by Emma Newman
“James is alive?!” Miri shrieked. “In the Unders?”
Zane pulled himself to his feet and went to his mother’s side. She clutched his arm. “Do you still have that photo?” she asked him urgently.
Zane sighed and pulled the photo of his father from his pocket. Miri plucked it from his hand and showed it to Lyssa, who only had to glance, nod, and then look away to tell Miri what she wanted to know.
Miri turned to Zane, her eyes glistening with unshed tears. “He’s alive!” she exclaimed in a shaky voice. “He didn’t leave me, they took him … he’s a prisoner there too. That’s why he didn’t come back–do you see, Zane?” She began to almost laugh as she pulled Zane into a tight embrace. Over her shoulder, Zane looked at Titus with haunted eyes.
“No, he’s not a prisoner,” Lyssa said and Titus watched Zane’s eyes squeeze shut as Miri froze. “He’s one of them, he was the worst of them … he hurt me. He was the one that stuck the needles in me.” Miri released Zane and turned to face Lyssa as she continued. “He didn’t wear the same weird clothes and masks as the others did. He pretended to be nice, pretended that he would make me feel better. He said he’d take the pain away, but he always made it worse … he was the one who –” Titus cut her off with a pointed look as Lyssa’s hand moved to the place on her stomach where the scarring was.
The photograph fell from Miri’s hand and fluttered to the floor as an awful silence descended on the room. A shaft of light fell across her face and she looked to the glass panes in the front door that it had come from. “I don’t want to hear any more,” she said in barely more than a whisper. “The sun’s coming up. I’ll be in the garden.”
They all watched her leave and shut the door behind her. Zane looked at the picture of his father lying on the rug but didn’t move to retrieve it. “I didn’t want her to know,” he said quietly.
“You knew all along?” Lyssa shot at him. “I knew it! I knew you were in with them somehow!”
“No!” Titus shouted and Lyssa stared at him in surprise. “We suspected that he was doing bad stuff in the Unders– that’s all, Lyssa. Zane is not like his father.”
“Zane would never hurt anyone,” Erin added.
Lyssa sighed and leant back. “I’m so tired. And this is all so strange. Titus, you know we never used to be friends with anyone from the gangs. I don’t understand.”
Titus sighed. “I live next door now. Let me take you home and you can get some sleep, then I’ll tell you all about what’s happened since we last saw each other.”
She nodded wearily and let him help her to stand. Zane opened the door for them and watched them leave.
Erin watched them pass the window, then turned to Zane. “Why didn’t you tell me about your dad being in the Unders?” she asked quietly.
Zane sighed heavily. “I think I was hoping that Titus was wrong. No chance of that now.”
Erin looked as if she were about to reply when she saw something outside that distracted her.
“Father wants me to go home,” she said. “David’s coming out into the square, so you’ll be safe. I’ll see you later.”
She left the door open behind her and Zane stood alone, staring at the photograph still lying where it had fallen. The breeze from the doorway teased at his hair; the sounds of bird-song drifted in with it but didn’t make him smile.
He didn’t even notice Titus at the doorway until he spoke. “You know what we have to do, don’t you?”
Zane’s eyes didn’t leave the picture. “Huh?”
“You know we have to go after the Unders, stop what they’re doing.”
Zane nodded. “We have to get the other children out.”
Titus stepped into the room. “Once Lyssa is well again, I’m going after them. Will you help me?”
Perhaps it was the conviction in his voice that pulled Zane’s attention from the photo at last. “Yes,” he replied, looking up at his friend. “I will.”
Titus nodded with satisfaction. “Good.”
Titus left and Zane remained motionless, staring at the image of his father and his friend, grinning out at him from a time he didn’t understand. His fears now confirmed, he was assailed by a cacophony of emotions: shame, disappointment, disgust. But pervading it all was a crushing sadness. Silently, after one last look, he threw the photograph into the fire and watched the hungry flames consume his father’s smile.
Outside, Titus watched Erin join her father on the steps of the house across the square. He didn’t go home; instead, he went to a secluded corner of the garden where he took a penknife from his pocket and flicked out a stubby blade. He recalled the day that Zane swore to be a doctor, and Luthor’s words. If what the Hunter said was true, this needed to be marked with blood. He pressed his palm onto the tip of the blade until a drop of blood slid down the metal and splashed onto the soil below. “I, Titus, swear that I will destroy the Unders. With this blood, let the oath be kept.” Only when the blood had seeped into the ground did he wipe the blade clean and return it to his pocket as a cold blast of wind bowed the trees around him.
Chapter 29
EVE
Later that day, Lyssa woke with a start, eyes wide and alert, the tendons in her neck straining as she tried to get up before she had even registered her surroundings. She flopped back into the sofa cushions when she saw Titus and the room around her. As unfamiliar as it was, it was a world away from her previous prison and enough to take away that instinct to run.
Wordlessly, Titus held a glass of water to her lips and she drank long and deep.
“You’re in my new house,” Titus said, pre-empting the question. “Remember? It’s in a place called Queen Square in Miri’s territory.”
Lyssa frowned and then made an attempt to get up that her weakened body simply couldn’t realise. “Miri?” she croaked. “That woman with long hair?” Titus nodded and Lyssa frowned. “Why are you staying in her territory? What’s the price you’re paying?”
“No, you don’t understand –”
“There’s always a price,” she interjected hoarsely. “Didn’t I teach you anything?”
Titus scowled at the implication that he’d been lax. “She’s different. A lot’s happened.”
“Evidently,” she said wryly, looking at her emaciated arms. She sank back, accepting her inability to stand for the moment. “I think you’d better fill me in.”
Titus paused. “Long or short version?”
“Short, I’m so tired. And hungry.” Titus gave her an apple from a fruit bowl newly stocked from Miri’s garden. Her eyes widened. “Wow, how many of these have you found?”
Titus smiled. “There are ten apple trees outside, and plums, pears, strawberries, raspberries, and grapes, Lyssa, actual, real grapes like in the pictures!”
She listened, enraptured as she sank her teeth into the apple’s juicy flesh. He watched her bliss with open joy and then remembered what she’d asked.
“Do you remember us going down the road past Euston station that night?” She shook her head. “Oh.”
“I remember us finding a house with a cellar and there being lots of good stuff hidden in it,” she ventured between bites.
He frowned. “That was a few days before you …” His voice trailed off as he realised just how much she had forgotten. “You don’t remember Jay?”
“Who’s Jay?”
Titus sighed heavily, remembering that night all too well. He tried to decide how much to tell her and decided to stick to fact rather than speculation. “He’s the leader of the gang whose territory we went into by mistake. When he was –”
“Was there a storm?” Lyssa interrupted, her brow creasing as she struggled to recall that night.
“There was lightning, but no storm. It was made by guns. Do you remember that?”
Her chewing paused and she stared into the space above his left shoulder for a few moments. “No,” she finally said. “Not really. I would remember that. How can lightning be made by guns?”
“You wanted the short version,” Titus reminded her and she nodded, returning to her apple. He shrugged. “Ok then. You were taken by some people from a gang called the Unders. They have guns that fire lightning but they can’t breathe the air, so they walk around in strange suits and look like Giants.” Now set on his task, he continued regardless as his sister struggled to take in what he was saying. “I don’t know what they did to you, but I think it was bad. And I don’t think they fed you properly. You were gone for seven weeks and four days, but then we caught one of their gang and made them swap her for you.”
Unchewed apple sat in Lyssa’s mouth for a few moments. Finally she swallowed, quickly regaining her composure. “And what happened to you when I was away?”
“Miri and her son Zane looked after me when I was hurt. There’s a big garden outside that they look after. They live in the house next door to this one, the one you woke up in when we brought you back. This one was empty so I –”
“You look ok now. Why did you stay? Did they help you to find me? Is that why?”
“They helped me a lot,” Titus began but then was cut off by his sister again.
“What did you give them in return?”
Titus pressed his lips together, managing his irritation, and then said, “Nothing. They don’t want anything from me.”
“So they haven’t told you yet.” She frowned at him with obvious disapproval. “You didn’t make a clear deal with them? I can’t believe you were so –”
“No,” Titus said firmly. “It isn’t like that. They’re nice people and Zane is my friend. And that girl, the one called Erin, she lives here with her father, though they’re in another gang … it’s complicated. But the most important thing is that she’s my friend too.”
Lyssa looked at him as if he had said that in her absence he’d decided to hop everywhere backwards. “People are only friends when it suits them.”
“They’re different.”
She peered into his eyes, searching, perhaps for the brother she remembered. “Just give me a few days to get strong, then we’ll get moving again. It isn’t right, any of this. I can’t believe that you’ve been fooled so quickly.”
Titus almost revealed the pulse of fury that flashed through him but managed to rein it in. “You don’t know everything that’s been going on … you wanted the short version.”
Lyssa let her head flop back onto the cushion as she swallowed the last of the apple, stalk and all. “It’ll have to wait. I just need to have a rest, just for a few …” And then she was asleep.
That night, the children met in the dream. Zane was pulled in first, then Erin. Each one of them had a good look around the room, as if to check that everything was in place and as it was before all of the drama of Lyssa’s rescue. The shelves were still filled with the strange collection of objects, the captain’s desk and chair were still there, and the window still looked out onto the tree hanging in the void, roots and all.
“How’s Lyssa?” Zane asked Titus, watching his friend wander over to sit in the captain’s chair.
Titus frowned. “She’s … tired,” was all he said.
“Has she said anything else about the Unders?” Erin asked, taking up her favourite spot by the window.
Titus shook his head. “She’s been asleep most of the time. But Miri said she would be, so I’m not too worried.”
Zane sat cross-legged on the floor and began to worry the hem of his trousers. “I think it will take her a while to get over what happened … it sounded horrible. Mum’s still really upset about what Lyssa said about my dad. I heard her crying tonight after she went to bed. I’m not sure what to do about it.”
Erin shrugged. “You can’t stop her being upset.”
Titus nodded. “I suppose you just have to be calm and patient,” he offered. “You suspected this a long time before she did. It must have been a shock for her.”
Zane nodded. “So what do we do now?”
“We find a way to destroy them,” Titus stated firmly.
Zane frowned. “They’re really strong, and they have guns that make lightning. And anyway, I thought you didn’t like all that gang stuff.”
“This isn’t ‘gang stuff’!” Titus was appalled. “We have to stop what they’re doing to those children down there that Lyssa told us about. You’ve seen the boys when they arrive at Jay’s patch. Surely you want all that to stop?”
“Of course I do!” Zane exclaimed. “But you said ‘destroy’ and that sounds a bit … well …”
“Violent?” Erin offered.
“Dangerous,” Zane finished.
“Necessary,” Titus returned. “It’s necessary. If they’re bad enough to do things like that to children, and Lyssa, then they don’t deserve anything else.”
“If my father’s bad enough, you mean,” Zane muttered and the trio fell into silence.
“We have to find out more about them,” Erin ventured. “If you’re going to hunt something, you learn about it first. That’s what my father’s taught me. You learn about how it thinks, how it moves, and what makes it attack or run.”
Titus nodded. “Erin’s right–we do need to learn more. I’ll see what Lyssa says when she’s better. But the one who I’d really like to speak to is Eve. The boys who get away talk about her and Lyssa told us about her too.”
“Yeah,” Erin agreed, staring out at the oak tree. “I’d like to know how she went in and out of locked rooms so easily. Maybe she was one of Them.”
Titus shook his head. “No, she wasn’t from the Unders, I’m sure of it.”
“She was very brave by the sound of it,” Zane said, not looking up from his trouser hem. “I’d really like to meet her too.”
“If only we could talk to her here,” Titus muttered, resting his head in his hands. “Then we could find out all we needed to know.”
He looked up as someone touched him lightly on the shoulder and then cried out in surprise, jumping up so fast that the chair tipped over behind him.
A slip of a girl with strawberry blonde hair and deathly pale skin leapt away from him and silently cowered in the corner as Zane scrabbled to his feet and Erin sprang into a fighter’s stance, hand on the hilt of her dagger. The three children stared at the strange girl dressed in familiar blue pyjamas.
“Eve?” Titus ventured and the girl simply nodded, with eyes just as large and surprised as his.
“Is this Uppabov?” the girl finally said, in barely more than a whisper.
The three children stared at her, until Titus finally regained some composure and said, “Where?”
“Uppabov,” the girl replied, voice no louder.
Titus shook his head. “No. This is a dream. My dream. We brought you here.”
The girl continued to look thoroughly confused. Zane blinked away the last of his surprise and gave her a warm smile. “I’m Zane,” he began. “Hello.”
“Hello,” she replied and reciprocated with a nervous twitch at the corners of her mouth that didn’t really make it to a smile.
“This is Titus.” Zane waved a hand in his friend’s direction. Titus didn’t smile but continued to stare at the girl intensely. “And that’s Erin,” Zane added, pointing at her. Erin gave her a curt nod, similar to the way Jay greeted people when he wanted to seem impressive.
“Hello,” said the girl. “I’m Eve.”
“We’ve heard about you!” Zane said cheerily.
“More than that,” Titus added. “We wished for you. We wanted to speak to you … and you came.” His voice trailed off as his mind began to work over the mystery.
Eve peered back at him. “You did? Why?”
“Because you know my sister,” Titus replied, smiling at her for the first time. “And the boys who were in the Unders– they all talk about you.”
Eve clapped her hands in delight. “The boys who went to Uppabov?!” she gasped. “You know them?!”
All three of them nodded and couldn’t help but smile as she jumped up and down
on the spot.
“They live near us,” Zane said. “They’re in a gang called the Bloomsbury Boys, but we know they came from the Unders, and that’s why we wanted to talk to you.”
Eve frowned. “What’s the Unders? What’s a gang?”
“The Unders are the people who keep you where you are,” Titus began. “The ones who stole my sister, Lyssa–remember her?”
Eve nodded. “She’s gone … don’t know where though.”
“She’s with us now,” Titus began, but when Eve looked excitedly around the room as if expecting to find Lyssa, he added, “At my house, in the garden–not here literally.”
“House?” Eve frowned. “Gar-den? I don’t know what these words mean.”
Titus sighed and exchanged a look with Zane. “What’s important,” Zane said, “is that Lyssa is safe with us and isn’t being hurt anymore.”
Eve nodded at that. “Yes. This is important–I’m glad. She’s nice. Oh!” She pointed at Titus. “You’re the one she kept asking about! I understand what a brother is now! It’s a you!”
Titus smiled, charmed by her clumsy language. “We need to know why the Unders are keeping people prisoner,” he pressed.
“Why?” Eve tipped her head to the side and regarded Titus with interest.
“Because we want to understand and learn how to stop them,” he replied evenly, as if talking to someone much younger than she looked.
“Stop them hurting us?” Eve watched the trio nod. “Good, they hurt us a lot, it’s horrible. But they say that it’s necessary. I don’t like necessary, it hurts.”
Zane looked pointedly at Titus and then asked, “Do you know what the ‘Compound’ is? Lyssa said something about it.”
Eve wrinkled her nose. “It’s horrible stuff that they put in people to try to stop the air in Uppabov from killing them. They put it in some of the children, but it makes them sick. Sometimes it kills them, and then Hex stops doing things that hurt for a while whilst they talk about it lots. Then when they stop talking lots, it’s always bad–then they come and do the really bad tests, where they take bits out of us and put bits in, and there are lots of needles and it all hurts really bad.”
