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  ‘Well, maybe we need the vaccines. I’m a bit scared, not having them. This girl died at school. They said it was the head lice virus. She got a nose bleed in Science. Her hanky just got redder and redder till it was full of blood. Then we saw it coming from her mouth.’

  ‘Yeah, three kids from our school died. Did you hear the rumour that Pharmix might have introduced the viruses just so people would be scared enough to accept Endorsement?’

  ‘Oh no, that’s sick. Insane. I can’t even think about that.’ Marti shuffled over so her lap was in moonlight, and pushed the sleeping bag round her waist, pulled up her sleeve. She scratched at the piece of Sellotape holding the bandage in place. ‘Look, Derik. See how close I got? Come and look.’

  I did. Put my nose almost to the pale skin of her wrist and saw the centimetre-wide slit with its fine crust of blood.

  ‘Endorsement, stage one. Failed. They’d made the cut and the woman was just going to put in the filament — what’s it called, the wand — it touched my skin and I went into this atomic reaction. I just screamed and whacked out like a total maniac. I hadn’t planned to. I thought I had no choice about getting done but my body … something in me wouldn’t take it.’ She touched the scar.

  ‘So what did they do?’

  ‘Gave Mum a couple of pills to dope me with … no, to ‘settle’ me so I’d go back no trouble next day. Tomorrow.

  ‘Huh! They didn’t know me — not even my parents — and how determined I’d be after that. I just took off this afternoon.’ Her mouth was pulled down, her eyes shut. ‘I can’t think about them yet. I have to work out how I’m going to survive, then I’ll worry about them. I rang and said I’m okay, with a friend.’

  Marti’s hands smoothed her plaits and her front, as if her mother’s eyes were licking over her, checking her out. ‘What about you?’ she asked.

  My stomach clenched. It was easier just to think about the swish of cloth on cardboard, the heat of my socked feet in the sleeping bag.

  Suddenly I recalled Mum kissing me good-bye five forever-days before. And Dad’s hug, his ‘Back before you know it’, and his too-long look. They were worried. But they had to go.

  ‘My parents knew about the whole thing from when it was first discussed on medical sites on the Net.’ When Marti’s eyes widened, I paused. This was information I’d told no-one else. But those eyes were so nice, so full of concern. After the last few horrible days, deciding all alone what to do, it was such a relief to talk, I couldn’t stop. ‘They knew a big enough epidemic would set off the Endorsement experiment, and that New Zealand was going to be the guinea pig for the world. They use us because we’re cut off from everywhere, easy to monitor. Nobody expected it to happen so soon though.

  ‘But Mum and Dad actually helped set up the feeding network for Dunedin, just in the last two weeks. So people won’t starve while they’re trying to find a way to stop it.’ The lump in my throat was pure pride. My parents were going to help save us, save New Zealand. Imagine having witless parents like Marti’s who didn’t have a clue about Endorsement.

  ‘They’ve got this meeting in Germany with other people opposed to it, who are going to monitor New Zealand’s response and campaign against the whole thing. They went over last week. Officially, they’re attending a conference in Berlin on citizen compliance and how to make the Endorsement machines more user-friendly.’

  I bit my gums, both sides. What if the national authorities found out their real purpose in going? Would they manage to get back in unendorsed and find me? I couldn’t see my parents nesting down in an adjacent cardboard box. They’d have much better ideas. Contacts. They’d get our house back. Surely.

  ‘At least my sisters are only nine and eleven,’ I said. ‘Two years until Ella has to get done.’

  ‘Did you leave them behind?’ Marti sounded shocked.

  ‘They went to our grandparents in Mosgiel. Gran and Pops said all along, since they’re old, they’d get endorsed so they could shop for us, get what we need.’

  ‘My parents’ll be queuing to get done. Mum’s never been all that well. She tried the free medicines; now maybe this’ll help her. I don’t know.’ Marti was still sitting up, rocking herself against the cardboard.

  I had the shivers, too, talking about all of this.

  Marti slid back down and we fell silent again.

  I woke before she did and wormed out into the empty playground. I peed behind the bike shed and found a tap to fill our water bottles. It was hard to know how careful we had to be. Endorsement was such a huge job, I figured it’d be a while before they started seriously tracking down abstainers, although Marti’s parents might be looking out for her. I clung to the buildings and the shade. Grey cloud was scudding across the city, letting the sun through in short warming bursts.

  I sat outside the box and sorted through my backpack; emptied everything and put it back — clothes, folded and rolled; exercise book; pills, counted and tucked away. I did that each morning and it helped me feel real when we’d spent the previous day wandering the streets without buying anything, avoiding anyone we recognised, hardly talking except to each other.

  I checked last night’s aluminium pie plate again. Feeders were supposed to give a message where to go on the next tide. But the only scratches were the ones Marti had made with her knife. There’d been nothing on the paper bag either. A skinny dog had snatched that away and shredded it between its paws.

  I laid the city map out on the asphalt. It looked so contained and tidy. But in my mind’s eye I could see a black line scrawling back and forth through the parks and the green belt — the ring of wild forest through Dunedin’s hill suburbs — Marti’s and my route when things hotted up and we’d have to keep moving.

  I ran my finger down Battery Street and up Lowe. The Asian shop was meant to be a feeding station, and Serpentines Restaurant down by the railway, but I’d heard you had to be dressed like customers to go there. I picked at the patch on my trackies. I’d been thinking ‘warm and comfortable’ when I left home, not ‘dining out’. And Marti, with her baggy pants and hoody, was big on the old skatey look.

  When she woke we drank as much water as we could hold, to fill our stomachs. We hid our sleeping bags in the bushes up behind the school. I wanted to bowl the box up there too, but Marti said it’d stand out too much against the green. In the end we folded it flat and tucked it back in the bike shed where we’d found it.

  We hesitated at the cast-iron school gates, as though we were leaving the one safe place. Then Marti said, ‘Huh!’ and ran across the road. She whipped a rolled newspaper from the letterbox in the holly hedge.

  ‘Good thinking,’ I said. ‘Where do they put the tides?’

  ‘No idea.’ She squatted and spread the paper on the footpath.

  I’m a New Man! shouted the front-page photo of the mayor with his chain, grinning, holding out his wrist.

  ‘They’ve made the photo hazy,’ said Marti, ‘so you can’t see the nu-skin properly. Sick, eh?’

  Standing by the gate I heard the door of the house below. A man in a dressing gown stepped out and called back inside, ‘Santy come and do a wee?’

  ‘Quick. Someone’s coming.’ I knelt beside her, snatching the back half of the paper. We flapped out pages, slapped them down. ‘Here it is, right at the back.’ I crouched over the undulating line. ‘Tides for Dunedin … memorise this: high at seven fifty-six, low at two-oh-four.’

  The newspaper was a scrunched mess by the time Marti had it rolled again, and the Dressing Gown was at his gate. He cleared his throat. Marti stood up with a huge toothpaste smile and handed him the paper.

  ‘That was unbelievably helpful, thank you so much.’

  Santy had done his wee; he was a demented yellow duster, jabbering and smashing at the gate.

  The Dressing Gown gaped silently at his newspaper and we hightailed off down the road.

  ‘Seven fifty-six!’ Marti stopped dead. ‘What is it now?’

  I held out
my watch. ‘Eight ten.’ We pulled faces.

  ‘Next tide at two,’ I said, picturing the great hollow of my stomach, the swill of hydrochloric acid waiting for food. ‘We’ll have to find something.’

  The streets were weirdly quiet — the third day into Endorsement week you were meant to stay home unless you were going out to get done. They’d tried to get adults through first. Now the cars that passed carried teenagers, and groups of them were walking towards the town hall which was the Endorsement station for this area.

  ‘At least we look like that’s where we’re heading,’ said Marti. ‘Quick, I’ve got to go to the toilet.’

  ‘You should’ve gone in the bushes.’

  ‘I did. It’s all the water and no food.’

  I strode down beside her until, just before the town hall, we ducked along the library alley. The library was open ‘for reading only’ from ten o’clock.

  ‘Damn. Where else can I go?’

  ‘There are some by the visitors’ centre. Or Hoyts.’ I jogged on ahead to check. But everything was closed. ‘Can you go over in the car park?’

  ‘I’m not a guy,’ Marti snapped, crossing her arms over her chest, as if that would help. ‘I’ll have to go in the town hall.’

  ‘Yeah?’ My heart pounced. But there were crowds pouring in there and only one police car on the street outside. ‘Is this where you went yesterday?’ I touched her wrist.

  ‘No. Our family medical centre’s doing it too. You stay out here if you want.’

  ‘No.’ No way was I letting Marti out of my sight, except at the toilet door.

  We swirled with the crowd, through the big double doors. I saw an old teacher, the woman from the corner dairy, kids from my school. I turned away from them all.

  It was hard to believe this wasn’t just another Stage Challenge, another Last Night of the Proms we were attending. Hard to believe that inside there was a whole orchestra of doctors, nurses and technicians waiting to entertain the crowds with ‘just a little tickle on the arm’, just a little change in lifestyle. Permanent.

  The toilet door waggled shut after Marti. I kept my eyes on it and backed against the wall at the base of the stairs.

  ‘Derik, hey man.’ A hand flapped at my shoulder. I looked up to see Disco leaning over the bannister. His feet were still climbing, his head and shoulders dangling over, as he looked at me with eyes full of fright. ‘You been in yet?’ He tapped his wrist.

  I made a jerk with my chin that might have meant yes or no and looked back at the door. I felt a squeeze of betrayal. I liked the guy: Disco short for ‘disconnected’. He looked like his hands and feet would never land where they were headed — except they always did.

  But right now I didn’t want any complications. I glanced up at him lurching onto the landing, twitched my eyes away when he looked back down at me. Disco disappeared into the main auditorium. He’d heard me arguing in class against Endorsement — badly because I’d never followed my parents’ reasoning all that closely — when it still seemed just a crazy idea, but I’d learned to shut up lately, as the reality came closer.

  Marti was taking forever. I shielded my eyes from the crowd. Music had started up — an eerie panpipe warble over the PA system — then it cut out mid-note. Ha! Someone had realised you couldn’t have Endorsement candidates conjuring up misty hillsides and wilderness. Something sweet as caramel sauce oozed out in its place.

  Marti was suddenly beside me, her face red, hair freshly tortured into two thick plaits. ‘Let’s go.’ She dodged through the crowd and close behind her I saw the white of her neck where the hair had been lifted.

  We were almost at the door when we heard a scream: the strangled, cracked notes of a kid whose voice is breaking. There was a ruck at the top of the closest stairs, then the crowd was dividing to let Disco through. Snot and tears shone on his face. People leaned away as he charged, hiccupping, down.

  At the bottom a man touched his arm. Disco whirled around, clocking the man on the ear with his spinning arm, and ran onto the street. On the opposite staircase there was another boy about our age, worming fast and silent down the staircase, clutching his wrist in front of him. Blood oozed between his fingers.

  Marti pulled me outside and sucked at the fresh air. Disco was gone. Marti blinked away brimming tears. ‘Don’t let’s ever go back in there. Hell must be like that.’ We began to walk down, away from the town hall. ‘This girl was crying in the next cubicle like her mother had died. When she came out to wash her hands I saw the … synthetic skin ….’ Marti gagged and swallowed. ‘So real, and so creepy.’ She held her own wrist to her mouth.

  ‘Shall we go down to the water?’

  Marti nodded.

  We felt the pull of it like a deep cool current — the waterfront where, in spite of the oily scum and plastic bags like wrecked jellyfish, the salt wind and crying gulls reminded you that some things were still too big, too free to ever be collected up and endorsed.

  WE WERE like bloodhounds, sniffing all the way — at the golden cheesy waft from Barstucks, the hot-bread rope of scent from Krusts. The smell from Coffee to Go made me drool and I don’t even like the stuff. We stood outside Crammers and stared in at the woman wedging a fat yellow muffin into her mouth.

  ‘Why can’t we try our Scope-cards?’

  ‘They’ve made the old ones invalid already.’

  ‘Wash dishes for scraps?’

  ‘They’d want to know why we aren’t getting endorsed. Might report us.’ I glanced around then snatched a fresh white bag off the top of a full rubbish bin. It released a sprinkle of sugar, then it was empty.

  ‘Derik!’

  ‘Reflex,’ I said. ‘I wouldn’t eat anything with bite marks.’ But I wasn’t so sure. We used to test each other on the way home from school: ‘Would you rather pay ten bucks or eat an apple Tracy Gould’s been slurping?’ ‘Rather lick ice-cream off the footpath or jump from the gym roof?’ Right now I’d take the apple and lick the juice off Tracy’s chin. I’d jackhammer up the piece of footpath and suck it clean.

  We caught the first sea-whiff from the top of the railway bridge. The shining rails reached both ways, but both ways led to other towns, other cities where people were getting their veins hooked up to the Natural Chemistry Unit. Everywhere they were buying the idea that this week they were on the road to becoming healthier, stronger, that they might get to live a hundred and fifty, two hundred years … who knew, maybe forever. We went down the steps towards the sea and sucked in air that carried the flashing memory, for me, of spray-wet sails, of sizzling through the waves on my grandfather’s old yacht.

  We walked around the esplanade and down onto the wooden platform two metres above the water. The salty wind pierced our clothes. It felt good at first — fresh and clean.

  Usually the place is dotted with people fishing but there was no-one else today. We tossed pink gravel from the tussock garden into the water and knelt down to peer under the wharf at the gloomy seaweedy posts.

  ‘Fish,’ I said. ‘If we get hungry enough.’

  ‘I’m hungry enough,’ said Marti, sitting back, tugging a splinter of wood off the wharf edge. ‘What’s in there?’

  ‘Spotties. Tiny with heaps of bones.’

  ‘How would you catch them? With a snotty hanky?’ She hugged one knee, pressed her face to it.

  I sat near her with my feet hanging. ‘I’ve been thinking I’ll go home and nick a few things.’

  ‘Nick? From your own home?’

  ‘It’ll be like that. People living there. Have to wait till they’ve gone.’

  ‘Who?’ Marti swivelled round to see me.

  ‘These research students are house-sitting, three of them that Dad knew from varsity.

  ‘Thought he knew. The plan was, I’d stay there during the week ’cause it’s close to school, and go to my grandparents’ at weekends.

  ‘But then, bang, Endorsement’s on and two of the students came home yesterday showing off their new skin. The other on
e was waiting, couldn’t decide, but I wasn’t going to hang around for them to dob me in.’

  ‘There’s no school this week. Why didn’t you go to your grandparents’?’ Marti stuck her chin out in challenge.

  ‘Could have. Still could but I wanted to see what was happening, see how people get on.’ I couldn’t bear to be stuck in my grandparents’ sleepy satellite town during what Dad called the biggest social experiment in history. Besides, too many of their neighbours had nothing better to do than check up on each other — and on each other’s visitors.

  Marti had both her knees hugged up now. ‘But you can go there any time.’

  ‘I won’t. Maybe I’ll get a message to them, to my sisters, but I’m going to stay here.’ I looked towards the city crouched into the hills. ‘See how the feeding network goes, first-hand.’ I recalled recent evenings with my parents, sitting three-a-breast in front of the computer — this was the only thing about Endorsement I’d paid really close attention to — chasing obscure websites with coded entries, watching the map of feeding sites slowly grow. They’d worked so hard to get it set up, but it had taken a leap-start when Endorsement had been brought forward suddenly.

  ‘But you could,’ she insisted.

  ‘Yeah, I could, and you could too,’ I flung back at her. ‘No-one has to sleep out on the streets.’

  ‘Don’t get snickety. I’m not trying to be some kind of hero. I just wondered if you’re going to …’

  ‘Leave you?’ I said. I looked at the whitened fingernails clutching her knee, the unravelling plait, the tight line of her mouth, shook my head. ‘I won’t. When my parents get back you can join us. But what about yours? Won’t they be looking for you?’

  Marti craned her neck to see my watch. ‘I’ve got eight hours till they do.’ She stood up abruptly. ‘I’m too cold. Can we walk back?’

  I trailed her along the waterfront, through the streets and back up the railway steps.