Extract: The Paradise Generation, by Sanna Thompson

When Kieran was twelve, he crashed a "liberated" car deep in the suburban wilds. The accident left his cousin Lucas in hospital and Kieran pretty much done with breaking rules. Four years later, he's reconsidering. Lucas's Allocated recovery time is almost up, and if Kieran can't help him, Lucas is dead. Midnight hospital break-ins and dodgy internet remedies look a lot more tempting when you've tried everything else. Meanwhile, Kieran finds an accomplice in Mira, a girl hiding losses of her own. He can't help being drawn to her, but there's one problem: their Match is outlawed. In their search for solutions, Kieran uncovers truths that make the rules meaningless. The truth could save Lucas, could sanction his match with Mira. Or it could get him killed. This is an extract from The Paradise Generation by Sanna Thompson – out now. 1: Gen-en

I probably should not have been at the hospital at three in the morning. Three a.m. is not technically visiting hours, but there was no way Mum would let me go twice in one week (even if I faked sick), and she doesn’t notice I’m gone at three in the morning. Plus I couldn’t sleep, so what else was I going to do?

“Morning, Kieran.” The duty nurse had his feet up on the desk, face glowing in the light of his tablet.

“Hey. Any chance…?”

“Oh, I dunno about that.” He tapped his tablet against his chin and raised his eyebrows. “How much you gonna give me?”

“Come on, dude… Pretty please? Sugar on top?”

“Bit late for you to be out.”

“Jimmy…”

He grinned and motioned for my wrist. I held it out so he could code my chip with a door pass.

“You don’t know anything about Joshi algorithms, do you?” I asked.

“I’m not doing your homework for you.”

“You’d be more like a tutor than a cheating assistant.”

He ignored me. “All done.”

I sighed and swiped a few mints from the bowl on the desk. “Fine. Thanks.”

“No problem. You want a lollipop too?”

I couldn’t tell if he was teasing, but who passes up a free lollipop at three o’clock in the morning? “Sure,” I said, walking backwards towards the long-term wards, hands held open to catch.

He snorted, rummaged in the desk and threw me two.

Lucas was on the second floor. I took the stairs two at a time, saluted the half-asleep nurse at her station and followed the corridors to his room. His door was open but his windows were on dark mode. I moved around the bed by memory, swiped up the window opacity so a little light shone in, and took the bedside chair.

“Hey, cuz,” I whispered. “You awake?”

Nope. That was the problem with three a.m. visits. I touched his hand and he stirred, blinked, murmured something that might have been “hey Kieran! What’s up?” but probably wasn’t. He hadn’t spoken in four years.

I sighed, dropped my bag and scuffed off my shoes, pulled the other chair close enough to put my feet up, settled both cushions behind me and unwrapped the first lollipop. “Yeah, same old… Couldn’t sleep. Thought I’d come keep you company, maybe soak up some genius. I gotta hand in something for IT in seven hours, and I don’t think what I’ve got is gonna cut it.”

Lucas had been crazy good at IT. He’d been good at pretty much everything, or at least it seemed like it when I was twelve. His sister moved across the Pacific to Seattle that year for a Match, and his parents went too to help her settle in, so he stayed with us for a few months. Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if he hadn’t stayed with us, if I hadn’t nagged him to take me on adventures.

He should have been at uni by now.

“My brain’s not working,” I went on. “You know when you try to concentrate, but then you’re just thinking ‘gotta concentrate’, or you can’t stop thinking of stuff you’re trying not to think of? So I thought maybe if I came over, it’d be like ‘hey! Lucas is all good’, and I can stop thinking about you lying here all by yourself, and maybe I can concentrate on Joshi algorithms. Or, you know, sleep.”

They say talking to people can help them recover, so that’s what I’d been trying to do every week for the last four years. So far it hadn’t worked. Maybe it was just something they told friends and family to stop them going crazy.

“You know what would be amazing? If you could, like, hook up to a tablet and explain Joshi algorithms to me. Or maybe upload your brain to the cloud.” I crunched the lollipop into tiny pieces and twisted the stick between my teeth. “Though I guess if you were in the cloud, then they’d be complaining about you taking up valuable server space. Shit, you can’t win, can you?”

I pulled out my tablet and made another heroic attempt at the Joshi assignment, but my brain wasn’t working any better here so it ended up back in my bag while I updated Lucas on the latest VR releases (a New Zealand doco about extinct giant moa in ancient forests, which I was pretty sure they’d filmed in our local green belt, and cave diving in Mexico).

I was describing the perilous abseil into a sink hole when the lights pulsed on, red. I stopped midsentence. In all my visits, they’d never gone red. Blue, yeah, for an earthquake last year, and I’d had time to duck under a table before the shaking started. There’d been a siren and announcement, too, but there was no announcement now.

On, off, on, off, like a heartbeat. I went to the door. The corridor was deserted, but I could hear the nurse’s strained voice, something about emergency exits.

“You know what’s going on?” I whispered to Lucas. “Anything like this happened before?”

The fire door at the end of the corridor slammed shut, way faster than a heavy roller door should move. I swore, grabbed Lucas’s door and shut it, which meant I could only look out through the wire mesh glass. There was nothing to see in the corridor, anyway, just that pulsing red light. I kept looking. Fire doors meant fire, right? But where was the fire alarm?

The PA chimed, and a male voice came on. “All patients, please remain in your rooms. Repeat: stay in your rooms. We’ll give you further advice as the situation changes.”

“Great,” I muttered, uneasy. “I gotta leave before six, or Mum’s gonna notice…”

Lucas didn’t answer, but his eyes were open now. He didn’t look that worried. But then, he never did.

I checked the door for a lock. There wasn’t one, at least not from this side. Hooray. I pulled out my phone and checked the Pōneke Wellington alerts page, but there wasn’t anything there. Maybe it took a while to register an alert, or maybe this whatever-it-was wasn’t big enough…? I’d barely thought that when a blue-and-red glow hit the glass. No siren. The cops had arrived, yet there was nothing on the alerts.

Something hit the floor above us, hard, like a dropped bowling ball.