ripple of excitement in my belly. He then runs at a nearby oak tree, planting the ball of his foot on the trunk and jumping from the other foot. One arm wraps around the trunk, the other grabs a low-hanging branch, and he lugs himself up so his pelvis rests on the bough. He swings his legs up so he sits, back bolt upright, arms folded like an elf. He looks down at me and laughs. He’s hardly broken a sweat.
I laugh too. ‘OK, OK, I get it . . . it’s because you’ve got buck teeth, right?’
‘At least you didn’t crack a joke about me liking nuts.’ He grips the branch with his legs and lets his body fall back so he hangs upside down like a bat. This makes him look really strange, his hair falling away from his face and his cheeks sagging towards his eyes. I can’t help thinking of the upside-down kiss in the old Spider-Man movie. Maybe following the script isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
‘Now you’re just showing off,’ I say.
‘Maybe.’ He places his hands on the branch and lets his body unfold, landing on his feet with a gentle thud.
We pass beneath the trailing wisteria and enter the orchard. I glance nervously at the spot where I spoke with Willow. That guilty feeling worms around in my gut again. Ash squats down and whacks a black cube with the side of his fist. A bulb flickers into action like an old movie projector starting up – a portable floodlight, coating the orchard in a sticky white light. He grabs a wicker basket, his arm sending a giant, shadowy butterfly wavering across the trunks.
We start picking apples from a nearby tree – they make a soft thump as they hit the bottom of the basket, chucking up dust and releasing their sweet, earthy aroma. This scene mirrors canon very closely – Ash and Rose picking fruit together – but the conversation differs dramatically.
‘It’s all very strange, Violet.’ His words interlace with the beat of falling apples. ‘I save you from getting hanged, then you turn up in my orchard. Are you stalking me or something?’
‘No, course not.’
He smiles his lopsided smile. ‘I was joking. You were practically drooling over that Gem . . . Willow.’ He sticks out his hip and bats his lashes. ‘You look like a Willow – tall and lanky.’ He mimics my voice and bites into the skin of an apple with relish. This Ash is so much more vibrant than canon-Ash.
I throw an apple at him. It explodes against the bark and releases a fine spray of juice which catches in the floodlight like beads of glass. ‘You can’t blame me, he looks like an angel . . . A demigod.’
He places another apple in the basket. ‘He’s about as far from God as any creature could be – all tweaked and fake.’
‘I didn’t say he was a demigod, I said he looked like a demigod.’
‘Well, aren’t we the superficial one?’ The trunk forms a divider, shielding his expression, but his voice sounds small and a little hostile.
I push my hands between the leaves in search of fruit. My fingers find only twigs. ‘I can’t help who I’m attracted to. You said it yourself, we’re all just animals.’
‘Yeah well, they’ll hang your animal ass if they find out you’ve been canoodling with a demigod.’
‘We were just talking.’
‘He was undressing you with his eyes.’
My hand finally locates an apple – I snap it free almost triumphantly. ‘Are you jealous?’
‘Of course I bloody am.’ He laughs, but I see a fleeting glimpse of that vulnerable puppy dog. I was wrong, he doesn’t disapprove of Imp–Gem relationships; he disapproves of me with somebody – anybody – else.
I resist a little smile. ‘Look, Ash . . .’ But I don’t know what to say. I study his slightly asymmetrical features for a moment.
‘What were you and the kid doing?’ he asks suddenly.
‘What, you mean my brother Nate?’
‘Yeah, the kid. You were reciting lines or something, right before demigod turned up.’
‘We were just messing around. Sibling stuff.’
He passes an apple between his hands. Back and forth like it’s too hot to hold. ‘It was like you were rehearsing for something, and then demigod actually said some of the things the kid said.’ He raises his eyebrows expectantly.
I can’t tell him the truth, so instead, I change the subject. ‘I never thanked you properly for saving me and my friends, back in the city I mean.’
He picks up the basket and moves to another tree. ‘That’s OK. Couldn’t very well let ’em hang you, could I?’
I follow him, partly because he has the basket, and partly because I feel lonely, just me and the shadows. I stand beside him and notice the hairs on his forearms, dark against his skin and raised in the cold.
‘Well, you saved our lives. Thank you,’ I say.
He screens his eyes with his heavy lashes, which seem even longer than usual, extended across the pink of his cheeks by their own spidery shadows. He suddenly looks very sad. ‘I just can’t believe you want a Gem, after how they treat us, what they do to us.’
I recall my face pressed into the Perspex, the crumpling paper chain, and I feel like I might cry. I shake my head, trying to dislodge the images from my brain. ‘But it isn’t Willow who does those things. You can’t blame him for the sins of his people.’
He raises his gaze. His irises, so pale they look like glass in the floodlight, his pupils, two intense dots. ‘Who then? Who do you blame? Nobody else is going to rise up and stop the barbarity against the Imps if it isn’t the Gem people.’
I wish I could tell him everything, but it’s too risky. Besides, he would probably think I’m mad. So I steady my voice. ‘Maybe he will, one day, if he falls for an Imp. Maybe he will make a stand.’
‘What do you mean?’
I realize I’ve already said too much and return to picking apples, pretending those frosted blue eyes don’t pierce my skin as they study my profile. At this point in canon, Rose was making up some bullshit about having worked in the Pastures before. Just small talk really. Polite answers, eager nodding, puppy-dog eyes. I wish we were back on script again – this is way too hard.
‘Nothing,’ I say. ‘I’m just thinking out loud.’
‘Just don’t get killed, OK?’ He scoots up the tree so he can reach the fruit on the higher boughs.
I strain my neck to look up at him, and he drops a couple of apples into my outstretched hands. ‘I’ll do my best,’ I lie.
‘Because I didn’t save you from one noose just to see you wind up hanging from another.’ He drops an apple straight into the basket. ‘Bullseye,’ he shouts.
Ash returns home on the Imp-bus that morning. I watch him shuffling up the line and climbing the steps, adopting his subservient Imp pose, so at odds with the squirrel I witnessed earlier in the night.
I slump into the bunk above Nate.
He pokes his head up so it’s level with mine. ‘So, how did it go with Ash?’
‘Rubbish. I think he may hate me.’
‘Well it doesn’t matter whether Ash likes you or not, he’s just a side character, it matters whether Willow does.’
I know Nate’s right, but it kind of matters to me that Ash likes me. ‘I guess,’ I reply.
Nate pats my arm. ‘Get some sleep, heroine extraordinaire, gotta look your best.’
It makes me smile when Nate goes all nurturing on me, like he’s the older sibling. ‘Thanks,’ I say.
He bobs back down, and I soon hear the rhythmic pattern of his breath as he falls into sleep.
The Day-Imps begin to arrive, and their movement, combined with the light seeping through the cloth dividers, keeps me awake. Plus, my mind is just a whirl of conflicting thoughts and emotions: I think of Katie, back in the bell tower, at the mercy of a patch-wearing sociopath with a bit of a crush; I think of Alice, wherever she may be; I think of Ash and those winter eyes; I think of the way Dad always touches Mum’s hand as she pours milk on his cereal; and finally, I think of my feet, dancing mid-air, searching desperately for solid ground, never to find those ruby slippers and return home.
In five days, I will hang.
I roll into the foetal position and imagine all these thoughts pooling in the side of my head, seeping into the pillow below. Finally, I fall into an uneasy sleep, punctuated with twisting shadows and screams and a feeling like I want to move but can’t, like rope binds my limbs. The dream changes, and suddenly I can move again. I feel surprisingly free, like all of the weight has been lifted from my chest. It’s summertime – the smell of lupins and freshly cut grass, the sound of children playing mixed in with birdsong.
I’m seven years old, stood in my parents’ garden with Alice and Nate. Alice looks so young – her feet not yet crammed into heels, her hair free to kink around her face. And Nate, he’s only four years old. His legs still have that lovely, chubby fold at the ankle and the knee, and his shorts drown his petite frame. I’m blowing bubbles, watching them sprout from the wand and float into the air, perfect spheres shining in the sun. Alice and Nate run this way and that, trying to catch them, squealing as they pop in their cupped hands. More, Nate cries, more bubbles, Violet, more bubbles please.
I aim the wand upwards and spin in a circle. The bubbles fly high into the sky, hovering just out of reach, carried by the breeze and catching on the tops of the buddleias. Too high, Alice cries. Too high, Violet. But I keep on spinning, keep on blowing, spurred on by their laughter and the sense of freedom. Suddenly, Nate screams, Look, Violet, look! Alice and I freeze and track the invisible line travelling from his finger. A single bubble survives the buddleias, climbing higher and higher, bobbing over the garden fence, beneath the telephone cables, up, up and over the tops of the sycamores.
We watch that bubble until it is no more than a tiny dot, floating into the horizon. Nate turns to me. He grins so wide I can see all of his baby teeth, all pearly and wet. Will it land in the stars? Alice and I laugh. Yes, Nate, it will land in the stars. And that’s when I hear it, the rhythmic pip of a hospital machine, like the ones you hear on Holby City. Pip. Pip. Pip. The scent of Dettol and washing powder replaces the perfume of summer.
Alice turns to me. What’s that noise? We look across the lawn, under the flowers, behind the wooden bench. But we can’t find the machine. Pip. Pip. Pip. Nate nuzzles his head into my stomach. I don’t like it, Violet, make it stop. I climb on the stones, peer into the neighbours’ gardens, check the windows into our house. But still no machine. That sense of freedom makes way for a growing sense of dread. Pip. Pip. Pip.
The pips begin to mutate, changing into the hollow tap of knuckles against wood. I wake to Saskia’s stern face, her fist rapping against the edge of my bunk. ‘Come on, Violet. You need to use your charms on that useless hunk of a Gem.’
I’m covered in sweat, my pulse banging repetitively in my ears. ‘Willow,’ I say, my voice muffled with sleep.
She frowns. ‘Yeah, I know his name.’
I blink the grit from eyes and tell myself those pips were just the sound of Saskia’s impatient knocking, or my own blood gushing through my body. There’s no other explanation.