The Hive: A Young Adult Dystopian Romance (The Enigma Trilogy Book 1) Read online

  But Finn’s lips quirked at the very idea of anyone dressing up in any kind of finery, especially as she entered the town square through the interior stone fence that Lady Miriam had magicked into existence using her stunning power of Manifestation. Pretty as it was, the town square was full of people dressed in the polar opposite of finery who like her, had come down to the common for the weekly assembly. Some people still had working sewing machines, and plenty of people had learned how to hand-stitch since the Strike... but producing cloth was the tricky part, and doing so was still very low on everyone’s priority list, so most people still wore their old clothes every day, or traded them in for other people’s old clothes at the second-hand boutique that Michelle and Cara now worked at, Suave. No one who lived in Laidlaw actually looked ratty, because the king’s vanity wouldn’t have allowed that, but almost everybody looked faded- like they’d been left out in the sun for so long that the vibrancy had been baked out of them and their clothes.

  Luckily for everyone’s sense of vanity though, no one anywhere else was doing any better, so it was impossible for anyone to look unfashionable in a world devoid of fashion, and luckily for Finn, the uniform that the school students and castle staff wore were the nicest outfits around. They didn’t all match, because it was difficult to forage up enough grey skirts and trousers and white shirts to fit everybody, and Finn lamented the fact that the long skirt she’d been given looked so daggy on her tiny frame, but Lady Miriam had manifested emblems with the new nation’s blue and white flag onto each one, so they all kind of looked the same, which mattered more to Finn than she would have liked to admit. She’d never had a full wardrobe before, but things were even more dire now that she’d outgrown most of her old stuff but was still too small to fit into most of her mother’s stuff, so she was relieved that she didn’t have to try and plan a separate outfit to wear every single day. Also, given how often, she felt like an outsider, it was nice to have something that announced: ‘I belong in here.’

  Finn reprimanded herself often for caring about such shallow things when just two hundred feet away, on the opposite side of the fence, there were Outsiders who would have traded lives with her, and called her woes blessings as they did... but then again, as the crowd parted for Finn the ‘Potential’ Enigma to break through, and allowed her to catch a glimpse of the Hive girls clustered together at the front of the stage in their own matching uniforms, she knew deep down that there wasn’t a teenage girl in the world who would have traded places with her if that meant attending a new school not only with bullies from your old one, but with bullies that had evolved from being second-tier queen bees to potentially being the most powerful beings on earth with magic in their blood.

  I’m just like them! Finn reminded herself then, swallowing hard when Georgia Janks and her own, over-achieving clique stepped out of a separate part of the crowd and began to saunter down the alley that had been created for them all towards the front, no doubt to jockey their way to the lip of the stage. I was dosed with the same level of radiation at the exact same time! So, if they have a chance of developing powers and making a difference someday then so do I!

  Finn knew that she was right, at least from a technical standpoint, but as Georgia Janks turned and looked her way, letting her long, sandy-blonde plait whip out behind her like the tail of a horse, Finn felt her own steps falter. Then, Georgia looked her up and down and smirked in a way that said: ‘Oh good! It must be ruin Finn’s day O’clock!’ and Finn lost her ability to believe that she had the potential to survive high school again- let alone the end of the world.

  CHAPTER TWO

  You didn’t have to know Amory Laidlaw well to understand that he was the kind of alpha male who’d been finding a way to demand everyone’s absolute attention since birth, and Finn blew out a thin, sly breath between pursed lips when she saw him step out onto the stage then, because Georgia immediately lost interest in Finn, turned and strode forward before the crowd could close in, sliding into the front row beside Cara and using her shoulder to jostle the other girl out of her way, like a groupie at a concert.

  Most girls, including Finn, would have flinched away from Georgia on reflex, but Cara and Georgia had been cut from the same, heavy-duty cloth, so Cara widened her stance when she realised who had intruded upon her personal space- resting her hands on her hips and then cocking her head and one hip Georgia’s way, so that her fluffy mane of honey blonde hair swung in Georgia’s face, reclaiming the space around her. Always dramatic, Georgia recoiled like Cara’s hair was made of seaweed, but by playing up her disgust, she’d surrendered the ground she’d been trying to gain, which allowed Cara to win without causing a scene, which everyone knew was the only way to win a female-pissing contest in the public eye: slyly.

  Finn gave the two girls a moment to settle, and they did so like agitated horses- shifting their weight, blowing out their breath and swishing their long locks again like tails- before she moved forward to stand a safe distance behind them, smirking a little as she did. She didn’t like either of them and they didn’t like her... but if she had a single blessing to count, it was that they disliked one another more.

  Well, it’s not that they dislike one another more than they dislike me… Finn silently amended then, enviously looking from the back of Cara’s perfect head, to the back of Georgia’s. Cara’s hair was thick, fluffy and a dark golden blonde while Georgia’s was long, sleek and pale. Each girl was evidently proud of their hair and wielded it when they moved like it was a fifth limb, but neither of them actually ever did anything fun with it, which frustrated Finn, because if she’d had hair like that, she would have dressed it up every day. It’s just that I don’t threaten them the way they do each other!

  ‘Good morning!’ the king sang then, holding his old microphone with one hand, and the long cord of it with the other, moving it away so Lady Miriam could step over it and take her seat on the small line of chairs onstage behind him that were reserved for the royal family. Miriam wasn’t officially part of the family the way Laidlaw’s grown son and daughter beside her were, but she’d been the magical glue that had patched his kingdom together out of pieces of what he’d had before, so the king made a point to putting the new nation’s unofficial princess on a pedestal regularly. ‘I trust you’re all doing well on this beautiful- and hot- Thursday morning?’

  A few people chuckled as the king made a show of fidgeting with the collar of his pressed white shirt, but again, Finn just smirked. Amory Laidlaw liked to joke about the stuffy way he’d have you believe he was forced to dress for the sake of keeping up appearances, but she’d overheard Cara gossiping about the man enough to know that the king was a clothes horse who put as much thought into how he presented himself as any queen in any castle ever had. However, the king was also the kind of man who knew how to read people, and could charm the grey hairs out of an old crank’s head, so Finn enjoyed the spectacle that he made of himself, and was secretly impressed by how effortless he made the charade look. She didn’t crush on him the way the other girls did, but she was in awe of how he’d mastered ‘peopling,’ among so many other things. Besides, he was probably the first likeable king the world had known in centuries, and he set a positive example of how men ought to behave in times of crisis for the rest of the men, who might have turned into barbarians under a different leader’s influence.

  Finn took a second to work her helmet hair into a low, messy bun using the band on her wrist as the king began to read aloud from the list of announcements that he had to make, just as he did at every Thursday assembly. But though she tried to look like she was paying attention, her mind began to wander the moment she realised that the notices were about minor issues that didn’t affect her at all- like taxes, the curfew within the kingdom’s walls, and the supply of rice that they’d received on a trade with some Asian seafarers, who’d requested coal in exchange for it.

  Boring! Finn stifled a yawn that crept up on her- no doubt as a result of the fact that she�
�d stayed up too late the evening before writing before she’d foolishly started on The Great Gatsby again. They’d been out of bread and milk that morning too, so she’d forgone breakfast for the second day in a row- which would have been okay, if not for the fact that she could smell someone cooking fresh bread nearby right then, which made her feel dizzy with hunger. Get to the anniversary ball! Is it on, or not? Because if I don’t have to worry about buying that dress this week, I’m getting a ham sandwich today!

  Finn had found the assemblies thrilling in the beginning because back then, most of the announcements had been exciting or at least- relevant to everyone. Not only had the king always had a surplus of news to share from the outside world, but he’d also had a lot more stories to share regarding the discovery of new ‘Enigmas’ back then too. But alas, fewer Enigmas were being discovered those days, which made Finn anxious, because she knew that the rarer, they proved to be, the less likely it was that she’d ever become one herself.

  We’ve only heard of eight girls developing powers in two years! Finn shifted her weight from one foot to the other while she surreptitiously scanned the backs of the heads of the other ‘Potentials’ who were lined up in front of her, toying with her necklace and wishing for the hundredth time that being Enigmatic came with some sort of physical tell, so they could all stop worrying about whether they were truly special or not already. Eight, in the whole state! And four have already been found locally, so what if that’s all the divine intervention we’re gonna get in these parts...?

  But they’d picked the word ‘Enigma’ to label what happened to some girls after the Strike perfectly because that was exactly what it was; mysterious, and difficult to understand. Originally, no one had been able to explain why teenage girls were suddenly developing magical abilities at random, but after some time had passed, a lot of tales had been swapped and a bunch of people had put their heads together to get to the bottom of the mystery, it had been confirmed that the chunks of comet that had hit the earth had created a phenomena that was now labelled ‘Enigmatic Radiation,’ which was just a fancy way of saying: ‘Blood poisoning via space hail.’ What they knew was that there had been a liquid-based particle in the comet (not in the meteorites) that had crashed to the earth that had been toxic in high doses, but transformative in small ones with the right host. Anyone who’d been within a ten-kilometre radius of the comet’s impact sites had been killed within seconds, minutes or hours of inhaling the glittering alien particles, those that had been within about twenty-seven kilometres of it had gotten deathly ill before dying within two to five days of exposure, and those that had been twenty-eight kilometres or more away from it had come out more or less unscathed- save for a few respiratory issues in some people, who’d probably been reacting to the dust and firestorms that had been raging then anyway- not to the radiation itself, which had apparently dissolved quickly after being exposed to their atmosphere.

  However, those that had been within what was now called ‘The Goldilocks Zone,’ (within twenty-eight to thirty kilometres of ground zero) at the time of the Strike had potentially been exposed to just enough radiation for their DNA to have been mutated by the space dust, so instead of walking away sick, they’d potentially walked away with some sort of magical ability that defied science instead.

  Oddly enough, that magical particle had only had a transformative effect on the young females over the age of thirteen that had been in the Goldilocks’s Zone at the time, so the males their age, or then men or women that had reached maturity already that had been with them that night, had escaped being fatally poisoned or biologically altered, meaning that the power to change the world for the better or worse now mostly rested in the hands of a bunch of restless teenagers, which scared some people a lot more than the actual Strike itself had.

  The king’s researchers had deduced that the transformation was probably hormone related in some way (which also explained why some girls had gotten powers almost immediately while other girls’ powers were taking longer to surface), but that theory would stay a theory until a team of scientists could be assembled to investigate the matter in depth. For now, though, all anyone really cared about was finding as many Potentials as possible and claiming them as their own; digging them out from under the rubble and polishing them up the same way the human race had with every other precious resource that they’d unearthed since they’d first crawled out of their caves with their knuckles dragging in the dirt behind them.

  Tracking down all of the ‘Potentials’ in their region had been tricky, but once they’d understood how it all worked and that it could take years for someone’s powers to reveal themselves, King Amory (back when he’d just been ‘Mr Laidlaw’ to most) had used a chart to map out the two-kilometre wide Goldilocks’s Zone that ringed ground zero at a thirty-kilometre radius, and had sent out a special team of people to locate anyone who’d been in that zone that night who might fit the criteria of a Potential, so that they’d be able to be rescued and monitored under his banner. They’d had almost two hundred kilometres worth of territory to hunt down helpful teenage girls within, which had seemed like a lot at first, but unfortunately, their part of the state had been remote and coastal, so half of that territory had been in the ocean, and the other half had been out bush where almost no one had lived anyway.

  But Paige’s house in Cutrock Hills had fallen smack in the middle of the zone, and Paige had been the second girl in the region to be diagnosed as being an Enigma, which was why all of the other girls that had been there with her when the sky had fallen in had been classed as ‘Potentials’ as soon as the term had been coined the previous March too- Finn included. But the only other group of people that they’d been able to find who’d fit the criteria, had come from within Georgia Janks’s Girl Guide troupe, who had been camping on the opposite side of town as part of a regional jamboree that night.

  Finn had assumed that the universe was messing with her by finding a way to lump her and every single girl that had ever made her life miserable together after the apocalypse, but it could be argued that if you went through a disaster while living in a small town, then it was only natural that you’d come out on the other side of that disaster in familiar company. But as though the universe had been determined to prove that serendipity was a real thing, it had thrown a spanner in the works by making sure that both Wiley sisters had been exposed to the exact same level of radiation that night too- despite the fact that they had been separated at the time.

  Cara had been at the party with Finn, but Miriam, her older sister, had been on the highway with the man they all now served and his children, whom he’d had custody of for the weekend. The Laidlaw family had picked Miriam up from the university she’d been studying at and had been bringing her back to Broadsound, so that both Miriam and her partner’s families could get together (for the first time) as a surprise for Cara’s fourteenth birthday on Saturday, November fifth. Their king, who’d just been a somewhat anonymous real estate developer at the time, had lost control of his Mercedes after the first EMP had flatlined everything electrical, and though he’d managed to pull the car over safely, the ash had started coming through the cracked windscreen and vents after, choking them all. They’d survived and hadn’t thought anything of the ash then, but everything had changed a few weeks later when Miriam had performed a small miracle by building a campfire with her mind while mentally planning out how she was going to set the sticks in her hand up; as in one moment she’d been holding them and the next they’d been perfectly arranged and were already alight and so now, the story of how Miriam Wiley had become an Enigma was one that was shared around every campfire, to explain how the new king, his two children and his sweet suburban princess had gone from surviving- to thriving. And of course, the memory of how she too had almost choked on that same glittering ash had haunted Finn’s dreams since making her wonder: ‘Am I special too?’

  There were seven other girls who had stories like Miriam’s, but none were as legenda
ry for two simple reasons: because she had managed to steal the heart of a king back when he’d still just been a rich man who’d owned property in an opportune area, and because Miriam had been the only Manifest that had come to light so far, unlike Paige, who was one of three that had been classed as an ‘Enmity.’ Enmity’s were useful, because they could destroy things with the power of their mind (and often, without even meaning to) so they could flatten forests or dismantle wrecked buildings... but Manifests could create things- fantastical things- so long as they had the supplies to do so with on hand. No, Miriam couldn’t imagine a brick wall into being if she didn’t have any bricks or mortar to construct it with, but if there was a big enough stock of both elements handy, she would be able to manifest it, and that was why Laidlaw already had a brilliant, modern, sandstone castle surrounded by an impressive, fourteen-foot sandstone fence- because Miriam had built it from the rocks in the quarry which fell within Laidlaw’s boundaries now, using just her imagination.

  There were limits to what Miriam could do (the castle had sadly not come with electrical wiring or indoor plumbing because she hadn’t thought to imagine such things) and building her king a castle had resulted with her ending up in bed for a month after, suffering malaise, migraines and exhaustion as though she’d laid every brick with her own bare hands... But though Amory had stopped her from manifesting anything that they couldn’t create themselves for the sake of keeping her healthy since then, she’d already accomplished so much for Laidlaw on her own that she was considered to be its national hero. Which was precisely why Finn had reservations about the king- because Miriam Wiley was already their queen in every way that counted, so it pissed Finn off that the king hadn’t yet made it official, by upgrading her from ‘Lady’ Miriam Wiley (all the Enigmas received the title of ‘Lady after’ they’d pledged their loyalty to Amory) to Queen Miriam Laidlaw.