The Spotless Prince - by Phil

Felix Swordsman emerges from under his mother’s long coat once the drone moves on. She watches it hum off, unsure if it was a government or private one. Either way, she can't take any risks with Felix.

The two of them were homeless again, having had a narrow escape from their crumbling tenement the night before. There had been a rancorous knock around eight on the fragile plywood door. On the other side was the now-familiar set up: a suited man; a pair of bodyguards to add persuasive muscle to his charms. All three with breathing apparatus and a kind of shield, like a motorcycle windscreen, over their faces. The men filed into the single room and stood around heavily, the suited man doing the talking. He was talking about a different path in life and their civic responsibility. The suited man made no specific threats, but Felix’s mother understood. Having no back door on this place, the pair was cornered. Felix’s mother had to use desperate measures to evade the suited man’s terrible proposition.

She flipped open a penknife she had stowed in her waistband and held the blade close to her son’s pale throat. She crouched low behind him, free arm roughly grabbing around both elbows to hold him close. The bodyguards pulled guns, but couldn't chance any harm to the boy. They were sharpshooters, but not that sharp. Felix’s skinny body was between his mother and the menacing trio, terrified, as she said ‘back off’ through gritted teeth and dragged him backwards out of the door. All the while, the suited man used negotiation manual language: “ I'm sure we can reach a resolution, Mrs Swordsman;” “Your welfare and the welfare of your son are important to us, Mrs Swordsman.”

Felix and his mother crept down the steel staircase to the street, her leading them down backwards. The three men crowded to the door. At street level, Felix and his mother had the advantage, knowing the complex map of the alleys between the tenement blocks far better than any bully boys from the sterile compounds. The fugitive pair made off into the mucky gloom, and kept moving until first light. They finally bedded down for a couple of hours in the lee of a pile of algae-coated corrugated iron.

Today, Jennifer Swordsman has to explain her actions to her son.

“You’re seven years old now, Felix. You know I'm just trying to keep you safe. The penknife, yesterday… it was just pretend. We were acting. It was so we could get away from the bad men.”

Felix stares up at her, sulkily, saying nothing. Mother looks back, weighing her son’s response. She brushes his long fringe to one side with her dirty fingers and says:

“I think we should head out into the countryside. There shouldn't be so many drones.”

“Will we sleep inside tonight?” asks Felix.

“Yes.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know. I’ll think of something.” Like hell I will, thinks Jennifer.

They plod toward the city limits. Looking back, Felix can see the buildings of the sterile compounds rising above the dank everything else like pillars of sparkling light. He can vaguely recall his life of splendid isolation inside the sterile compounds, before they were on the run. He had his own bedroom, friends on the floors above and below. He remembers a time when he had enough to eat and wasn't ever cold. The time before his mother lifted him, dozing, from his bed and vacated the place, leaving Felix’s father and the rarefied luxury of the sterile compound behind. Jennifer spoke to Felix about his father often, trying to help him understand. To Felix, he was an absent yet present figure.

The sterile compounds were the only disease-free places left, she said. Aunty Biotic was useless now, she’d said. So people, who could afford to, lived in the sterile compounds. But they were still afraid. They thought the diseases would come back. Rumours of a ‘breach’ of asepsis periodically inflated and collapsed. There would be whispers of an infected child, food stocks being contaminated. The only part Felix really understood was that his blood was special, more valuable than gold or silver or copper. The doctors checking him shortly after his birth discovered its amazing properties. Important people wanted to use it to fight diseases. In exchange, the family would be royalty. The King and Queen (and prince) of cleanliness. Saviours of civilisation; the panacea people. Felix’s mother said that his dad was prepared to let them use his body and make his blood into medicine. Felix always shivered at this part. Jennifer didn't spare the details in her telling: they would remove all of his blood and at the same time pump in a synthetic alternative. Felix wasn't sure what a synthetic alternative was, but he didn't think he wanted all his blood to be taken out. Jennifer also spoke to Felix about his Aunty Bodies, but he’d never met her.

At the edge of the city, Felix finds a crash-landed drone. It lay like a prehistoric dragonfly, stranded on some charred rubble. Its wings were about the size of Felix’s hands. They were fashioned from living cells forming a translucent sheet over plastic supports, are still lightly beating. He points to it and his mother quickly crushes it beneath her shoe. A wing breaks off.

“It was probably still transmitting,” she says.

As she sets off walking again, Felix hangs back a moment, picks up the loosed wing and shoves it in the pocket of his anorak. He knows his mother wouldn't let him have it, but he thinks it is beautiful. He strokes it as they walk, and it responds with little shudders from time to time.

They walk for hours, through overgrown suburbs and into silent countryside, with Jennifer pausing to cough heavily every few minutes. The city becomes a memory, beyond the horizon. Jennifer is hoping for some luck. Prior to the sterile compounds, before the husband and child, she can remember coming out to picnic in the fields. There was a farm, and she can picture the chickens, waddling about with short feathery legs and pecking at the earth. Jennifer hopes the farm is in the direction they are heading. There is no doubt it will be abandoned.

At dusk, they happen upon some ruins. It is so dilapidated Jennifer can’t be sure if it is the farm she recalled from her youth, but it will do.

The driest, cleanest spot they can find is in the corner of an outbuilding. The main house is overgrown with moss and mould and weeds. There is some straw; with the blanket from Jennifer’s knapsack, the pair makes up a serviceable bed. Felix falls asleep huddled against his mother, but she wakes him many times in the night with her guttural cough.

They stay at the farm for a few days. Jennifer keeps saying to Felix ‘we’re lying low.’ Yet really, she doesn't know what to do next. Their pile of energy bars is running short, and her cough getting worse. Jennifer knows she was infected in the grotty tenement but she doesn't want to think about using the syringe at the bottom of her knapsack. She gets Felix to press his ear to her back and listen to her breathe. He says it sounds crunchy.

In the daytime, while his mum rests, Felix explores the farm. He picks fragile flowers and plays with his drone wing, which still flutters every now and then. Occasionally he sees a working drone overhead, a speck although they were only at fifty feet or so. When he sees them, Felix takes cover and buries his face in his collar as his mother had shown him. After they are gone, Felix waves his drone wing after them. His mother had told him the drones were bad news, but he is enthralled by their gift of flight and friendly hum.

On the fourth day, Felix goes back into the outbuilding in the afternoon and finds his mother looking death-grey. Her body is stretched long on the straw, arching as she coughs heavily every few seconds. Felix looks alarmed. “Mum, what’s wrong?”

“ I've caught a disease,” she says. She admits to herself that she has no choice; she has to use his blood for selfish ends, treat him like a walking pharmacy. Jennifer betrays the principles of their flight; her moralising side-lined.

“I need your antibodies,” she croaks.

Felix is crying now. “Tell me what to do, mum.”

“Get the knapsack.”

Felix hauls it over and Jennifer digs out the syringe, sealed in a little plastic case. She is confident it is sterile. She asks Felix, ever so softly, to roll up his sleeve and kneel down next to her. Felix somehow knows what to do, as though it is instinctive, and clenches his fist repeatedly to raise a vein. Jennifer gently, lovingly, pierces the skin inside the elbow and withdraws a few millilitres of blood from her son.

Jennifer carefully inserts the needle into her own vein and shoots her son’s miracle blood into circulation. She gasps at the incestuous thrill and grisly reality of the thing, this desperate plea for survival, and lies back on the makeshift bed.

Felix lies with her through the night as her coughs become less frequent. His magic bullet blood swarms through his mother, eliminating bacteria. Felix touches the drone wing in his pocket as it continues to silently pulse out data to the receivers back in the city. Mother and son wake up hopeful, even as the drones begin to gather over the farm.