Composite Creatures by Caroline Hardaker (best story books to read .TXT) 📗

asleep. Doing this would mean I was breaking every contract, every law. I didn’t for a second think that the Grove would just let us go. We might be hunted down. If Art wasn’t involved then at least he’d be left out of it.

I didn’t want to leave him, I didn’t, so don’t think I didn’t care. We might have been matched by Easton Grove but we’d worked at this together. They couldn’t have known the system would work so well. Art wasn’t perfect but I liked him. I understood him. He’d be OK. No matter what I did, Art would still be a member of Easton Grove, he’d still be under their protection. If his book turned out to be everything he’d promised them it would be, they might make him his own ovum organi and he wouldn’t need anyone to share it with. She would pump with his blood alone. Look at him with only his face. He could be better off.

But Nut only had this one chance. She was more than the sum of her parts.

She was Nut.

I carried some jeans and a dirty jumper downstairs, coaxing Nut behind me with a teasingly closed fist. Thinking I had inside there some piece of human food, she followed silently with saucer-eyes, absolutely on her best behaviour. When we reached the kitchen, I gave up the game and started pulling out tins of her food and shoving them into the holdall. Nut grunted in disappointment and leaned back into her haunches, flexing her fingers back before tapping them on the wooden floor impatiently.

What else would Nut want to bring? It didn’t even cross my mind to grab photos of Mum, or her paintings, or anything else that was me before all this happened. Would Nut want her toys? Her own food bowl? Or would she be OK without the past? Would she adapt?

I grabbed them regardless and lifted the duffle bag onto the kitchen table, ready to go. The rain was still tipping against the windows, so I grabbed Art’s jacket and snatched my keys from the windowsill, already mentally coordinating how I’d fit Nut in the back seat. She was too big for the footwell, maybe the boot would work…

And then there was a knock at the front door and I dropped my keys.

I froze. Acid cut the back of my throat.

The letterbox. “Norah?” A woman’s voice.

I pressed myself back into the kitchen and out of sight. Silent.

“We can help, Norah. We have answers.” A man. He sounded young. And then, silky smooth, like warm milk, “It’s going to be alright.”

I know that I could’ve gone through the back door with Nut. There was a gate at the side of the fence. There was an escape route right there, feet from where we stood. But in that second everything changed. I was a child, longing for the arms of those who would make everything better. Feed me sugar. Hold me tight in the dark.

A moment later, the key was in the lock and it slammed against the chain.

“Norah? We’re here to help you. We know everything.”

Deep in my head, tick tick tick tick tick, the pens clicking in those early assessments. The need to please. The desperate desire for someone to wrap me in their arms and tell me that everything would be alright. I clunked to the door on wooden feet. Perhaps part of me still thought I could deter them and smuggle Nut out when they’d gone. You’d think that’s what it was, but I can’t remember thinking that at all. The truth is that I didn’t think a thing. I just wanted it to end. Ownership of myself had expired, the real owners were back in the house.

Small and indistinct, I unhooked the chain and flung the door wide, beaming my broadest grin. This was the first of January after all. Happy New Year.

“Hell-o Nor-ah,” crooned Fia.

She stood on the step clad in a white puffer jacket which reached down to her ankles. Her round face was buried in a nest of black fur, and split by a tight-lipped smile. Behind her stood two other figures in the snow: the bald man, Mr Martin, and the young placement student from mine and Art’s last check-up together during the summer. Nathan. Why was he still there? That was months ago.

“Happy New Year, Fia. And Nathan,” I breathed. Light, light as air.

Fia clutched a briefcase close to her chest, “Will you let us come in?”

I showed them through to the living room, nudging closed the door to the kitchen with the tip of my toe and muttering, “Keep the warm air in.” Thank God I wasn’t already wearing my shoes. Or Art’s coat.

Fia peeled off her parka and offered it to me in both arms, “Otherwise I won’t feel the benefit, right?”

Why were they here? How did they know? Were they listening, had they bugged the house after all? I fingered my leather ID bracelet, flipping it over to see if there were any little holes or a catch for a battery or something. Nothing. It just looked like what it was, a piece of metal, a microchip, and a strip of blue leather. Besides, I hadn’t said anything out loud, and I was still in the house. If I was being tracked, I hadn’t done anything wrong yet.

I hung the sodden mound of fabric on the coat stand and quickly checked that Nut was still in the kitchen. She was, and she was starting to scratch the ground the way she always did before the territory-run.

When I returned to the living room – light as air, light as air – Art was there, already dressed in jeans and the same shirt as the day before. He was sitting on the chair and had been gesticulating with his left hand while rubbing his chin with the right. Leaning forward like that, the cotton hung from his middle and fell in folds around his waist. It