Captive

by A. J. Grainger

  “What does that matter?”

  “It just feels important. I know it wasn’t anyone’s fault that he died, but it is still sad, and it feels right to name him.”

  “Yes, yes, you’re probably right, my darling.” There’s a glass of water on the table beside my dad. He gestures for it, and I pass it to him. He takes a long, slow sip before holding the glass out for me to return it. When he does so, I notice that his hand is shaking. Still he doesn’t answer. It is only after I’ve sat back down that he says quietly and slowly, as if weighing something, “The child’s name was Jeremy. Jeremy Fletcher, I believe.”

  • • •

  It starts raining soon after I leave Talon. I promised myself that if I ever got the chance to run, I would, but to leave him there in that clearing, to not even look back, was harder than I thought it would be. The forest floor is wet now and slippery, and the sky is dark with more rain. Trees pack in tightly all around me, but I can hear the road more clearly.

  Talon’s real name is Samuel Fletcher. His brother is Jez—Jeremy Fletcher. It is the boy Dad told me about in Paris. I should be glad that I know Talon’s name. It will make it easier for the police to catch him. Instead I am sad that it was his family the AFC manipulated and used for their own ends. If they’d left him alone, Talon would never have kidnapped me.

  I push into the breeze and begin to walk slowly up the road, keeping to the shallow ditch on one side. The rain doesn’t let up, socking me in the face with drops that feel the size of a baby’s fist. It feels wonderful. I’m free! Finally. In a few hours, I could be home with Mum and Addy. And Dad.

  You’re up to your neck in this, Stephen.

  There’s the distant roar of an engine, and I shake myself free of the thought. As the car turns a corner, I begin to wave my arms and yell at the driver to stop. Lights and a blaring horn blast into me as the driver swerves and disappears into the distance. “Come back!” I shout, flinging a stone after the departing vehicle. It bumps once in the road and then drops down into the ditch. On the other side of the road, the wood stretches on and on into what might as well be eternity. It doesn’t matter. I don’t even care that I’m soaking wet and starting to shiver. I’m outside in the rain, under the sky, and I can hear birds singing and I can see the trees.

  I walk on for what must be another half hour at least. Not a single car has passed by. The initial euphoria of being free has evaporated. I’m giving in to the cold. My teeth are chattering, and my brain keeps playing that conversation with Talon over and over. I’m so distracted that I almost don’t notice the shadow of the tree trunks lengthen as a car approaches with its headlights on. I am taking no chances. I stand right in the center of the road and swing my arms in a huge arc. The driver honks his horn, but that only makes me wave more.

  “Stop!” I shout. “Please, stop!”

  The car steers sharply to the right to avoid me, then pulls to a stop a little farther down the road.

  I run toward the vehicle, which is actually more of a van. It looks dirty in the heavy rain, but in true light, it would be white. I slow my pace, feet tripping over each other.

  I know this van.

  I take a step back, and then another as the door opens. But it is already too late. A man is climbing out, and even in the rain-washed half-light, I can see that he is huge. He pulls something long and dark out of the van’s front seat and holds it up. It’s a gun. Its shiny surface winks at me, as though it knows a secret.

  Scar is standing on the road in front of me, a rifle in his hands.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  “Did they hurt you?” Talon asks.

  “Apart from tying me to a bed again, no.” We’ve both been bound by cable ties to opposite ends of the bed in my old cell. After I so helpfully flagged down the van, Scar had easily bundled me into the back of it, and then he and Feather drove me back here to the farmhouse. Talon had come outside as we’d pulled up in the driveway.

  “Lose something?” Feather asked him as she climbed out of the van. At her command, Scar dragged me from the vehicle and dumped me on the gravel at Talon’s feet. Before Talon could reply, Feather stalked the distance between them and smacked him in the jaw.

  It is still raining heavily, and streams of water pour down the windowpane. It’s windy too, and a branch or something is being whipped rhythmically against the glass.

  “What will they do with us?” I ask.

  “I don’t know.” He slides his foot along the floor until his leg is resting against my ankle. I can feel the warmth of him through my tracksuit bottoms. “It’ll be okay. We’ll be okay.”

  But when the bough of the tree slams into the glass again, making it vibrate against the frame, we both jump, and I know he is afraid too.

  “What if Scar . . . ?”

  “I won’t let him anywhere near you,” he says fiercely. His left cheek is bright red from where Feather hit him, and she’s tiny. We really don’t stand a chance against Scar. It means a lot that he is determined to fight with me, though, even after our conversation in the forest about my dad. I don’t want to bring that up again. I don’t want to see the look of disappointment on his face.

  “Where have they been since yesterday?” I ask instead.

  “They went to see this guy who used to work as a prison guard at the place Marble is being kept. He reckons he can help them get him out. Some kind of prison break. Shit. I don’t know. The whole thing sounds insane.”

  “But if Dad . . . if Dad isn’t negotiating with them, then . . . then there’s no reason to keep me alive. Is that why you let me go? Because you thought they were going to . . . hurt me?”

  “I’m sure Feather would never . . . But she’s changed. She won’t listen to me anymore. She spends all this time with Scar, and he’s bad, Robyn. Really bad. His ex-­girlfriend went missing a few years back, and there was a rumor he . . . you know.”

  “Killed her?”

  “I don’t know. But there’s something wrong with him. You’ve seen his fingers? Who does that to themselves? And he doesn’t care about Marble or Jez or animal welfare, or any of the other stuff Feather and I do. He just likes to break things and hurt people.”

  I open my mouth to tell him about my conversation with Dad when he was in the hospital. I want him to understand that it’s Feather and Scar who are wrong. They are lying, not my dad. The sound of the bolt being drawn back stops me.

  Feather opens the door and steps into the cell. She’s cast in light like some kind of avenging angel. Talon says her name, but Feather cuts right through him. “Shut your mouth. I’m not here to talk to you. It’s all agreed, Princess. You’re going home. We’re getting Marble back.” She crouches over Talon and grabs a handful of his T-shirt. “I will never forgive you for what you’ve done.” I draw back my leg, ready to kick her if she hits him again. She stands up, though, and her voice is controlled as she says, “I hate you for this.” With the light behind her and her face in shadow, it takes a second to ­realize she was talking to me.

  • • •

  With a blanket over my head, I am led from the van. We set off from the house at about lunchtime. Talon and I had been left chained up in the cell all night, with no food or water. Feather gave us a couple of stale bread rolls and a bottle of water this morning. That was hours ago, though, and I’m especially thirsty after being locked in the back of the window­less, airless van. As our hands were cuffed behind our backs, we couldn’t hold on to anything properly and were bumped and battered against the metal walls. Eventually Talon managed to wedge himself in one corner by pressing one leg against the right wall of the van and the other against the curve of metal that covered the wheel. He told me to sit in between his legs and hold on to his T-shirt. “At least then you’ll bump against my legs rather than the wall.” It felt too intimate to sit that close to him, but after knocking my head against the metal for the third time, I
finally agreed. Holding on to him was really difficult, and after a while my hand ached too much.

  “Just lean against me,” he said. “I mean, it’s okay, if you want to.” I leaned back slowly. I could feel the tension in his body too, but also the warmth of him, and the steady beat of his heart was soothing. My own was racing. I should have had more faith in Dad. Of course he couldn’t announce on national TV that he was going to release a known terrorist, but he’s obviously been working with the police and Parliament to get it sorted.

  Feather pushes me forward now with a sharp jab to my spine. I’m bundled up some steps. I stumble over the last one, banging my knee painfully against the ground, and into some sort of building, then up more stairs and along a corridor. We stop as a door is unlocked, and she shoves me down a shorter hallway, across a room, and finally knocks me to the floor.

  “Move and I’ll cut your throat,” Feather says after securing my handcuffs to a radiator. I expect to hear her footsteps crossing the floor, but instead she grabs me roughly by the chin and rips the blanket from my face. I’m staring into her cold, dark eyes. “You might have tricked Talon into believing you give a shit about our cause, but not me. I know you just played him so you had a chance to escape.”

  Talon is brought into the room then by Scar. He is pushed down next to me and Scar binds him to the same radiator, pulling the cuffs tight, so they bite into Talon’s skin. Then Feather ties something around my eyes, and I can’t see anything else. “If I hear so much as a squeak out of either of you, I’ll lock Scar in here with you,” she says.

  Scar laughs. “Any excuse,” he says. “Any excuse.”

  “Feather, can’t we talk about this—,” Talon begins.

  “I’m done talking with you,” Feather says. “Now shut your mouth and keep it shut.” I hear her and Scar cross the room, then the sound of a door opening and closing, and finally a key turning in a lock.

  “Well,” Talon whispers, “I guess this is marginally better than the van. At least the walls are no longer trying to knock us out.”

  “Where are we?” I ask. It’s horrible not being able to see.

  “I don’t know. Another safe house, one closer to the hand-over point, probably.”

  “Which is . . . ?”

  “’Cause they’d definitely tell me that.”

  “You’re angry with me?”

  “With you? No. Not really. A bit. I thought you’d listen to me, but you just kept defending your dad.”

  “Because he’s my dad. You have to understand that, surely?”

  “But he’s been lying to you.”

  “Not about everything. He wasn’t lying about doing anything to get me back, like you said he was. He’s releasing Marble.”

  “He took his time about it.”

  There’s no denying that, but I don’t want to talk about it. “Do you think you can do one bad thing and still be a good person?” I ask.

  Talon sighs. “No one is ever just one thing. It takes a whole lifetime of decisions to make you who you are.”

  “‘We are the choices we make.’”

  “What?”

  “It’s just something my dad said once.” The night he told me that Jez hadn’t died because of Michael’s drug, but I don’t tell Talon that. “How did you know about the voice-mail message?”

  “Feather. She’d been working with a journalist to uncover some of the dodgy animal-testing programs at Bell-Barkov, and they came across it.”

  “They hacked into my dad’s voice-mail messages, you mean.”

  “So what? Your dad and Michael are best friends. There was a chance Michael would talk to him about what was going on.”

  “How did you get involved in all of it?”

  “Dad had been in contact with Feather. I don’t know if she got in touch with him or the other way around. Anyway, after he died, she called up. Said she had some stuff on Bell-Barkov if I was interested. And of course I was. I was a mess after Dad and Jez died. Mum was even worse. I couldn’t stand being at home. Feather had a flat with Marble in London. Their parents died in a car accident a few years before and left them some cash. She got what I was going through. Said she wanted to help me. Said we could work together to bring Bell-Barkov down. And it appealed to me. I felt like I’d found not only how to fight but someone to do it with.”

  “And Marble, too?”

  “Not really. He didn’t get what Feather was trying to do with the AFC. He just wanted to go on marches and lobby for better conditions for animals in labs. He thought Feather was too aggressive with Bell-Barkov. He worried about her getting arrested. It became difficult living in the flat. We’d argue a lot. Feather can be brilliant, passionate, but she’s moody as hell. On her bad days, me and Marble would be walking on eggshells around her. She believes in total equality: woman, man, animal, tree, plant. Anything that exists basically should be valued and protected. By violent means if necessary. She couldn’t understand how getting justice for Jez meant more to me than animal welfare. She called it ‘personal campaigning.’ You’re doing it because it does something good for you, when in actual fact anything you do should be selfless and for the common good.”

  “But you still helped her? You still kidnapped me?”

  “Marble is my friend, and he’s innocent.”

  “How can you be so sure about that?”

  “Because he was with me when your dad was shot. We were in the flat, playing video games all afternoon.”

  “Why didn’t you tell the police that?”

  “I have! Loads of times. Marble keeps telling them I’m lying. He’s obviously covering for someone or something. I don’t know.”

  And it hasn’t occurred to Talon who that person might be. “Where was Feather that day?”

  “Out with Scar somewhere. . . No, oh no. She wouldn’t. She couldn’t have done. I know Feather and there’s no way.”

  I thought there was no way my dad would ever lie to me.

  My arms are hurting; I try to shift into a more comfortable position.

  “I was angry and desperate when we took you captive. One of my best friends was in jail, facing a life sentence for something he didn’t do. My brother and my dad were dead. My mum was going crazy with grief. But I swear if I thought for a single second that Feather had—had tried to kill someone, there is no way I would have got involved in this.”

  I try again to move into a more comfortable position, fail, and say, “I don’t want to talk about this anymore. Talk to me about something else. Anything. Let’s just pretend for two seconds that we’re not tied to a radiator, that we’re in café, drinking hot chocolate. We’ve just met because there are no other tables and so you have to share mine.”

  His voice is full of emotion. “You want to imagine meeting me somewhere else?”

  Do I? There are too many questions I don’t want to answer in that sentence. “I want to imagine being somewhere else. But you can’t talk about birds. Not spotting them, watching them, or pretending to be them. Okay?”

  “I do have other topics of conversation, you know.”

  “Like badgers? Dolphins? Fish?”

  “Okay, Little Miss Interesting, you choose a topic.”

  “A favorite day. Tell me about your best memory.”

  “That’s easy. The beach at Brighton the summer before Jez died. Your turn.”

  “Christmas this year. I got a digital camera. Addy had wrapped it in brown paper that she’d covered in stickers. And I mean, covered it in stickers. It looked like the glitter monster had had a serious case of diarrhea. Anyway, she started crying as soon as I took the paper off and she realized that her paper wasn’t the present. I had to pretend all afternoon that it was. But it was kind of special, really. She’s silly, my sister, but I like how easy she is to please and that she thinks I’m, like, the best person ever.”

 
“How old is she?”

  “Three. She’ll be four in September. I know it’s weird her being so much younger. I don’t think my parents thought they could have more kids. . . . Wait, I don’t even want to think about kids and my parents, because that means . . .”

  Talon laughs. “You’re not at all how I expected you’d be. In your photos, you look—don’t take this the wrong way—like you think you’re better than everyone else.”

  “I hate having my photo taken. I feel really awkward.”

  “And you’re always going to parties.”

  “My dad’s the PM. I get invited to stuff. It’s rude to say no to everything.”

  “I wish we’d met under different circumstances.”

  “What, like at one of those stupid parties?”

  “Hell, no. You wouldn’t catch me dead at one of those things. You all look dumb, in your fancy clothes, posing for the cameras.”

  “You wouldn’t have been invited anyway. They have a strict door policy. ‘No terrorists allowed.’” In my head, it was funny. We would both laugh. Said out loud, it is anything but. “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay. It’s what I am. I’m ashamed of what I’ve done. If I could take it back, I would. I guess Mum isn’t the only one who went a little mad after Jez and my dad died.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  “The exchange will take place over there.” Feather points at a patch of green about ten meters or so from where we are standing. I can’t see much more of it, because the trees rise up so thickly around us. Several paths wind off from where the four of us are standing by the back of the van, one of which leads to the field. It’s a bit less overgrown than the others, but the track the van is parked on is the only one wide enough for a vehicle. It will be hard for Feather and the others to escape if anything goes wrong.