I like watching his hands as he drives, and the way his forehead crinkles when we hit slow traffic. But… He lied to me, kidnapped me, knocked me unconscious. He’s so different from the boy I thought he was.
I have to separate the Rehan of last week, the Rehan I adored, from this real Rehan.
I know I have to do that.
But they’re blurring together.
We head to Castlerigg first, but there’s nothing around except sheep, watching with empty eyes as we shiver in the wind, staring at the circle of ancient rocks. There’s no visitor centre. Not even a shop. On another day I’d find the stones beautiful and inspiring - I think - but today, this place is bleak, and its silence is a threat, not a refuge.
I want to go home, but I don’t have one.
I want everything to stop.
We ask around the local pubs, but no-one has heard of Anna Tretheway.
We’re quiet as we drive to Keswick town centre, and Rehan decides that we should sort out tonight’s accommodation and take a rest, try the pencil museum tomorrow. He says that he needs a break from driving, but I suspect that, like me, he’s worried that there will be nothing there either, and he’d rather put that off until tomorrow.
He finds us a cheap hotel. It smells of wet dog. The faded wallpaper and worn carpet are a blur as we carry our things up the stairs. It’s a relief to walk into my bedroom and shut the door between us. We’ve hardly slept since KHH attacked the Institute. I’ve perhaps found a parent, he’s perhaps lost one. We’re both exhausted.
I choke down the sandwiches Rehan bought in Lancaster and crawl into the bed, not even bothering to brush my teeth. Teeth can wait until tomorrow, Anna Tretheway can wait until tomorrow. Everything can wait.
When I wake, the room is still dim, and for a moment I’m home in the Institute, drifting out of a really strange dream. Then my eyes settle on the outline of the unfamiliar bedside lamp, and beyond it the faint glow of dawn through the thin curtains. I’m not home. And the Institute isn’t home anyway.
I’m starving, and cold under the cheap blankets. I make a dash to the bathroom, where the hot shower makes up for the shortcomings of the hotel. The water is fast and generous and warm, and there’s free soap and shampoo. Pure bliss. My eyes close as water pours over my face and hair. My body aches in strange places from all of yesterday’s running and falling, but my mind is much clearer after the long sleep.
I feel older somehow, but not necessarily in a bad way. Today will be different. Today we will find Anna, or get other answers. No more giggling with Rehan, yesterday we were both overtired – but I can’t trust him. Although it seems unlikely, this could all still be Forever’s ‘period of intense stress.’
Nevi. It hasn’t let go of you. But what hasn’t? Anna? Forever? KHH?
Or was Nevi just another part of the act?
A leaflet on my bedside table tells me that breakfast is served from seven. It’s currently six. I’ve slept for just over twelve hours. Overcome with an urge to do something, anything, that definitely hasn’t been planned for me by someone else, I go for a walk.
There’s not much to see in the little town of Keswick. It’s all grey: the sky, the stone houses with their slate roofs, the hills staring down at me, the faces of the few people I pass. A damp kind of mist clings to everything, including me, and my hair frizzes up around my face. But there’s a freedom and a peace in choosing my own path, in being alone, and despite my rumbling stomach, it’s with a pang of regret that I turn back towards the hotel.
Rehan is sitting in reception, foot jiggling, and leaps to his feet when he sees me. “Where’ve you been?”
“Just walking around, I woke early.”
“And you couldn’t leave me a note? I didn’t know what had happened to you, and reception,” he shoots the man on the desk a dirty look, “wouldn’t let me into your room to check on you.” The man on the desk ignores us.
Was Rehan worried because he’s tasked to look after me by Forever, or by KHH, or because he cares what happens to me? Sleep has washed away yesterday’s certainty that our escape was real. But, real or not, I need him, and the questions I want to throw at him can only start a row. It’s easier to mumble an apology and follow him to the faded pink of the dining room, where we sit on uncomfortable chairs gazing away from each other, eating toast in slow, reproachful crunches. Eventually our plates are empty and we’re forced to look at each other.
“So, you ready?” he asks.
He’s on his feet before I can answer. I’m not sure I have an answer to that question anyway.
The sight of the sign reading ‘Pencil Museum’ lifts my mood a little, as I wait outside with Rehan, who’s doing something on his phone. Never did I think I’d be visiting a museum for pencils, let alone waiting outside it in the drizzle.
There’s a bit of dead skin next to my thumbnail. I tug it off, but now my thumb is sore, and I think it might bleed. I should leave it alone. I shouldn’t pick at it.
I pick at it.
The museum door’s sign turns from closed to open. I speed towards it before Rehan can, I’m fed up of him acting like he’s in charge. I march inside, towards a startled looking woman at the desk. I guess they don’t get many visitors who turn up at opening time. She turns from stacking something behind her and offers a pleasant smile.
After yesterday’s searches of the local pubs, the question rolls off my tongue easily. “Hello, I’ve lost touch with someone and a friend suggested that you might know where I could find her. Her name’s Anna Tretheway.”
She stares at me through thick glasses rimmed with bright red plastic. I’m impatient for another “Never heard of her, sorry,” so that we can move on, get this exercise over with.
But she doesn’t give it. “Anna? You’re looking for Anna?” she asks instead. She looks at me and her eyes widen, although perhaps that’s just the effect of the glasses. A little sound comes out of me, and even I don’t know what it means.
“Anna Tretheway.” Rehan confirms from behind me. “You know her?”
“She worked here a while back, before – she’s back at home now I believe.”
“Home?”
“I’m not sure I can…” she looks at me again, and something in my face changes her mind. “Mere Cottage. Past Westway, near the lake.”
Rehan takes over, charming the woman, jotting down details. A ten minute drive, the woman says, still staring at me.
Ten minutes. I now know what Geraldine’s romances meant when they said her blood turned to ice. It’s an actual physical thing. My lips are numb, and everything in me is quiet and cold.
I follow Rehan to the car.
There’s nothing to say as we drive, but he tries anyway. “Are you going to tell her? Everything that’s happened?”
How do I know what I’m going to tell some stranger who may or may not be my mother, may be real or fake? If she is real, she may not be happy to see me. May not believe me.
I don’t answer. I watch the road flash by, and wish Anna lived further away.
The house is neglected but pretty. Its weather-stained walls were probably white, once, and the thicket in the garden looks like it might bear flowers at sunnier times of year. The building itself lists towards the lake, as if considering whether to take the final leap. It’s small, three bedrooms at the most. Does Anna live alone? Does she have family? We forgot to ask.
Let’s get this over with.
I climb out of the car into the wind, then through the tangled garden. Rehan crunches along behind me on the gravel.
We halt on Anna’s doorstep. I stare down at the worn stone beneath my feet. This house is old: so many other people have stood here, waiting. I wait with their ghosts, my fists shoved into pockets, fingernails digging into my palms. I don’t know what I’m hoping for when the door opens.
Moments later, the door is open. She looks so like me. A thinner, slightly older me, with longer hair and lighter eyes. Our cheekbones are the same, the curve of o
ur lips is the same, and her nose has that tilt which I always disliked in my mirror. I don’t dislike it on her. Huge eyes, pale face, too many shawls – she looks a fey, a bedraggled faerie who doesn’t know how to get back home. She looks too young to have a daughter my age, but she’s my mother, I know it.
Rehan’s saying something that I don’t hear. Anna isn’t listening to Rehan either. She doesn’t say anything, just stares at me, and after a moment, she sits down on the front step and cries.
My insides are cracking open too, there’s a hole where my guts should be, a pain in my chest, even my skin hurts, and I can’t speak. There’s no doubt in me anymore. This woman is my mother. So I sit down next to her on the step and let my tears come too. Anna Tretheway throws her arms around me, yanking me close while the sobs shake her, and I cry harder as her fingers dig into my bones. I cry for the instant sense of connection I feel to her, for the years we should have had together, for my strange and cold childhood at the Institute. I should have been here.
I cry for my other family – Katrina, Arlo, all my friends, for the lies we were sold, for their lost parents still out there somewhere, or perhaps dead. Why did Forever do this to us?
I don’t cry for that sense of being special, for the fake immortality I took for granted. I know that I’m going to die, all my friends too, in only a few dozen decades. Sitting in the circle of my mother’s arms, I don’t care about that. I’m not one of the Forever, I’ve never been Forever. It’s a relief.
Now I know who to hate.
Rehan moves away to look at the garden.
I don’t want to speak first, so I don’t. We just carry on crying.
After a while, Anna draws me to my feet and leads me inside the cottage.
Chapter Fifteen
Anna slams the door against the wind, against the world, against Rehan, still out there somewhere. I sift vague impressions of dust, piles of books, white walls covered with colourful paintings, as she leads me into the house.
“The hospital told me that you were dead,” she says unnecessarily, wiping her eyes on a sleeve and leading me into a small living room, where she tugs me down onto the sofa next to her and takes my hands in hers. “What happened to you?”
“It’s complicated,” I offer weakly. “Uh. I was raised in the Forever Institute, that’s all I remember.”
“The scientists?”
“Yeah.”
“They took you? Why?”
“I don’t really know. Um.” How do we catch up on a lost lifetime? As the initial shock fades, this begins to feel incredibly awkward.
“I want to hear everything. Every detail.” Her eyes are bright, intense, too close as she grips my hands.
Everything. Ok. I begin talking, randomly at first, about my childhood, my friends, and she doesn’t interrupt, although sometimes her mouth presses into a thin line. Mine does that when I’m annoyed, Katrina always teased me about my governess expression. After a while – one hour, two? – Anna gets up to make us a drink, her eyes never leaving me as she stands in the kitchen doorway, boiling the kettle. She looks drained, yet alert at the same time. I wonder if I do too.
“I haven’t got tea or coffee,” she mumbles. “Is hot chocolate all right?”
And that’s when I know that we’re going to be ok.
Her eyes flicker back and forth as she thinks, bird-like, another thing Katrina and Arlo used to tease me about. So many little things about her remind me of me, as she comes back to the sofa. But she’s a stranger.
I ask about my father, but she doesn’t have much for me. She was very young, she says, and it was a summer fling, they weren’t together long. She changes the subject before I can ask his name.
“You look cold…” Anna offers me a pink scarf thing, and I let her settle it around my shoulders in a waft of rosemary and lavender, but it feels forced, the mothering so late it just makes both of us sad. “I don’t even know your name…” Her lip wobbles. “I was going to call you Isobel, did they keep that?”
“Fern,” I offer awkwardly.
“Fern…” She looks so lost, but makes an effort to smile. “Well, that’s lovely too. And the boy? Who’s he?”
“He’s Rehan, a Vol. He – got me out of the Institute.”
She stares at me blankly. “What’s a Vol?”
I stare back. I came here for answers, but now… Huh. I start telling her what my textbooks said about the Vol, leaving out the negative stuff, and my friends’ talents. Anna shakes her head in wonder. Then I remember how much my textbooks lied, and I trail off. I ask Anna what the outside world know about the evolution of psychics. Nothing, it turns out.
Perhaps there are no Vol at all, and the only ‘talents’ are those developed by Forever? But no, that wouldn’t explain Rehan, Callie, the girl in the lilac coat. And the data said that I had a high level of Vol mutation.
I realise that I haven’t spoken in a while. Neither has Anna. She glances at the door. “So how did you meet Rehan, if he was outside the Institute?”
We’re going to have to talk about that, too, then. “Uh, he was part of a KHH plan to break in.”
“KHH? That terrorist group? I’ve heard of KHH.”
“I don’t think they’re terrorists, or not exactly – Forever call them that, but it looks like Forever have said a lot of stuff that’s not true.”
She’s clearly unconvinced. “So how did he get you out? Why?”
“KHH blew up the Institute wall, they were trying to steal information, they tricked me into helping them disable the power. Then Rehan kidnapped me, well his Dad did. It’s actually kind of a funny story…” She doesn’t look like she’s going to find it funny, so I change what I was about to say. “But Forever shot his Dad – at least I think so, we were upstairs so I didn’t see – and Rehan’s been really nice to me, he helped me find you, I would never be here if it wasn’t for him. He drove me up from London.”
“They shot someone? While you were upstairs?”
“Um, yeah.”
“So, you aren’t together?”
Out of everything I’ve said, that’s what she focuses on? “No… No.”
She smiles warmly at me. “Well, whatever his background, it’s wonderful that he helped you find your way back to me, I owe him so much, I’ll make sure he knows how grateful we are. Or has he gone already?”
Gone? I dash to the window, but the car is right where I left it, and I let out a long slow breath. I turn to reassure her, but she’s behind me, glaring at the car.
I don’t think I should have mentioned the kidnap.
I track down Rehan in the garden – he must be freezing by now – and ask him to join us. Anna watches from the front door as we trudge back through the wet tangle of plants. She’s unwilling to take her eyes off me for a moment. I wonder how long that will last – it’s lovely, but also kind of weird.
“Are you ok?” he asks. I nod, and that’s all we really have time for before we’re back with Anna. Just as well, I have no idea what to tell him anyway. Except that I guess I finally trust that something is true. Anna is true. She’s too like me not to be my mother, for all she looks more like a big sister. The rest of the data stick, all the stuff Rehan’s said – who knows.
When we reach Anna, I tell her that I need the toilet, just to escape her ever-following eyes. Part of me wants to rush back to her, reassure myself again that she’s real, that I’m not imagining how much she looks just like me – but more of me wants to sit on the bathroom floor and never go out again. It’s all too much. I do sit on the tiles for a while, letting waves of emotion crash over me while I stare at the wall, but I can’t live in a bathroom, so I plod back to the living room. Anna and Rehan are smiling tightly at each other. I’ve seen less tension in Katrina’s kickboxing sessions with Lia.
“Fern,” says Rehan. “What do you want to do now?”
“She’s staying here, of course,” Anna interjects.
“If she wants to,” he reminds her gently, and she
bristles, so I interrupt.
“I’d like to stay here.” They’re both relieved, but then I suddenly feel sick at the thought of being left alone with Anna. “Can Rehan stay too? For a bit? This is all so sudden.” And he knows me and you don’t and I still might be Vol and you’ve never even heard of them and I can’t just move in because I’m your daughter when I don’t even know you at all. And what if, when you know me, you decide you don’t want to?
“Of course,” smiles Anna. But it doesn’t reach her eyes.
“So.” Rehan dumps the pile of my new clothes onto the bed in Anna’s spare room. It’s sparse but nice: oak floors, white walls with colourful pictures. The scent of forgotten summers whispers up from dried flowers on the bedside table. Anna excitedly promised to change the paint, the pictures, anything I like, but it’s lovely how it is. Even if it wasn’t totally crazy to turn up and start planning redecorating straight away. I just met her.
My mother has finally gone downstairs to get something – more blankets, probably, the woman seems convinced I’m about to freeze at any moment. Or perhaps food, she keeps asking if I’m hungry, seems determined to feed me as if that’ll relieve some of the pressure inside her. My eyes settle on the vase by the window, more dried flowers. They look like they were pink, once. I wonder what their names are.
“This is intense.” Rehan looks at me.
“Yep.”
We look at each other. Then his mouth twitches and my tension has somewhere to go as a snicker bursts out of me. We sit heavily on ‘my’ bed, our shoulders shaking with suppressed laughter.
“I don’t even know why I’m laughing.” I say.
“It’s more than a little weird,” he concedes. “Are you really ok with staying here?”
“I want to get to know Anna. And it’s not like I have a lot of options.”
A Girl From Forever (The Forever Institute series Book 1) Page 12