The Memory Keepers Read Free Page B

of school). Handmaids were traditionally paired with their charges at a young age to create a sisterly bond. Dolly had only been around nine when Alba was born, and she learnt her role by shadowing and aiding Alba’s mother’s handmaid, who looked after Alba until Dolly was old enough to take on the role fully. She was still young, in her mid-twenties now.
    Alba had heard some of the other girls at school talking down about their handmaids. Even though a lot of servants were from the lesser families in North, many were from South, and there was always that divide running between families and their help. An invisible wall, a barrier slicing the two worlds neatly in half.
    North.
    South.
    Light, and its shadow.
    But there was none of that between Alba and Dolly. If anything, Alba felt as though Dolly were the only one with her on her side of the wall. Everything else in North was on the other side; detached, a façade of glittering glass and jewels and fake smiles. A world she never quite felt part of.
    ‘Did you have Professor Nightingale again today, by any chance?’ Dolly asked, grinning down at Alba.
    She rolled her eyes. ‘Why else do you think I’ve turned into a zombie?’
    Dolly laughed, and it was a sound like bells, bright peals that drifted down around them, as soft and light as summer rain, and for the millionth time Alba wished that it was Dolly who could be her mother, her sister, her family, and take her far, far away from here.

3
SEVEN
    ‘What an effing waste of time that was,’ Seven grumbled to himself as he pulled off the metal cap and let it drop on its cables to the side of the memory-machine. He rubbed his temples where the pincers had dug. ‘That’s eight minutes and thirty-one seconds of my life I’m never getting back. You’re going in the bin, R.L.S. And you!’ He detached the wristbands from his arms and waggled a finger at the room. ‘You better get your act together. Dunno why that skid was in that cabinet. It should’ve been filed under
So Boring Your Eyes Will Fall Out.
’
    Grinning at his own joke, he glanced round the room, half-waiting for a laugh he knew wouldn’t come. There was no cabinet under that name. Instead, he’d stuck the label to the bin behind the door.
    Seven pushed the machine to the corner of the room, distracted now. How did that skid end up in the
Fear, Desperation and General Wetting-your-pants Kind of Stuff
cabinet? Every new memory he thieved was filed away after its first surf. There was no way he’d have ever considered that one as anywhere near pant-wetting stuff. It was just a vast, empty space of blackness that seemed to have no end, and the low buzz of voices whose words he couldn’t make out. He must have made a mistake when sorting it.
    But as Seven slipped out of the room, locking the door quickly behind him, an unbidden thought fluttered at the corner of his mind:
I’m a skid-thief. I don’t make mistakes.
    I can’t afford to.
    Seven had a few hours to kill before going to the skid-market that night, so he spent the rest of the afternoon on the roof of the flats where he lived. Because Butler often overheated, he was limited to just one or two surfs a day. If he didn’t have to worry about breaking his memory-machine for good, Seven knew he’d be on it all the time. There wasn’t much else to do around South.
    The roof had become his private hang-out place. He told himself it was because he liked the view – which was true – but he ignored the other truth. That the group of big boys who hung in the courtyard, smoking and drinking cheap beer and vandalising every inanimate object in sight, saw Seven as an experiment to find the limits of how many punches a teenage boy can take and still stand (hint – not that many). So he’d learnt to stay well away whenever their voices echoed up from the courtyard.
    Seven could hear them now from where he sat on the edge of the rooftop, thirty floors up. He was positioned facing the city towards