Without even meaning to, I reach out, all around us—to the grass pulsing with life, the insects and spiders and burrowing things; to the fish in the sea and the birds in the air.
And to the island itself.
The island is alive: the earth and the rocks all have memory and purpose. It has been hurt but will heal and live again.
And here, so close to me, is another life that is separate but linked and wound together with mine, like his hand is in my hair.
My mind touches Kai’s. He’s almost asleep too, but he startles awake. He shakes his head, both inside and out, and I know he doesn’t want me there, not inside him like this.
“Sorry,” I whisper, and back away.
His heart still beats close and his arm is still around me, but I feel shut out and alone.
CHAPTER 22
CALLIE
I HAVEN’T BEEN TO THIS PART of the Shetland Mainland before, and it takes me a while to work out where we need to go. It turns out to be a good thing Kai and Shay stayed where they did for so long. The air force base Lochy told us about is in a high place not far away, and they might have been spotted if they’d set out across the island in daylight.
And I know they need to sleep—that they were awake all night on that awful boat.
But everything inside me is screaming to get going. We’re so close to Dr. 1’s house! I can get there in minutes—how long will it take them to walk? Once we get there, and find out where he is, then we can leave.
Then I can burn him and watch him die.
But I hate being here. It makes me remember what they did to me, and so many others.
Much of the island was destroyed, burned and blackened, but now there are signs that it wants to return to how it was. There are green patches in the black, reaching for the sun; birds and insects and scurrying things. Parts of the island, like where Dr. 1’s house is, weren’t even touched, and live and breathe and grow as they were before. There are people too, in that air force base, and others near the oil place that blew up.
It’s wrong that it should change; it’s wrong that people should be here. The island should be dead and dark, like all those burned or buried alive underground.
So many died. Where are others like me? Why aren’t there more ghosts? I’m both scared to think I might find someone like me and scared that I never will. If I’m the only one, I’ll be unheard and alone forever.
Apart from Shay. She can never leave me.
CHAPTER 23
SHAY
I LIE BACK IN THE GRASS, my head on her lap. Mum winds wildflowers into my hair. She’s humming a song, one I know, but I can’t remember the words.
It goes la-de-dah, and de-de-dah; slower, then faster and repeat—something like that. La-de-dah, de-de-dah…
“I’ve missed you,” she says between verses.
“So stay.”
She shakes her head and starts to sing the words that go with the tune this time. They’re nonsense words, ones she sang to me long ago, a child rocked in her arms.
“Why did Callie stay, and you couldn’t?”
She smiles. “Why do you think?” she says, and goes back to her song, humming again.
The question niggles. Mum would never have left me if she could have stayed, so it’s not that.
La-de-dah, de-de-dah…
Shay, it’s time to wake up.
Mum didn’t say it; she’s still singing. I frown and sit up.
Callie is there: cool darkness in the light, where Mum is warmth and light in the darkness. Not the same thing, not at all.
Why do I think…?
Wake up, Shay, Callie says again. It’s time to get going.
I sit up, awake in a rush. Kai is stretching, yawning. Callie is next to him, impatience all over her stance and face. Everything I am lurches with loss, aching to reach back to my dream, to Mum—to be in her arms, to listen to her sing.
Kai reaches his hand to mine. “What is it, Shay? Is something wrong?”
I can only nod my head wordlessly. The tears start to come, and he gathers me into his arms.
CHAPTER 24
CALLIE
“WHAT TIME IS IT?” Kai says, looking at his watch. “After midnight, and it’s not really dark at all.”
“No, and it won’t get any darker than this now: we’re too far north,” Shay says. “It’s the summer dim. This time of year it never gets truly dark; for a time in the winter, it never gets truly light.”
“You’ve been here before?”
“Yes. My uncle and his family lived here.” Shay is struggling not to cry again and turns her face from Kai so he won’t see. “We visited a few times, but not in the winter dark. My cousins told me about it, though.”
“Now the dim makes it easier to see the way, but also easier to be seen.”
“True enough. But only if they’re watching, and why would they, when they think they’ve got the island to themselves?”
No one is near, I say.
“Callie says no one is near.”
I stay just ahead of them on the path I’d found, one that loops away from the air force base and then heads in the other direction, away from the ruins of the oil depot and toward Dr. 1’s house.
They’re so slow.
Shay is lost in her own thoughts, her boundaries up. But she’s been upset since she woke up, like this place unsettles her as much as it does me.
I drop back to walk next to her.
Shay?
What?
Are you okay?
She’s silent for a while. She sighs. More or less. You?
Much the same. Why were you crying when you woke up?
I was dreaming about my mum.
Oh.
When I woke up, I felt like I lost her all over again and that I was completely alone.
You can never be alone, Shay. I’ll always be with you.
CHAPTER 25
SHAY
THE SUN IS RISING OUT OF THE SEA when we finally reach the white house. We had to cross a burned-out wasteland, and then a spit of sand that links to this almost island. The fire didn’t reach here. It’s lush, green; wildflowers grow everywhere. The house is in a beautiful place with views over cliffs and the sea, but the smell and taste of ash and death are so near that the sea breeze can’t take them away.
Kai tries the front door. “Locked,” he says.
We walk around the house, trying every door and window: no luck.
“We’ll have to break in,” he says. “Though the windows look like special reinforced glass, probably because of high winds here from the sea. Could be hard work.”
“There’s a keypad by the door,” I say, and flick the small box open. “Maybe there is something I can do to work out the code.”
It’s a standard digital-type keypad with numbered buttons. How many numbers would the code be? Three? Four? To my eyes and my fingertips, the buttons are the same, but are there any traces left behind? I close my eyes and reach.
There are circular marks on five of the numbers—slight pressure patterns, oil from skin—on 1, 2, 3, 5, 7. So the code has at least five numbers, and maybe more if some are used more than once.
That is way, way too many combinations to try them all. I open my eyes again, stand back, and stare at the house. The numbers could be random, or they could mean something. Even if they mean something, if they are personal, like a birthday, I’d never work them out.
I spin the numbers around in my mind, faster and faster—running combinations over and over, looking for any sort of logic or pattern—but this is pointless, isn’t it?
The wind has picked up, and now that we’re not walking, I shiver. Beautiful, maybe, but a cold place for a house—on a high, isolated point, surrounded on three sides by the sea.
Kai has found a rock and holds it up. “The panes in the door might be easier to break; maybe we could reach through one and open the door. Should I smash it?”
There are three small glass squares in a row in the door, decorative and
not reinforced like all the bigger windows. They look like those antique squares you get with hand-blown glass, with a round bull’s-eye pattern. It seems a shame to break one.
I run my fingers across the middle one. Is there a faint letter K etched in the middle of the circle? Maybe it’s a manufacturer’s mark.
Cold through and through now and wanting to get inside, I’m about to nod yes to Kai when something clicks into place:
A circle—or a zero—with a K: 0 K. Zero degrees Kelvin is the coldest temperature—absolute zero. We did this in chemistry last year. And in Celsius it is…
273.15.
Could it be? That Dr. 1 stood here and saw the K in the 0 in the glass and made this his code? They’re the numbers that have been pressed.
It seems pretty thin. I shrug, reach up, and enter 2 7 3 1 5—just in case.
The lock springs open. I turn the handle and open the door.
“You’re one freaky girl,” Kai says, his voice uneasy. He puts the rock down and follows me inside.
I’m a freak. That’s it, isn’t it? That’s why he always pushes me away.
But I can’t let any of this get to me right now. There are things we have to do.
Kai points at the electric clock on the microwave. “The power is still on.”
I think there’s a generator, Callie says.
“Callie says there may be a generator. But we shouldn’t use lights in case the air force flies over or anyone goes past on the water and wonders,” I say. “It’ll be light enough to see without them soon.”
Kai and I explore. Downstairs is a kitchen, open-plan lounge with fireplace, a bathroom. The lounge has a desk, laptop, and bookshelves and leads to a shuttered conservatory. There, under a cover, is what looks like a fancy telescope. Upstairs are two bedrooms and another bathroom. Kai checks the water, and it comes out hot.
“Ladies first?” he says.
“No, you go. I want to get started.”
He’s soon in the shower, and I wander back downstairs. The sun has come up a little more; there’s enough light through the windows to begin.
I sit in the desk chair: it’s massive, comfortable. Callie is on the kitchen counter, her feet swinging over the side, watching me. What kind of man sat in this chair, looked at the stars through that telescope, and killed people like Callie?
It’s time to find out.
CHAPTER 26
CALLIE
FOLDERS AND PAPERS ARE NEATLY STACKED around the kitchen, all the things Shay has already gone through—and found precisely nothing that says who Dr. 1 is or where he’s from.
Kai, frowning, is going through each pile again in case she missed anything, and getting more and more frustrated.
Imagine how I feel.
Shay comes back downstairs, clean and wearing a robe that must have belonged to him.
“Any luck?” she says to Kai.
“No. But I’ll keep going. Did you try his laptop?”
“Yes. It’s password protected.”
“You couldn’t magic up a code like you did for the door?”
Shay raises an eyebrow and sighs. “No. There are no obvious clues on a keyboard where every key is used.”
“If he lived here and there is nothing that says who he is or where he came from, that must be on purpose. Maybe there is nothing to find,” Kai says.
“There must be some trace of him, something left behind.” Shay goes to the bookshelves. “I’ll check he hasn’t used anything personal as a bookmark, or written his name inside any of them,” she says. She does that to start with, picking each book up one at a time, looking inside and flipping through upside down to see if anything falls out. Then she starts looking at them more closely.
“Callie, was Dr. 1 a medical doctor?” Shay asks after a while. “I assumed he was, if he was trying to find a cure for cancer.”
I’m pretty sure the other doctors were all medical doctors. I thought Dr. 1 was too, but he never did any medical sort of stuff that I saw. Maybe because he was in charge.
“Callie thought he was, but doesn’t know for sure.”
“Does it matter?” Kai asks.
“I’m just trying to work him out. Okay, here’s a guy with money, obviously, by the look of this place. He has a telescope—he likes looking at the stars. There are masses of books here, and they all look like they’ve been read, so he likes to read. But his book collection is—well—weird. There are books and papers on really strange, random subjects. From philosophy to stargazing to specific areas of quantum physics, and even alternative stuff, like reading auras. And his fiction? Not much of it, and what there is doesn’t seem to go together: The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and a load of obscure things I’ve never heard of. But there is nothing here that even vaguely has to do with medicine or biology, other than a few papers on experimenting on tissue culture. Though maybe this is like his holiday reading, not work stuff?”
Kai has finished going through Dr. 1’s papers and starts looking in the kitchen cupboards, and then the fridge and freezer. “There’s loads of long-life food in the cupboards; a well-stocked freezer; nothing much in the fridge, and nothing that could go bad. All vegetarian, by the way—no meat or fish.”
Shay nods. “So perhaps he wasn’t living here regularly, and by the looks of the place, all neat and tidy and no milk left to spoil, he didn’t leave abruptly. So he likely wasn’t here when the disaster happened.”
“Maybe he has a complete life somewhere else. Like you said about his reading, maybe this place is like a holiday home.”
Shay sits down on a chair with an armload of books and starts reading one of them.
What good will that do?
She pauses, looks over the page. “I’m trying to think like he thinks. The books a person likes can tell you a lot about the person, can’t they?”
“True. The things Callie used to read!” Kai says.
“Callie, what sort of books did you like?”
I stare back at Shay. Books? I used to read books, at soccer. When Kai was playing. But what did I read? I don’t remember, and it scares me—I should know. What did I like? But the only books I can remember were ones they made me read in school.
And then I’m angry. If my memory is a mess, I know who to blame, and talking about my books or his books isn’t going to do anything to find him.
I don’t see what this has to do with anything! I scream, really scream, the words.
Shay jumps. Her eyebrows are raised; she’s surprised, but I’m way beyond angry and have to get away from them now.
I punch the wall and disappear up the chimney.
CHAPTER 27
SHAY
THE SUN WILL SET AGAIN SOON AND STILL I READ, lost in Dr. 1’s books.
Kai yawns. “Time to sleep?” he says.
I shake my head. “I want to read some more while we still have enough light.”
Kai kisses me and then wanders up the stairs, and I pick up the next book. Callie still hasn’t come back, and I didn’t tell him how angry she was. I have to keep reading.
The pages turn so fast. I’ve always read quickly, but now this is something else. Everything I pick up I’m hungry for; everything I read stays with me, not just memorized but understood in a way I haven’t before—integrated into a larger whole.
Whatever happened to me when I survived the flu, it’s really like it booted up my brain into some sort of supercomputer—like earlier today when I could spin numbers in my head, looking for significant combinations. And days ago in the hospital, when I worked out how to focus inside and fix my concussion—not just by instinct that time, but by working out what needed to be done and then doing it.
Freaky girl I am indeed.
And the more I read, the more I feel like I am getting closer to this mystery, this Dr. 1.
He doesn’t somehow equate with what I think a psychopathic mass murderer should be like. His books are all logi
c and philosophy, some science and religion. No politics or propaganda, no medicine or biology in his science titles—mostly physics and astronomy.
Though there is this interest in auras. Weird hippie stuff, and I’m about to dismiss it, to pick up something else, but…it sounds like something Mum was into. I scan the shelves. His collection includes books on sensing auras, healing, decoding colors.
I get up, gather them together, and spread them out on his desk. There’s a color chart tucked in the back of one of the books.
I unfold it, and a piece of paper flutters down. It’s a hand drawing of the outline of a man with an aura sketched in all around him in colored pencil. It almost looks religious—a halo drawn around the head and body. Did Dr. 1 draw this?
A single word is written above the drawing: Vox. What does that mean? There is something familiar about the word, and I frown, thinking. Doesn’t it mean something like voice?
I start to read and get goose bumps on my arms. Since I was ill, I have begun to sense the feelings of those around me all the time. The descriptions of the waves of auras and what I sense sound so similar…could it be the same thing?
It says that to those sensitive to auras, they can be seen or heard as much as felt. To sense auras like this, the eyes and ears need to adjust, to defocus; to leave solid matter behind—to focus on the space inside matter. Matter is made up of atoms, which are made up of particles—particles that spin through space.
Particles that can also behave like waves.
My stomach does a weird flip.
That is just like when I healed myself; with waves, from inside me. Was I using my aura without knowing that was what I was doing?
And it’s not just living things that have auras. Since we arrived, I’ve felt the island was alive, that the history of the place was imprinted in the rock and earth, like a memory. The book says it is easier for beginners to see auras at a distance, and where have I seen colors around objects? The sun, the moon, and the stars—they all have radiating color and energy patterns around them. This was one of the first changes I noticed when I was ill.
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