The Burning (21 page)

Both were hoping that sleep would come quickly.

Thirteen-and-a-half hours, Paris to Madrid; it was far and away the longest train journey that either of them had ever taken. They’d made the four-hour trip to Washington DC a few times – traipsed round the Smithsonian and had pictures taken outside the White House – but that was about it. A train journey through the night was a marathon by comparison, and, if there hadn’t been so many other things to think about – so many worries – they would both have been pretty excited.

Rachel lay back and listened to the sound of the train, letting its gentle, rhythmic rocking carry her away. She knew that Morag and Duncan were in the compartment across the corridor and that the French boys were somewhere further along, towards the restaurant car. She had no idea where Gabriel was. She imagined him striding up and down the length of the train, his mind racing faster than the engine, unable to sleep.

If he ever slept at all.

The French boys…

Jean-Luc and Jean-Bernard. It had taken over an hour of surly looks and inaudible grunting to get so much as their names out of them, and even then they had been given grudgingly. They’d sat huddled at a table with Gabriel, while Rachel, Adam and the younger twins had sat across from them, trying and failing to make conversation.

“So where are you from?”

“You speak English?”

“You speak
at all
…?”

The new boys had insisted on calling Gabriel “Ariel,” talking in whispers and tossing dirty looks across at Rachel and the others if anyone had so much as offered one of them a stick of gum.

“Maybe they just don’t like us because we’re American,” Adam had said.

“Maybe,” Rachel had answered.

“Didn’t we fall out over Iraq or something a few years back? Remember, we weren’t allowed to call them ‘French’ fries…?”

“
We’re
not American,” Morag had said. “And I don’t think they like us either.”

Duncan had glared across at the two French boys. Jean-Luc, the one with the hat, had turned and stared right back, picking at something stuck between his dirty teeth.

“Just ignore them.” But even as Rachel had said so, she had known she would find it difficult. She had been desperate to find out who they were and where they lived; not because she was genuinely interested in them, but because she wanted to know what their connection was to Gabriel. How long had they known him? What had he told them about himself? Why on earth had he invited them along?

The guard had come by an hour or so into the journey, and, after a few words from Gabriel, had happily taken the children’s non-existent tickets. Everyone had ordered food from the buffet – sandwiches and cold drinks – and once
they were eating, Jean-Luc and Jean-Bernard had begun talking to Gabriel in French but neither Rachel nor Adam had been able to understand what was said. The boys were obviously capable of understanding English and could translate a foreign language into their own as easily as Rachel and Adam, but it seemed they were also able to
block
the translation powers of others when they felt like it.

“I can just hear …
noise
,” Adam had said. “Like some kind of interference.”

“Me too.” Morag had pulled a face. “It’s not fair.”

Furious, Rachel had sworn under her breath. She’d seen the look from Jean-Bernard. “They can still understand
us
, though.”

“I bet we can do it too.” Adam had glanced across and seen a slight smile from Gabriel, who had looked as though he was enjoying himself, and Adam had known he was right. “Come on …
concentrate
.”

Rachel had closed her eyes and tried to focus. After a minute or so, she’d begun to picture a barrier forming, layer upon layer inside her mind.

Adam’s words had come into her head as the wall took shape.
That’s it
, he’d said.
Keep going
. It had been delicate yet powerful; a latticework of light that had hummed with energy and strength, and had twisted around every phrase and sentence, darting between the letters like an insect in flight, until each had been bound up tight.

Protected.

Opening her eyes again, Rachel had looked at Adam and spoken with her mind.
You want to try first?

Adam had smiled.
Chicken
. He’d cleared his throat and turned to look at the two French boys. “Hey, you … doofus!” When he’d caught Jean-Luc’s eye, he leant across. “You two look like monkeys, you know that?”

Rachel, flashing the pair her nicest smile, had added, “Smell like them too.”

It had been clear from the shrugs that neither boy had understood a word, and Rachel and Adam had settled back in their seats, mentally congratulating each other. On the other table, Gabriel had only stopped laughing when Jean-Bernard had banged a fist on the table, like a small boy who was not getting enough attention.

The conversation between the tables had become rather more animated after that, though every bit as unfriendly; Gabriel – the only one able to understand both sides – had done his best to keep the peace until darkness fell outside, and all three sets of twins had wandered off in search of their beds.

Rachel lay listening to Adam shifting his position on the bunk above her. She knew that he was not asleep; that he was finding it as difficult as she was.

“Adam, are you OK?”

“I’m fine.”

“You sure?”

“Positive. G’night.”

Then, ten minutes later, Rachel heard her brother say, “You ever think about Dad?”

“Course I do.”

“Lately, though? I mean, it’s all been about Mom, hasn’t it? I know she’s the one who stuck by us, the one who’s in trouble, but it’s not like he’s … dead or anything, is it?”

“No.”

“So,
do
you?”

Rachel realized that, although her father popped into her mind many times every day, she could not remember the last time she had really sat down and
thought
about him: how he might be feeling; if he was missing them. If she was missing him. He had been the one who’d walked out, who had decided that the marriage was not working, but still… She felt guilty for taking her mother’s side quite so easily. If it took two people to make a marriage work, didn’t it take two people to wreck it?

She knew that Adam had found it much harder to decide where his sympathies lay.

“When everything’s … back to normal, or as back to normal as it’s ever going to be, I’m sure we’ll get to spend time with him, you know?”

“Yeah…”

“He could hate Mom’s guts,” Rachel said. “But that wouldn’t change the way he felt about us.”

“I know that. I was just asking, that’s all.”

Rachel heard him swallow and turn over again. “We
should try and get some sleep.”

There were a few more murmured words after that, but soon Rachel heard her brother’s steady breathing and she knew he was asleep, and almost as soon as she’d had the thought, she was asleep herself. She woke once in the middle of the night and reached down to the floor for a T-shirt to wipe the tears away. When she opened her eyes again it was light outside.

Adam was still dead to the world as Rachel crept out of bed and across to the small window. Mist lay low across brown fields strewn with vast boulders, and, craning her neck, she could see a walled city ahead: towers and turrets rose up on the summit of a rocky hill, where the tracks swept round in a wide curve to the left-hand side.

She pulled on her clothes and stepped out into the corridor. The guard was on his way past her door. “Are we coming into Madrid?” she asked.

“No, miss; Madrid’s still a couple of hours away.” He led Rachel to the small area between carriages and pointed out of the window. “That’s Avila. It’s medieval, matter of fact. An amazing place … if you like churches all over the place, that sort of thing. You should go and visit.”

Rachel saw Gabriel step through the door at the far end of the carriage. “Maybe next time,” she said. The guard shrugged and wandered away. From the look on Gabriel’s face, Rachel knew that there would not be a great deal of time for any sightseeing.

Adam was out of bed when she walked back into the compartment, and Rachel gasped when she saw him turn to pull his T-shirt over his head.

“What?” Adam said. “What’s the matter with my back
now
?”

Rachel just shook her head and pointed. It had been a little over twenty-four hours since she’d dug into her brother’s flesh with a razor blade.

“It’s completely … healed,” she said. “There isn’t a mark on you.”

L
aura Sullivan rubbed her knuckles into her tired eyes. She took a gulp of strong black coffee and tried again, without success, to focus on the screen of her computer. She looked up, as she had done periodically throughout the night, at the coloured pencil sketch of the narrow-eyed boy pinned above her desk. It felt as if he was guiding her, telling her where to look next.

She had been working feverishly since the previous evening, putting all her data together. She had eliminated a network of false leads and had gone down a dozen blind alleys. She had re-examined significant findings and now, as a new day dawned over the Hope building, she felt she may have finally made a breakthrough.

Laura knew she had to produce a result, or enough of one to placate Clay Van der Zee. Something to convince him that her preferred course of action was the correct one to follow: to let the children’s powers develop in the wild. To allow Rachel and Adam free access to
roam across Europe and lead them to…

Laura didn’t know
where
they would lead her. Her greatest hope was that it might be to another site like the chalk circle at Triskellion. A site that might yield more important remains and ancient treasures. Anything that would throw light on the meaning or the function of the Triskellion.

She hoped too that they would lead her somewhere that might reveal the identity of this mysterious fifth child. The boy in the picture. Just the
possibility
of meeting him was more exciting than anything in all her years of research.

Above all, she hoped that wherever the trail led, whatever happened at the end of their journey, would liberate the twins: would leave them free to get back into society. Laura was convinced that any lessons they might learn from Adam and Rachel would benefit mankind in some way. She felt instinctively that their way of thinking, their communication and their mind skills could be learned by others; could even be bred into future generations.

She believed that kids like Rachel and Adam Newman might
be
the next manifestation of humanity. The New Man.

A new breed…

Homo erectus
: the caveman.
Homo neandertalensis
: Neanderthal man.
Homo sapiens
: us.

Then what?

Homo triskelliensis
? Triskellion man?

Laura laughed to herself. Now her mind really
was
racing: buzzing with too much coffee and too little sleep. What she
did
know was that anything less than a plan of action and a convincing route would have Van der Zee marshalling a sweep of agents across Europe to bring the kids back in.

She couldn’t let that happen.

Most of Van der Zee’s superiors in America considered these children a “threat to humanity” and would insist on continuing with what they worryingly called “invasive research”. If they could tag kids without a thought for their civil liberties, then heaven knew what else would be considered valid research.

Research that might well be terminal.

Throughout the night, Laura had eliminated dozens of Bronze Age sites from her inquiry. Since discovering that the twins were in France, she had hoped that they were heading for the ancient standing stones at Carnac on the Brittany Coast. That would have made sense. The village was geographically and geologically similar to Triskellion. It had a very static population and a high occurrence of twins. Even the ancient symbol used on fags and monuments to represent the region of Brittany was a Triskellion.

She had fed in some of the data from the Triskellion site: metal analysis from bronze beakers, fabric samples, carvings, symbols and signs found in the area. A bewildering array of matching burial sites dotted right across Europe had
appeared on her screen. It was only when she had factored in some genetic information about the inhabitants – the incidence of twins, the age of the population – that a definite pattern had begun to emerge.

A line could be drawn directly between certain sites. Starting from Orkney in the north of Scotland, where Morag and Duncan were from, it ran all the way down the West Coast of England and Wales, to Triskellion in the West Country. Then it jumped across the Channel to Brittany and continued south-west through France. From the Dordogne area, the line went south again, across into Spain and continued further down, still in a clear, unbroken line…

Laura stared at the map and tried to keep the mounting excitement under control. Looked at in reverse, it was the same line that tracked the development of Bronze Age man across Europe and into the British Isles.