I smoothed out my smooth shirt. “That’s it.”
“Cool… But if you changed your mind, you could do a lot more than that in half a year.”
Five months, I corrected her mentally. It had already been almost four weeks since the doctor’s prognosis.
I felt an urge to tell her about all those nightmarish plans about to hit the world. How would she react? Think me strange, hide, tell other friends or notify the police? Mark was right when he had told Andrew I wouldn’t do anything to jeopardize the safety and survival of my family. Emma might not even take me seriously and think that the shock of cancer spreading through my body had made me lose my mind.
My meetings with Mark have become an almost everyday affair and I felt like a junkie, going to him to get my fix. It was a terrible analogy in his case which I would never mention out loud, but it was true. I was addicted to the flow of new information. I wanted to make sure that their grand plan was really thought through to the last detail, and that in the case of any kind of trouble, they had a dozen unexpected solutions and plans B, C, D… Anything to ensure Dad and Ruby’s safety!
After each of his explanations my head was buzzing with yet more questions, like fireworks going off inside my mind.
“Rotorua, New Zealand,” I read aloud the name of a place marked out on a map that Mark showed me. There were notes written around it in abbreviations I didn’t understand. “Why there?”
“I don’t know,” he shrugged, although there was no indifference in his voice. “I didn’t choose the place. As far as I know, Rotorua had already been selected when I was joining The Collective.”
I looked up from the map, taken aback. “You never wanted to know why?”
“To be honest, no. I’m mainly focused on the plans for releasing the plague going ahead. There’s no way I’m ever going to go to New Zealand, but I trust the leadership to have chosen well. It didn’t seem important to know their reasons. Does that make sense?”
I nodded, although I personally found a huge interest in them.
“The Collective had spent years choosing the right place,” Mark continued. He must have seen how desperate I was for details. “Rotorua must fulfil all the requirements. When you say New Zealand, everyone imagines its nature. Green, lush, life-giving. The Collective thinks that people should go back to living in harmony with nature, and where else would it be better than New Zealand? The conditions for agriculture are good, and so is the climate… This is just me speculating of course, I may be wrong.”
It made sense.
“How many people… are you going to save?”
“This is another thing I can only guess about,” he said, apologetically this time. “Given how many stations there are around the world, and given that The Collective wants the new community to be diverse and multicultural, I’d say at least two hundred. Maybe three hundred.”
“Including the children?”
“Yeah, I think so.”
Andrew was watching us from his desk, but didn’t add anything to our conversation, despite the fact that his knowledge, I guessed, must be even more extensive than Mark’s. Maybe he was still angry with his colleague for bypassing protocol and taking me in, even though The Collective was working fine without me.
I tailored my next question especially for him. “Why did you decide to let me join The Collective?”
Andrew didn’t look up but stopped turning pages in his folder and his left hand froze above the keyboard. He was listening; he must have raised this topic with Mark many times.
“For several reasons,” Mark admitted. “The most important one being that the idea of going to New Zealand is going to sound much more natural coming from you than from strangers. Your reasons and persuasion will be much easier for Frank to accept than if they came directly from us. Didn’t you say he’d agreed straight away, without hesitation?”
I nodded.
“Because you’re his daughter. The Collective doesn’t underestimate friend and family ties, you know.”
I wondered what kinds of persuasion techniques they were going to use on Dad, but it didn’t matter anymore. He’d already agreed to go to New Zealand. If only he knew it would turn into a permanent stay… I didn’t doubt that neither Dad nor Ruby would ever return to Australia. That was a truly strange idea, after all, this was their home.
“Right at the start you mentioned that to be accepted into The Collective, you have to fulfil certain requirements. What are they?”
Mark paused for a moment, scratching his head awkwardly. “Well… I don’t know about the very beginning, how they were putting The Collective together ten years ago, but there are a lot of psychologists and psychiatrists in the leadership, and they thought that it was better to mainly add people who… let’s say people who have nothing to lose. Those without a family or anything else they’d want to live for. Those with really bad experiences, who have maybe even thought about taking their lives…”
I gaped at him. “Those people are deciding the fate of the entire human population?”
“Don’t be so high and mighty,” he said darkly. “Most of them wouldn’t be in this situation if it weren’t for other people.”
I felt embarrassed. Wasn’t I looking after a small five-year old girl at the station just the other week, who’d been beaten and raped by her own father for years? Didn’t I wonder if the sad, quiet girl would ever recover? I was reading to her from books and watching her colouring a picture of a gingerbread house. She was sitting there quietly, and when I wanted to pat her tiny arm in encouragement, she flinched away in fear. Now I was wondering if she, when she grew up, would be a suitable candidate to join The Collective. She might be more than happy to take part in their activities…
“I’m sorry,” I blurted out.
“We have to
