‘I’m breaking out this weekend,’ she said in a low voice but a voice that carried to them all. ‘I want to know how many of you want to come with me.’ There was a stunned silence at this. After a moment Olivia spoke:
‘I want to come…’
‘I know you do,’ Kimba interrupted her. ‘What about the rest of you?’
‘We haven’t thought about it,’ said Barnaby. ‘Well, I mean, we have of course but you’ve got to give us a bit to decide.’
‘That’s fair enough,’ said Kimba to everyone’s surprise.
‘Isn’t it awfully dangerous?’ said Tina in a small voice.
‘Yeah!’ said Kimba. ‘Look, it is dangerous being a Vador. Make no mistake every day of your life it is dangerous, you are being hunted by the Slime. I don’t want you to be under any false pretences so I’ll tell you now, being a Vador is very hard. We train every day, we work all the time. Often we don’t eat for days on end and when we go on a march we run for miles!’ She did her looking around trick again. ‘We are being hunted all the time, we can be attacked at any second: when we are eating, when we are sleeping. We have to fight for our lives against Warriors and Hunters and there’re the Stingers which hurt so much some of us scream with the pain.’ She paused again, ‘You sleep on the ground, you dress like this,’ she grabbed a bunch of the rough cloth shirt she wore. ‘And when you eat you are lucky to get a piece of meat or bread.’
She crouched down in her familiar pose and now there was complete silence in the cave. She let it grow and now the children could see tears in her eyes. When she spoke it was in a whisper:
‘I was thinking how to explain to you best what it’s like,’ she said. ‘There’re three words that keep coming to my mind: excitement, laughter and love. That’s what being a Vador means: excitement, laughter and love! The Kraal hunt us but we also hunt the Kraal and when we bring one of the Slime down there is nothing like it…nothing! You’re fighting to get our world back from these monsters! Two years ago Jessica took a Warrior on face to face and brought it down.
‘You laugh, all the time. Even when it’s at the most dangerous everyone is joking or playing tricks on the others and I say we go hungry and we do but then Craddock catches a deer and we have meat roasted over the fire and maybe Paula has made some of her cheese and Tara has still got some Gaart bread and in season there’s the apple drink and…and…and you’ve never tasted food quite like it because you’ve had to fight so hard for it.’ She rose to her feet and now she was crying unashamedly.
‘And all the time you feel this tremendous warmth all around from all of you because you are a Vador! Even from people you don’t really like that much you love them because they’re Vadors like you and you’d die for them. A year ago Tom asked for volunteers to go on a virtual suicide mission to rescue Jessica…do you know that every single Vador volunteered? Every single one! If I don’t escape, he’ll come for me, within the year, whatever it costs them because I am a Vador!’ And her voice thrilled with pride.
‘So, you can stay here, the Kraal won’t punish you if the rest of us escape and you stay on. They never do, like a farmer doesn’t punish his animals. You can stay a slave the rest of your life, it’s not so bad. Or you can come with me and live your life rather than give it away!’
