Triskellion 3: The Gathering (2 page)

She already knew what she would see.

Just the action of getting out of bed and looking from the window had resonated with something deep in her memory. A wave of déjà vu swept over her. She had been in this position before; she had done this before; she had
felt
this before. And sure enough, there, across the yard, the boy sat under a tree, sheltering from the rain that had barely stopped for two days now.

He had disappeared when Mel had threatened him with the gun, but Rachel had known he would come back. He would always come back.

He was that kind of boy.

Rachel had been having flashbacks since the boy, Levi … Gabriel, whatever his name was, had called her by her old name. It had unlocked something buried in her mind: a past as dim and distant as her childhood in New York, as shadowy as her memory of her father; a past her mind had deliberately locked away to allow her to move forward and forget the traumas that had forced her to go into hiding on the other side of the world.

Images had begun to come together – an English village, a chalk circle, a beach, some caves – but whenever Rachel had tried to remember more, her brain had felt as if it would burst.

She had tried to link the pictures and recall the people in her mind’s eye, but her head would spin until she felt nauseous. She would have to sit down and clear her mind for fear of being physically sick. It had been as though her brain was preventing her from dredging up the past: protecting her from it.

And when Rachel had pulled Adam into the sitting room after Mel had chased the boy off their land, it had been clear that he felt the same way.

“He called you Adam,” Rachel had whispered.

Adam had clutched his head between his hands, trying to keep his thoughts straight. “I’m Dan,” he’d said. “Dan Crocker. My mum calls me that; my friends call me that. That’s who I am. End of story.”

“I know; I know,” Rachel had agreed. “And I’m Molly. It says so on my passport. But when he called me Rachel and you Adam, something clicked. It was like a window opened in my mind and bright sunlight streaked through.”

Rachel had seen from her brother’s face that the same window had been opened in his mind, but he had decided to shut it firmly again. He had shaken his head rapidly from side to side and left the room, slamming the door.

Rachel pressed her palms against the glass of the window and watched the rain drumming on the corrugated steel that covered the wood store. The boy under the tree seemed unaware of her presence and oblivious to the rain that filtered through the branches and soaked his dirty shirt. Rachel’s head began to throb again and she leaned her forehead against the cool windowpane.

Rachel.

She heard the voice in her head. Then again.

Rachel?

She quickly drew her head away from the glass, and the boy under the tree turned to look at her. His white-toothed grin was clear against his dark wet skin.

Listen to me, Rachel,
the voice in her head said.
You can hear me, can’t you?

Rachel nodded.

Good. You’re coming back gradually. Still some way to go, but at least you can hear me. You’ve had time to rest. We need to get going…

Where?
Rachel asked with her mind.
Where are we going?

Walkabout.

Rachel was familiar with the word. Mel had used it. It was an Aboriginal phrase. Aboriginal youths would “go walkabout” at the age of thirteen or so, disappearing into the wilds and tracing the Songlines, or paths their ancestors had taken thousands of years before. They would try to recreate the heroic deeds of their forefathers.

It was a rite of passage.

Mel had said that the Aboriginals were the oldest continuous culture in the world, and that every lump and bump of the Australian landscape was sacred to them. Every rock and pebble told a story; every river and stream had a meaning.

Rachel looked out past where the rain had drilled tiny craters into the red mud and the gum trees beyond, to the line of hazy blue mountains that slumped across the horizon. Mel had told them about the Darling Scarp: a range of hills that the Aboriginal tribes said were the sleeping body of a giant mythical snake-being which had crawled across the country creating lakes, streams and rivers.

Rachel imagined for a second that she saw the whole line of hills undulate and move as if it were breathing; a trick of the light created by the rain dribbling down the windowpane.

Rachel.
The voice in her head snapped her back to reality. But this time it was a different voice. Her brother’s voice.

Rachel,
Adam said again.
I can hear you. I can hear what you’re thinking. I can hear what
he’s
saying.

I can hear you, too,
Rachel answered with her mind.
And you called me Rachel.

Another voice chimed in, tuning into their frequency: someone who could read
both
their thoughts. The boy…

Welcome back, Adam,
Levi’s voice said.
Now we’re getting somewhere. You’re beginning to get your memory back.

There was a silence. Rachel looked across the yard at the Aboriginal boy, who had got to his feet and was drawing a shape in the wet mud with a stick. He looked up as Adam’s voice came through again, faint … anxious:
I’m not sure I want my memory back.

There was nothing wrong with Mel Campbell’s memory.

She remembered every step of their hellish journey here: getting two teenage kids and their mother, all on the verge of mental collapse, halfway around the world. She remembered the lies and subterfuge she had been forced into in order to escape the clutches of the shadowy organization for whom she had been working.

She remembered coming back to Perth, not only a place where she felt safe, but one where she was familiar with every street and alleyway, with an Aboriginal-like knowledge of the bush land that spread for thousands of kilometres beyond the city. It helped that this place was so remote: as close geographically to the wilds of Borneo as it was to Sydney. If they could start a new life anywhere, then the sparse vast space of Western Australia, which housed just over a million people in as many square kilometres, was the place.

The place where Mel Campbell had grown up as Laura Sullivan.

She, too, was watching the boy from her window.

She saw him look up and smile.

Laura had guessed that threatening the boy with a shotgun would not deter him. She had done it out of fear as much as anything, because if the boy was who she thought he was … if he was from
where
she thought he was … then their quiet life was about to be thrown into turmoil once again.

A couple of years ago she had promised the twins’ mother that she would protect them. She had promised to keep them away from the probing of scientific organizations and not to lie to them as she had been forced to do in the past.

Laura took a deep breath and pulled on her long Driza-Bone raincoat. She would have to try and reason with the boy, at least. She stepped out into the rain and splashed across the muddy yard to where the boy sat under the tree.

“Hi,” she said.

The boy grinned, as if he had won an argument.

“Listen, I’m sorry about the … you know, about pointing a gun at you.”

“No worries,” he said.

“We were afraid, you see. I promised them…”

“What did you promise them?” the boy asked.

“I promised to keep them safe; I promised to protect them from anyone who might want to hurt them. They’ve been through enough.”

Levi looked hard at Laura.

“I promised their mother,” Laura added.

“That’s a promise you can’t keep. You know you can’t.”

Laura looked at the bruised grey sky. A wet bee wove through the raindrops towards her, landing on the trunk of the tree. Another followed it, then another and then twenty or so more. They crawled over the wet bark, wiggling their abdomens: signalling to one another, before forming a line and weaving about until they’d created the outline of a symbol.

It was one that Laura had not seen for some time, and the instant she saw it, she knew that the boy was right.

She could not keep her promise. She could not protect them.

“Y
ou promised me!” Kate Newman screeched across the breakfast table, banging her fist so that the mugs jumped and the coffee splashed.

“I promised you I wouldn’t lie. And I haven’t.” Laura looked at the two empty places where Dan and Molly – Adam and Rachel – would have normally sat.

“You said you’d protect them,” Kate said.

“I’ve done my best.” Laura looked her friend in the eye, before getting up from her seat and putting her arm round Kate’s shoulders. “I’ve done what I can for all of you. But I can’t protect them from
who
they are, or
what
they are, any more than you can.”

Kate was silent for a moment, digesting Laura’s words, and then she nodded. The women had become close in the two years they had spent together. They had bonded, delighted that this new life in rural Australia had suited them all so well. They had also been relieved that something in the kids’ mental make-up had enabled them to wipe their memories clean. Neither Rachel nor Adam had seemed to have any recollection of the time they had spent in England two summers before, nor of their traumatic adventures evading the Hope Project across Europe. And neither Laura nor Kate had had any intention of reminding them. They’d lulled themselves into a false sense of security and clung to this idea of a new start like a comfort blanket – a blanket that had suddenly been whisked away when they had woken to find Rachel and Adam gone.

“So who do you think the boy is?” Kate said.

“It might sound stupid, but I think he’s Gabriel. Or at least, someone very much
like
Gabriel.”

Kate’s face drained of colour. Nothing would surprise her after what she had come to learn about her children – what she had been through with them – but the mention of Gabriel’s name gave her a sinking feeling of dread and panic.

“No,” she said. “Not here. I mean he didn’t
look
anything like Gabriel.”

Laura shook her head. “I know, but I’m beginning to think he comes in different shapes and sizes. Even if he’s not exactly the same Gabriel we used to know, he certainly knows who the kids are.”

“We’ve been stupid,” Kate said. “We thought we were safe out here in the middle of nowhere, but
because
we’re the only people for miles around we’re easy to find. If Gabriel can find us, so can
they.
” Kate couldn’t bring herself to say the name of the Hope Project, the organization that had abducted her children, tortured her son and nearly killed them all.

“I don’t agree,” Laura said. ”I think our cover here has been perfect, but I think Gabriel could find them wherever they were in the world.”

“It’s time to move.”

“Where?” Laura asked.

“Home. New York.” Kate’s voice cracked with emotion when she said the words. “They can only have been gone a couple of hours. Just get them back here and we’ll be off. We can disappear completely in a big city.”

Laura saw the strain on Kate’s face and suddenly felt the fear herself: the urgency to get Rachel and Adam back. It was like the panic of a parent who one moment sees their child playing on the swings and then the next sees that he has vanished.

“I’ll go after them,” she said. “There’s only really one direction they can go in, and as long as they’re on foot they can’t have got far.”

But as Laura grabbed the keys to the old Jeep, she knew in her heart of hearts that it would not be as simple as that.

Rachel and Adam were still not quite sure why they had agreed to go with the boy Levi to Perth. Without even being aware that they had come to any decision, they had left with him in the middle of the night and had found themselves cold and hungry at the bus station at dawn.

He must have been very persuasive, Rachel thought, as she took a seat next to her brother on the bus. She felt perfectly calm, as if leaving her mother and Laura behind were the most normal thing in the world. She’d barely given them a thought – it was as though something, or someone, had banished any negative thoughts from her mind.

She looked at Adam. He smiled, every bit as relaxed as she was.

The bus pulled out of the station and emerged into the bright morning sun that flashed off the mirrored buildings of Perth’s financial district. The light in Australia was brighter than anything Rachel and Adam had ever seen before. Somehow the sky seemed higher and bluer, and the whiteness of the light made everything around them seem crisper, more sharply focused, and hyperreal.

Levi had dumped himself in the seats in front of the twins. He pushed his face between the seat backs and, grinning his white-toothed smile at them, said, “We’re on our way.”

“Where?” Adam asked.

“Kalgoorlie,” Levi answered.

Adam shrugged. The name sounded vaguely familiar, but then many of the Australian names sounded similar to his ears. It may have been somewhere he’d heard his mother and Laura talk about. “What’s in Kalgoorlie?”