Cecelia Ahern – Perfect (страница 8)
There are times when I’ve wanted to give myself up, for the sake of others, but Granddad always stops me. He tells me that I can do more for people over time and they will appreciate it then. It just takes patience.
We see a Whistleblowers’ checkpoint up ahead, and take a sharp left down the back of a cluster of shops, an alley so narrow we have to squeeze by the skips. Carrick stops the car and they pore over the map some more in search of a new route. This happens a few times. The relief that I experienced on seeing Carrick has now dissipated as I realise I’m still not safe. I yearn for that feeling of not having to constantly look over my shoulder.
Beads of sweat glisten on Carrick’s brow. I take the opportunity of sitting behind him to study him. His black hair is closely shaven; his neck, shoulders, everything wide, muscular and strong. Soldier is what I named him in the castle cells before I knew his real name. His cheekbones and jaw are perfectly defined, all hard edges. His eyes, a colour I’ve never been able to work out, still look black in the rear-view mirror. I study them: hard, intense, quick, always analysing, looking for new angles. He catches my stare and, embarrassed, I quickly avert my eyes. When I finally glimpse back I catch him looking at me.
“Home, sweet home,” Lennox says, and I can see them both visibly relax. But I look out the window at our destination and I tense even more. This is not the ‘home’ I was expecting. Or hoping for.
We drive towards a compound surrounded by twenty-feet-high fences with rows of barbed wire. It looks like a prison. Carrick looks back at me again, to garner my reaction, his black eyes fixed on me.
I have broken the most basic rule that Granddad taught me. Don’t trust anyone.
And for the first time ever, I doubt Carrick.
Floodlights light the sky, I can barely see past the front window they’re so bright, and a man with a machine gun charges angrily to the door of the car.
“Uh-oh,” Lennox says. He throws a blanket at me and tells me to cover up and lie down. I do it immediately.
Carrick lowers the window. “Good evening, boss.”
“Good evening?” he splutters. “It’s midnight. What the hell are you thinking? The city is crawling with Whistleblowers, and my guys here are loyal but they’ll start to ask questions if we have too many comings and goings between shift hours. Do you have any idea how much trouble you could have caused being out here at this hour?”
“Could have, but didn’t,” Lennox says.
“Sorry, Eddie. You know we wouldn’t have been out unless it was extremely important.”
He curses under his breath. “You’re good workers but not that good. I could find replacements for you at a moment’s notice.”
“Yes, us Flawed should always be grateful for every opportunity,” Lennox says sarcastically.
“Len.” Carrick silences him.
“It won’t happen again,” Carrick says. “And you know that if anything did happen out there we would never be linked back to here. You have both our words.”
“Scout’s honour,” Lennox adds. “How about you let us in now? I don’t know if you heard but it’s dangerous out here with Whistleblowers sniffing around the place.”
There’s a long silence as Eddie thinks it over and I feel the tension again. If he cuts us loose, we won’t survive one night out here, off the radar, three Flawed. No more than two Flawed are allowed to travel or be together,
“Okay. Don’t think I can’t see a body under the blanket. I just hope it’s alive. I don’t know what you’re up to, but I’m not running a refugee camp here; he just better be a good worker.”
“The best,” Carrick says, and I smile under the blanket.
“What is this place?” I ask, after we’ve driven through the front gates and they tell me it’s safe to remove the blanket. I look out the window and strain my neck to take in the height of what looks like a nuclear plant.
“This is a CCU plant. Next door is a CDU plant. They’re sister companies.”
“What do they do?” I ask as Lennox jumps out of the Jeep before it stops and disappears into the shadows. Carrick parks the Jeep.
“Carbon capture utilisation and carbon dioxide utilisation,” he replies.
I look at him with even more confusion.
“I thought you were the whizz-kid.”
“In maths, not in whatever this is.”
“Come on, I’ll give you a tour.”
Carrick holds the car door open for me and his manners remind me of how he was raised in a Flawed At Birth institution. F.A.B. institutions are for children of Flawed parentage. The Guild’s reasoning for taking these children is to dilute the Flawed gene pool, and these special schools retrain their Flawed brains. Carrick was taken from his Flawed parents at the age of five and was raised in a state school boasting the best facilities, education and standards. The Guild, the state, raised him to be strong, to be one of them, to be perfect, but when he graduated, he turned on them by doing the one thing F.A.B. children are told not to do: he sought out his parents. He was branded on his chest for disloyalty to society.
Carrick is eighteen years old and a giant of a man; his only flaw was to want to find his parents. He walks me around the compound explaining, using a key card to access the doors.
There are a dozen metal containers that look like shuttles side by side, the kind of thing you’d see at a brewery plant, or at a NASA facility, looking like they’re about to lift off.
“As you know, the earth produces more carbon dioxide than can be absorbed. Carbon points have risen to the highest levels for eight hundred thousand years. Most of it comes from oil or coal, fossil fuels buried underground for millions of years. It’s a polluting waste product, so this CCU facility harnesses it and puts it to better use as a resource. Reusing the carbon to create new products.”
“How does it do that?”
“It captures the carbon dioxide from power plants, steel and cement works, or collects it from the air. It extracts the carbon, which provides the raw material for new products like green fuels, methanol, plastics, pharmaceuticals, building materials.”
“This is government-owned?” I ask, wondering why on earth he’s brought us here. How can we be safe in a state-owned factory when they’re the very people we’re running from?
“It’s private. This is a pilot plant, everything here is research, just testing, nothing is on the market yet. Whistleblowers can’t carry out surprise searches for Flawed without prior warning, which is, at minimum, usually twenty-four hours’ notice.”
“That’s why you chose here?”
“I didn’t choose it. I followed the others.”
“The others?”
“I’ll introduce you later. First, I’ll give you the tour. There are four units. This is the capture regeneration section.” He swipes his card and the red light on the security panel turns to green. He pulls the door open and lets me walk in first. Once inside, I see that the enormous plant is like an airport hangar, with more containers and pipes stretching in every direction, ladders climbing up the walls and ceilings to access them. Carrick hands me a high-visibility jacket and hard hat.
“This is where I work. Don’t worry, I don’t do anything important, just drive the forklift, so you’re going to get this in layman’s terms.”
“I won’t notice the difference,” I say, looking around, completely overwhelmed by the futuristic metal facility.
“This container here is where the flue gas is routed to a pretreatment section. It cools, then the flue gas is sent to the absorber column, to remove the carbon dioxide. The flue gas enters the bottom of the absorber and flows upwards.” He walks as he talks, pointing at the equipment, and I follow. “It reacts with the solvent solution, where a bunch of stuff happens.”
I smile.
“The treated flue gas is sent here to what’s called the stack so it can be released to the atmosphere. The carbon dioxide liquid leaves the absorber and is pumped to the regeneration section where the CO2 chemical absorption process is reversed. The CO2 liquid leaves the bottom of the absorber and is sent to heat exchangers where the temperature rises. More stuff happens. Then the carbon dioxide vapour is sent to the carbon dioxide product compressor. Which is over here.” We stop at the product compressor. “And there it is. Want to know anything else?”
“Yes. Who are the others you followed here?”
He nods. “We’re getting to that.”
We leave the factory behind us and take quite a walk in the enormous compound to a less futuristic side of the facility. This new section feels more residential, contains rows and rows of white Portakabins, all layered on top of one another, five levels high, ten boxes across, steel balconies and staircases connecting them. We enter a simple one-story concrete building with a reception area, with a desk that’s empty at this late hour, a few chairs, and technological and scientific magazines scattered on the coffee table. A beefy security guard is asleep in an armchair in the corner.