The Burning (8 page)

“What sort of look?”

Rachel shrugged. “You know what he’s like. It’s hard to tell.”

“Come on!” Adam leant forward. “Happy? Sad? What?”

Rachel turned from the window and stared hard at her brother. “It seemed like a warning,” she said.

O
ver the next few days, Rachel and Adam settled into their own, very separate routines. There were things they did together – the two hours each morning spent studying with a Hope Project tutor, mealtimes in Mr Cheung’s kitchen – but increasingly, and without really discussing how or why, they spent less and less time together.

When they weren’t eating and studying, the tests continued in Dr Van der Zee’s testing suite: Adam doing exercises to gauge the speed of his reflexes, while Rachel was put through her paces doing increasingly complex memory tests and guessing games with Laura Sullivan. Between sessions they were free to enjoy what Van der Zee called “down” time. Adam would spend most of his listening to music or perfecting his already considerable skills on a variety of high-tech computer games, while Rachel preferred to sit in her room. She told Laura Sullivan that she was happier on her own, that she wanted some time to think about things,
to sit quietly and read. But her mind quickly lurched into places that were dark and disturbing and it was hard to concentrate on any of the books that Laura provided for more than a few sentences at a time.

Impossible to concentrate on reading once she began to hear Gabriel again.

Each evening at ten o’clock – five p.m. New York time – they would arrive at Laura Sullivan’s office and wait impatiently for the telephone call from their mother. Laura would leave them alone, as most of the time there would be tears. Then, once it was over, Adam and Rachel would head back to their own rooms.

To their own, very different thoughts.

It had been a week or so since the funeral in Triskellion but as Rachel sat on her bed, she was still disturbed by the memories of that day. The damp, grey headstones, the mist that hovered around them like the breath of the dead. The face of Commodore Wing – her grandfather – statue-still and desolate and that of the boy who watched from the other side of the graveyard.

Rachel, what are you doing?

Gabriel’s voice had been clear for days now, and determined. It woke her in the middle of the night with that same question, the tone harsh and exasperated. It nagged at her during the day: desperate … adamant.

Rachel, don’t believe them
.

The voice – demanding, questioning, urging her to doubt – had changed her mood utterly, and while Adam had seemed to grow happier, content even, with their situation, Rachel had retreated into herself. She had all but stopped eating. She had become surly and uncommunicative, prone to tantrums. She had barely fought off an overwhelming urge to lash out at Laura Sullivan or Clay Van der Zee; to scratch and bite until she drew blood, until she could feel her own blood rushing through her veins like a powerful, gorgeous current.

Rachel … Rachel!

And the voice was growing stronger…

She tried to focus on something else, thinking back over that evening’s long-distance phone conversation. Her mother was a long way away, but the distance between them could no longer be measured in miles alone.

“Mom, is everything OK?”

Her mother had sounded weak and worn out. Even something as simple as crying seemed to exhaust her. “It’s the stuff with your dad, that’s all.”

“Divorce stuff?”

“Nasty stuff, baby. Letters from lawyers, seeing a different side to someone you love, you know…”

“When can we come home?”

Static had crackled through the silence. “I don’t know. I think you’re probably … better off where you are right now.”

“How long?”

“New York’s still the same you’ll be glad to hear. Still noisy and crowded. Still a million miles an hour—”

“How
long
, Mom?”

Rachel had pictured her mother closing her eyes; covering her mouth to stop her breath from catching.

“I don’t know. I don’t know anything. Listen I need to go…”

“Mom.”

Rachel! Don’t believe them
.

“I’m fine, though, baby. I promise.”

And Rachel had heard the lie, like a bad attempt at a foreign language. And she had known that her mother was suffering and that she could not say anything that might make her feel worse than she already did.

And so Rachel had lied too.

“I’m fine as well,” she had said. “We both are…”

Rachel was startled by the knocking at the door, but couldn’t bring herself to get up from the bed and answer it. She stared at the door, her head still swimming with the image of her mother, alone and unhappy, in an empty apartment.

Whoever was at the door knocked again.

“Rach? It’s me.”

Adam.

“I’m tired, Adam. I just want to go to sleep.”

The door opened and Adam strolled in, as though he hadn’t heard what she’d said or was choosing to ignore it.
He moved around the room for half a minute, looking through Rachel’s CD collection, picking up a magazine and flicking idly through it.

“What do you
want
, Adam?”

Her brother looked across at her. Blinked and shrugged. “I’m worried about you, that’s all.”

“About
me
?”

“Yeah, course. You’re not eating, you don’t really talk to anyone…”

“You’re the one who’s behaving like a freak. As though all this is …
normal
.”

Adam looked back down at the magazine. “I’m just trying to make the best of it.”

“Best?” Rachel was suddenly buzzing with anger. “This place is a prison.” Adam pulled a face, like she was being stupid. Rachel raised her voice. “We’re being tested like lab-rats, we’re not allowed to go anywhere—”

“They’re trying to keep us safe.”

“We’re prisoners, and you’re acting like it’s some kind of high-class hotel.”

“Right. How many prisoners get to eat whatever they like? Have this much fun?”

“
Fun?
You think this is OK? Just because you can play computer games and eat cheeseburgers all day? What about our
lives
, Adam? What about our friends? What about Mom?”

Adam flicked through the pages more furiously. The skin
tightened round his mouth. “We don’t have to go to school. That’s a good thing, right? And we’re … special in here. It’s like we’re stars or something.”

“What have they been telling you, Adam? What have they done to you?”

Adam tossed the magazine back on to the bedside table and stood staring at the floor. His fists were clenched at his sides. “Nobody’s done anything. We’re just different, OK?”

Rachel lay back on the bed and turned away from her brother. Closed her eyes. “Yeah, different,” she said.

They stayed as they were for another minute, the silence only broken by the artificial, ambient sound of night-time New York and the distant hum of machinery from somewhere far beneath them. Finally, Adam marched across to the door and opened it.

He turned in the doorway. “So this is the way it’s going to be? You’re going to be … difficult?”

Rachel didn’t bother to open her eyes. “One of us has to be.”

“Yeah, and it’s always you.”

“Can’t you hear him?” Rachel asked.

“Hear who?”

“Gabriel.”

Adam’s voice was thick with derision. “That’s another good thing about this place. I haven’t heard from
him
since we got here. If you ask me, we’re better off protected from him.”

“You’re not
listening
.”

“I’m not
interested
!”

Rachel’s fingers tightened round the edge of her duvet. She wanted to jump up and slap her brother hard. She held her breath and lay still until she heard the door close.

Adam was still angry when he walked into Laura’s office a few minutes later. Laura was at her computer. She turned to look at him, taking off the wire-rimmed glasses she wore to read.

“Any luck?”

Adam shook his head, feeling himself blush. He thought Laura looked beautiful without her glasses. “I did my best.”

“Don’t worry.”

“She’s just being stupid.”

Laura summoned a smile. “It’s going to take her a little longer than you to settle, that’s all.”

“She’s the stubborn one, always has been.”

“She’s very bright,” Laura said. “Kids like you usually are. She’ll figure out what’s best eventually.”

Adam grunted; he wasn’t sure. His eyes drifted towards Laura’s computer screen. There were lines of data down one side, some kind of map on the other. Laura cleared her throat and quickly hit a button which replaced the desktop with a screensaver image of an arid Australian landscape: the vast, flat-topped mountain known as Uluru.

“I think you should go and get some sleep.”

Adam nodded. The argument with Rachel had left him feeling wrung out and ready to drop. “I’ll try again tomorrow,” he said. “See if I can bring her round.”

“Probably best to leave it a day or two,” Laura said. “But thanks. And thanks for trying…”

When Adam had gone, Laura switched on a monitor mounted on the wall of her office. She stared at the CCTV image fed from the new, hidden camera in Rachel’s room: the picture of a girl curled up on her bed, legs pulled up, turned in on herself. Laura adjusted the volume and listened to the slow, steady sound of Rachel’s breathing.

After a minute, Laura went back to her laptop; back to the work which had occupied the best part of her life for almost ten years. She stared at the maps and the graphs, the analysis of a hundred sacred archaeological sites. The results of the tests on Rachel and Adam, Morag and Duncan, and others. She tried to concentrate, but she wouldn’t get any more useful work done tonight.

She hoped more than anything that what she’d told Adam was true. She prayed that Rachel would become … easier to deal with.

She did not like to think about what might happen otherwise.

Rachel lay in her room and thought about the fight with Adam. They had always fought, same as any other brother and sister, but not like this. Not about anything this important.
More than anything, she wished her mother was there to sort things out, but Rachel knew she was going to have do it on her own.

She opened her mind and waited for Gabriel’s voice. She needed his guidance now more than ever: his reassurance.

When the voice came, it was no more than a whisper, from lips that she could almost feel pressed close to her ear.

It told her to sleep.

R
achel falls down, down, down through the night sky, tumbling through the air and falling silently into the inky water. Neither cold, nor warm, but somewhere near her own body temperature, it feels painless as the water invades her ears and nostrils, pours into her throat: becomes part of her. She is pleased to find that she does not panic as she drowns, that she is almost comforted as the peaty water suffocates her. Yet she is not dying, she is becoming one with the soft water which pulls her, like a returning mermaid, towards the two pale orbs of light that shimmer deep in the lake
.

Rachel kicks and swims, moving effortlessly deeper and deeper, closer to the twin lights and to the silvery shape from which they shine. A car balances on an underwater ledge, teetering over a deep abyss that falls away into a cold, bottomless dark
.

Closer now, green ribbons of frilly weed dance slowly in front of her eyes, part concealing the rubbery shape of the diver, his legs kicking behind him, frog-like, as he struggles to
pull something through the car’s open window. Then, hand in hand, two small bodies wriggle free like fish from a net, and float upwards, coaxed and guided towards the surface by the beam of the diver’s torch
.

Closer still, and the torchbeam searches for something else…

A woman’s face, her hair swirling about her cheeks; the water inside the car, pink with her husband’s blood; her white palms banging helplessly at the window of the locked door
.

Don’t worry
,
Rachel thinks, swimming close to the window and pressing her hands to the glass, signing to the woman. I am here. Help is here
.