The Burning (2 page)

Rachel blinked.

The room was still there. She was not dreaming. But how, she wondered, had she got here?

She remembered the helicopter ride – the flight from Triskellion with Adam, her mother and Laura Sullivan – and the landing, somewhere grey and misty, miles from anywhere. She remembered being separated from Adam and bundled into a building, feeling weak with exhaustion from the day’s events.

Her thoughts began to spool back in fast rewind…

Rachel shuddered and felt a fearful lurch in her stomach as she remembered what Gabriel had revealed to them. That they were like him. That she and Adam were human but had …
something else
in their blood. In their genes. Something that made them very different. Her stomach knotted as she realized that
one
fact would inform every moment of the rest of their lives: their bloodline had been created centuries before, by the union of a human and someone from another world. Rachel felt a wave of nausea and, for a moment, thought she might be sick.

She breathed deeply and closed her eyes until the feeling passed.

Whatever had happened, at least she and Adam had been reunited with their mother. At least they were home. She just couldn’t remember how she had got here. She must have slept for days. Maybe she’d been given something to
help
her sleep…

But she took comfort from the fact that, however she had got here, she was a safe distance from England, from the village where it had all started. It would be a huge relief to talk to her mum about everything; to Adam…

Then Rachel realized that, for the first time in her life, she couldn’t hear her brother’s voice in her head. Nor Gabriel’s voice, or any voices at all. Not even the insistent humming, like the drone of bees, that told Rachel she was on their wavelength; that she was ready to receive their thoughts.

Just silence.

She felt a little panicked and climbed out of bed. She needed to find Adam and see if he felt the same. Her head was fuzzy, and her tongue was thick and heavy inside her mouth. She felt unsteady on her feet and, guessing that she’d stood up too quickly, she reached out for the desk beside the bed to steady herself.

The desktop was as tidy as she’d left it a month or so before, with pens in the plastic pot, a stack of CDs and the little round red mirror on it. Rachel picked up the mirror and stared at herself. She looked terrible. Her curly chestnut hair was greasy and matted and her face looked pale and puffy, as if she had been crying for days. She put the mirror face down and, as she raised her head, another thought struck her. This room – her room – looked and felt and sounded like it should, but it didn’t
smell
right.

It smelled synthetic, like the inside of a new car.

Rachel slipped on her red plastic flip-flops and walked
over to the door. The handle felt unusually stiff. She gave it a jerk and let out an involuntary cry as the door flew back. It didn’t open on to the carpeted hallway that led to her parents’ room but on to a brightly lit, white corridor.

And somewhere near by an alarm went off.

S
tepping from the shadows of her room, Rachel squinted up at the harsh white light flooding from the fluorescent tubes that ran the length of the passage. The corridor resonated with the faint, low-level buzz given off by the lights and with the distant beep of the alarm that had started the moment she’d opened the door.

The alarm that she had activated.

Rachel was frightened and confused, but more than anything, she was astonished by the bizarre feeling of stepping from her own room into an institutional hallway.

She felt as if she was a figure in a Surrealist picture (one of those her mom liked so much) walking from one room to another in a dream-like landscape with the “
slap-slap-slap
” of her flip-flops echoing like a ticking clock.

There were other doors every few metres or so, and Rachel began to push gently at each one, as much to confirm their existence as anything else. She glanced up in alarm as a man passed quickly in front of her, a few metres ahead, where
the corridor met another in a T-junction. He stopped and looked at her briefly before hurrying on.

Rachel stood, frozen. He’d been wearing white overalls and she’d seen a flash of panic pass across his features when he’d spotted her. She’d watched him fumbling to push in small earphones before walking quickly away.

He’d looked scared of her.

Rachel moved on past another two doors, stopping at a third, which had something written on it. She looked closely at the small printed label and her heart lurched once again. It read:

    ADAM NEWMAN    

Rachel tried the handle. The door was unlocked. She opened it and walked into her brother’s room.

“Hey, Rach,” Adam said. He was sitting on the bed and looked up briefly from the games’ console he was busily punching away at. “You just woken up?”

Rachel was too stunned at her brother’s nonchalance to answer immediately. Instead, she looked around the room. Like her own, every single thing was in its normal place. Unlike her own, everything was strewn across the floor and spilling out of drawers: the old catcher’s mitt that had been their father’s; the wall plastered with thrash metal posters; an electric guitar with two strings still missing; the TV in the corner, draped with odd socks. Business as usual, Rachel
thought. It was perfect in every detail. But quite
unlike
Adam’s room at home, it didn’t smell … boyish.

“I had a fantastic sleep,” Adam continued. “Feel like I slept for a year. Didn’t dream about a single thing. Didn’t wake up with voices in my head.”

Rachel dropped down on to the bed beside her brother. “Don’t you think that’s strange?”

Adam shrugged and looked down at his screen. “If getting the first good night’s sleep in weeks is strange, then give me strange.”

“But the voices are you and me,” Rachel said. “You and me … and Gabriel. We know each other’s thoughts.”

Adam looked his sister in the eye. “You know what? In the last few weeks I think I’ve had enough of knowing what you’re thinking, and as for what Gabriel thinks, well, look where that got us.” He’d suddenly lost interest in his game and there was something steely in his voice, something that Rachel found hard to argue with. “To be honest, he’s totally freaked me out. I wish we could just go back to normal, but I guess we’ve gone past that point. I’m trying as hard as I can to forget about it.”

Rachel understood his opinion perfectly; understood that he was finding it tough to come to terms with what he had found out about himself. She could see that he was scared. But she still failed to understand why he was not more fazed at being in his own bedroom … that
wasn’t
his bedroom at all.

“But what about this place?” she said, gesturing at the room around her.

“They just want us to feel at home,” Adam said. “They made me a BLT. I was starving.”

Rachel began to feel a tingle of panic in her limbs. “They?
Who
made you a BLT?”

“Some guy knocked on the door when I woke up, asked if I was hungry. It was weird, ‘cos I’d wanted a BLT for days. Couldn’t stop thinking about it.”

Rachel wanted to shake her brother. Of all the weird things they had experienced, his desperation for a bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich didn’t even register on the scale.

“Aren’t you worried about where we are? What this place is?”

“I know it’s not that village.” Adam went back to his game. “I feel safer here.”

“We were supposed to be going home. With Mom. Have you seen her?”

“She’s here too, I guess,” he said, without looking up.

Adam’s acceptance was beginning to rattle her. She sat on the bed and prodded her brother in the ribs. “Do you know where we
are
?”

“Not exactly,” Adam said, wriggling away from her. He gestured towards the window. “But it looks like New York, kind of…”

Rachel stood up and opened the blind, letting light stream in. The view certainly looked … American. Not the
New York that they knew, but a built-up town of tall buildings, their rows of windows glinting in the sunlight. Rachel sat back on the bed, her head in her hands, trying to gather her thoughts.

“Why don’t we switch on the TV?” she said. “The news should tell us where we are … or which country we’re in, at least.”

She picked up the remote and turned on the television, scrolling through the channels. There were cartoons, and Adam wanted her to stop when they saw Homer Simpson’s yellow face beaming out at them. But Rachel kept scrolling, stabbing furiously at the remote as yet more cartoon channels appeared and, dotted among them, some live-action American sitcoms; the actors’ faces as familiar to them as those of their own family. The canned studio laughter was momentarily reassuring: a reminder of evenings tucked up at home with family and friends. Rachel reached the fortieth channel and threw the remote control across the room in frustration. There were no presenters, no weather reports, no current affairs…

No news.

“That’s weird.” Adam shrugged, going back to his game again.

The panic tightened in Rachel’s chest. “They don’t want us to know where we are,” she said. She watched as Adam, despite appearing to concentrate on his game, began to chew his trembling lip and push at the tears welling in the corners of his eyes.

“Do you think Mom
is
here?” he said, swallowing hard. The confidence he’d shown moments before seemed to be draining away.

Before Rachel could answer, there was a knock at the door and she found herself automatically telling whoever it was to “come in”.

The door swung open and Laura Sullivan stepped into the room. Rachel took her in at a glance, amazed at the difference in her appearance since the last time they’d seen her. Laura looked scrubbed and clean. Her long red hair was tied back in a ponytail and her clothes were smart and businesslike.

“Hi, you guys,” she said. “How are you doing?” Her tone was calm and friendly, but her eyes darted nervously between the twins. Rachel registered the look and felt adrenalin surge through her. Her thoughts raced. She was looking for someone to explain everything, someone to
blame
…

Laura Sullivan had stumbled upon their secret by digging up the chalk circle in Triskellion. Was that what archaeologists did? Dig into the past only to mess up the present? Rachel felt a powerful jolt of rage at the fact that Laura had dug up
their
past. If only they hadn’t gone to Triskellion, if only Laura hadn’t excavated the Bronze Age tomb, they’d have been none the wiser. They could have spent the rest of their lives as ordinary Americans. They could have grown up innocent and had kids of their own. How could they now, knowing about their gene pool?

If only. If only…

“Where are we?” Rachel shouted. “Mom said … we thought you were taking us
home
.” Her voice was getting louder, almost a shriek. “Where
is
Mom? You tricked us.”

Laura held her hands wide, imploring. “Rachel—”

But something in Rachel snapped and she threw herself across the room, launching herself at Laura Sullivan, her hands grabbing at the tall Australian’s face and hair.

Sullivan’s strong, sinewy hands grasped Rachel’s wrists and held her fast. They stood face to face and Rachel saw that, despite the effort of restraining her, Laura’s eyes brimmed with sympathy. Suddenly the fight drained from her. Her limbs felt weak and she fell sobbing into Laura’s arms, while behind her Adam hovered awkwardly, not knowing whether to defend his sister or to try and break up the fight.

Laura held Rachel close and stroked her hair. “Let me at least try to explain a few things to you,” she said.

Rachel loosened herself from Laura’s embrace and looked her straight in the eye.

“This had better be good,” she said.

“T
his place is called the Hope Project,” Laura said. She had sat down between the twins on Adam’s bed. “It’s part of a bigger organization called the Flight Trust.”

Adam threw Rachel a look, none the wiser.