The Burning

by Will Peterson

  She knew that Adam had found it much harder to decide where his sympathies lay.

  “When everything’s … back to normal, or as back to normal as it’s ever going to be, I’m sure we’ll get to spend time with him, you know?”

  “Yeah…”

  “He could hate Mom’s guts,” Rachel said. “But that wouldn’t change the way he felt about us.”

  “I know that. I was just asking, that’s all.”

  Rachel heard him swallow and turn over again. “We should try and get some sleep.”

  There were a few more murmured words after that, but soon Rachel heard her brother’s steady breathing and she knew he was asleep, and almost as soon as she’d had the thought, she was asleep herself. She woke once in the middle of the night and reached down to the floor for a T-shirt to wipe the tears away. When she opened her eyes again it was light outside.

  Adam was still dead to the world as Rachel crept out of bed and across to the small window. Mist lay low across brown fields strewn with vast boulders, and, craning her neck, she could see a walled city ahead: towers and turrets rose up on the summit of a rocky hill, where the tracks swept round in a wide curve to the left-hand side.

  She pulled on her clothes and stepped out into the corridor. The guard was on his way past her door. “Are we coming into Madrid?” she asked.

  “No, miss; Madrid’s still a couple of hours away.” He led Rachel to the small area between carriages and pointed out of the window. “That’s Avila. It’s medieval, matter of fact. An amazing place … if you like churches all over the place, that sort of thing. You should go and visit.”

  Rachel saw Gabriel step through the door at the far end of the carriage. “Maybe next time,” she said. The guard shrugged and wandered away. From the look on Gabriel’s face, Rachel knew that there would not be a great deal of time for any sightseeing.

  Adam was out of bed when she walked back into the compartment, and Rachel gasped when she saw him turn to pull his T-shirt over his head.

  “What?” Adam said. “What’s the matter with my back now?”

  Rachel just shook her head and pointed. It had been a little over twenty-four hours since she’d dug into her brother’s flesh with a razor blade.

  “It’s completely … healed,” she said. “There isn’t a mark on you.”

  Laura Sullivan rubbed her knuckles into her tired eyes. She took a gulp of strong black coffee and tried again, without success, to focus on the screen of her computer. She looked up, as she had done periodically throughout the night, at the coloured pencil sketch of the narrow-eyed boy pinned above her desk. It felt as if he was guiding her, telling her where to look next.

  She had been working feverishly since the previous evening, putting all her data together. She had eliminated a network of false leads and had gone down a dozen blind alleys. She had re-examined significant findings and now, as a new day dawned over the Hope building, she felt she may have finally made a breakthrough.

  Laura knew she had to produce a result, or enough of one to placate Clay Van der Zee. Something to convince him that her preferred course of action was the correct one to follow: to let the children’s powers develop in the wild. To allow Rachel and Adam free access to roam across Europe and lead them to…

  Laura didn’t know where they would lead her. Her greatest hope was that it might be to another site like the chalk circle at Triskellion. A site that might yield more important remains and ancient treasures. Anything that would throw light on the meaning or the function of the Triskellion.

  She hoped too that they would lead her somewhere that might reveal the identity of this mysterious fifth child. The boy in the picture. Just the possibility of meeting him was more exciting than anything in all her years of research.

  Above all, she hoped that wherever the trail led, whatever happened at the end of their journey, would liberate the twins: would leave them free to get back into society. Laura was convinced that any lessons they might learn from Adam and Rachel would benefit mankind in some way. She felt instinctively that their way of thinking, their communication and their mind skills could be learned by others; could even be bred into future generations.

  She believed that kids like Rachel and Adam Newman might be the next manifestation of humanity. The New Man.

  A new breed…

  Homo erectus: the caveman. Homo neandertalensis: Neanderthal man. Homo sapiens: us.

  Then what?

  Homo triskelliensis? Triskellion man?

  Laura laughed to herself. Now her mind really was racing: buzzing with too much coffee and too little sleep. What she did know was that anything less than a plan of action and a convincing route would have Van der Zee marshalling a sweep of agents across Europe to bring the kids back in.

  She couldn’t let that happen.

  Most of Van der Zee’s superiors in America considered these children a “threat to humanity” and would insist on continuing with what they worryingly called “invasive research”. If they could tag kids without a thought for their civil liberties, then heaven knew what else would be considered valid research.

  Research that might well be terminal.

  Throughout the night, Laura had eliminated dozens of Bronze Age sites from her inquiry. Since discovering that the twins were in France, she had hoped that they were heading for the ancient standing stones at Carnac on the Brittany Coast. That would have made sense. The village was geographically and geologically similar to Triskellion. It had a very static population and a high occurrence of twins. Even the ancient symbol used on fags and monuments to represent the region of Brittany was a Triskellion.

  She had fed in some of the data from the Triskellion site: metal analysis from bronze beakers, fabric samples, carvings, symbols and signs found in the area. A bewildering array of matching burial sites dotted right across Europe had appeared on her screen. It was only when she had factored in some genetic information about the inhabitants – the incidence of twins, the age of the population – that a definite pattern had begun to emerge.

  A line could be drawn directly between certain sites. Starting from Orkney in the north of Scotland, where Morag and Duncan were from, it ran all the way down the West Coast of England and Wales, to Triskellion in the West Country. Then it jumped across the Channel to Brittany and continued south-west through France. From the Dordogne area, the line went south again, across into Spain and continued further down, still in a clear, unbroken line…

  Laura stared at the map and tried to keep the mounting excitement under control. Looked at in reverse, it was the same line that tracked the development of Bronze Age man across Europe and into the British Isles.

  A theory was taking shape and her meeting with Clay Van der Zee was in two hours.

  She needed more coffee.

  “Je déteste les Espagnols,” Jean-Luc grumbled to his brother. He shambled ahead along the tree-lined avenue that led from the station. He’d been honked at aggressively by a car as he had wandered aimlessly into the road.

  “I think I got the meaning of that,” Rachel said to Gabriel, some steps behind. “He hates the Spanish.”

  Gabriel smiled at her and, fixed by his green eyes, she felt a brief, but powerful, surge of the warmth that had once existed between them. It was something she missed hugely; that she had not felt since they had left Triskellion. The day was bright and a little chilly and Rachel pushed her hands deep into the pockets of her fleece. She took the opportunity to probe a little.

  “I think Jean-Luc and Jean-Bernard hate everything, don’t they?”

  Gabriel shrugged. “They’ve had a tough time. They come from a village in Brittany, a small place like Triskellion. People have treated them badly since they were born.”

  Several metres ahead Jean-Bernard spat on the pavement.

  “I thought you said they were friends. Our friends.”

  Gabriel let out a sigh and stared at the French boys. They were fighting with one another, landing playful kung-fu kick
s with scuffed trainers and bumping into people on the street. “They are,” he said. “They’re like you. Like us. I didn’t say you had to love them. Can’t you see them for what they are?”

  Rachel said nothing.

  She had felt it when they’d escaped from Hope, when they’d gone many hours without sleep and when her brother had carved a microtransmitter from her back. Rachel looked at Gabriel and felt yet again that he was testing her.

  They turned down a smaller street with shops on either side. Dawdling some way behind Rachel and Gabriel, Adam was struggling to keep Morag and Duncan moving. They moaned that they were still tired, stopped each time something new arrested their attention and now Morag was hungry. Adam ducked into a greengrocer’s, then emerged a few seconds later with a bunch of bananas. He handed one to each of the younger twins and watched as Morag greedily peeled and chewed, as if she hadn’t eaten for a week.

  Then he became aware that someone was following them.

  Adam grabbed Morag’s hand. “C’mon, we’re getting left behind.” He could see Rachel, Gabriel and the French boys up ahead, but they were a good distance away and Morag whined as her little legs tried to keep up.

  “Quick as you can,” Adam said. He glanced behind him, trying not to alarm the youngsters.

  A man was coming up fast behind them. He caught Adam’s eye and quickened his pace. Adam looked frantically around but saw nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. Before he could move, a car pulled up hard alongside them and Adam watched its driver, a big man with a black moustache, jump from the driver’s seat and step out in front of them.

  Adam took a defensive stance, but the man just looked at him quizzically before snatching a parcel from the passenger seat and carrying it into a nearby shop. Adam let out the breath he had been holding and looked behind him again. The first man was closer now.

  The driver had left the engine running…

  “Get in!” Adam pushed Duncan into the front of the car and helped Morag clamber over into the back. He slammed the door behind him and locked it. In the rear-view mirror, Adam could see their pursuer trying to work out where they had gone and then the realization on his face that they had got into the car.

  Adam began to panic, cursing himself for locking them into what was effectively a cage. He was sitting in the passenger seat. Duncan was next to him, his hands clamped tightly round the steering wheel. They weren’t going to get far like this, Adam thought. Not that either of them knew how to drive.

  “I do,” Duncan squeaked, tapping into the scramble of thoughts going through Adam’s mind. “I know how to drive.”

  “What?”

  “Are you sure?” Morag asked.

  “I read a book,” Duncan said.

  In the short time he had known Duncan, Adam had been amazed time and again by the little boy’s abilities. Now, as the man bashed his fist on the roof of the car, there was no time to question them.

  “Go!” he shouted.

  The engine screamed as Duncan stretched one leg to depress the accelerator and the other to operate the clutch. He let off the handbrake and his body twisted with the effort of turning the steering wheel as the car took off down the street, its tyres squealing.

  Adam looked behind as their pursuer was thrown into the gutter. He caught a glimpse of the man with the moustache come tearing out of the shop. Adam watched him help up the first man, and they both started running after them.

  Adam stared across at Duncan, who was leaning forward, his head barely higher than the wheel.

  “Fast as you like,” he said.

  However carefully Duncan had read and memorized the manual, knowing how to drive and actually driving on a busy Spanish street were two completely different things.

  Rachel, Gabriel and the French boys were astonished, then horrified, as the red Seat screeched past in second gear, driven by an eight-year-old boy who could not steer. The car was smashing off the kerb and knocking over rubbish bins. Rachel saw her brother’s terrified face through the window – his body was being thrown from side to side and his arms were braced against the dashboard. She saw Morag flying around on the back seat, and she saw two angry men running down the centre of the street after the car, each one waving fists and shouting curses.

  “Adam!”

  “Whoa!” Jean-Luc jeered after the car in French-accented English, while his brother whistled and jumped in the air as the car snaked off out of sight.

  “Supercool!”

  The two of them immediately began sprinting after the car, with Rachel and Gabriel doing their best to keep up, while a few streets away, a police siren began to wail.

  “Stop!” Adam shouted, grabbing at the steering wheel, but Duncan’s foot was jammed down on the accelerator. Adam pulled the wheel clockwise and the car turned into another street, missing a news-stand on the corner by a whisker. Adam tried to straighten up, but the car was going too fast, revving too high. Every yank he made on the wheel needed a push in the opposite direction to compensate, sending the car crashing into the kerb and squealing against the bodywork of vehicles parked on either side of the street.

  “Look out!” Morag screamed as a taxi came up the street towards them. A white wall, painted with the bulbous, waving figure of the Michelin Man, stretched between the parked cars, announcing the entrance to a garage.

  The taxi was still coming.

  Adam saw the gap and pulled the wheel clockwise again, heading straight for the garage’s entrance. Duncan took his hands off the wheel and closed his eyes. Adam wrenched the handbrake and the car spun sideways, bounced over the high kerb and smashed into the long, white wall.

  For a few seconds there was silence. Then…

  “Quick! Ven aquí! Come here; get out!”

  Adam heard a kindly voice above the hiss of the burst radiator as the car door was wrenched open. The smiling face of the Michelin Man peered through the shattered windscreen as Adam and the twins clambered out of the wreckage, dazed but unhurt.

  “You will be all right.”

  The voice belonged to a small, neat man in a white warehouse coat. He ushered Adam, Morag and Duncan across the street to a shop, above which, on a sign spelled out in gold letters, was a single word:

  A few minutes later, the policeman examining the written-off car wondered why there were so few witnesses about. Two surly French boys seemed to be the only people who had seen the accident and they simply smirked and shrugged incomprehension whenever he spoke to them.

  Then two, out-of-breath Spanish men came charging round the corner.

  “They took my car,” said one. “I was just making a delivery.”

  The other nodded. “I was serving a customer,” he said. “And this little tearaway stole some bananas.”

  Jean-Luc and Jean-Bernard were already walking away, their absence going unnoticed. They were relieved that the explanation was a simple one, that the events had not been more sinister, and they were already looking forward to the fun they would have at the American boy’s expense.

  The idiot had simply forgotten to convince the shopkeeper that he had paid.

  Rachel and Gabriel arrived to find Jean-Luc and Jean-Bernard walking away from the scene of the accident. Jean-Luc grinned and smashed his right fist into the palm of his left hand. Jean-Bernard supplied sound effects and mimed a crash with screeching tyres, explosive noises, police sirens and, for reasons best known to himself, machine-gun fire.

  “Cool!” they said as one, grinning.

  “Where’s my brother?” Rachel demanded. “And the little ones?”

  Jean-Luc studied her for a moment, then nodded across the street to a row of small shops. They walked over the road, towards one selling straw baskets, and another whose window was full of smoked hams. In between the two was a smaller shop: its window crammed with jars of various shapes and sizes, their contents catching the light in a hundred shades of gold. Etched into the glass door of the shop was an elaborately detailed picture of a bee and above were the words “A
beja” and “Miel” in old-fashioned script.

  “Miel … honey, right?” Rachel asked.

  Jean-Luc nodded. “It’s the same in French.”

  “This is the place,” Gabriel said. He pushed open the door and walked in.

  A man in a white coat was waiting for them. He was standing to attention in the middle of the shop and his face lit up as the boy with green eyes walked through the door. He marched up to Gabriel, his hands trembling, as if he were summoning the courage to touch his face. Then, as though thinking better of the idea, he lightly patted the boy’s arms and spoke, a little nervously.

  “I am Señor Abeja.”

  The man was in early middle age, nearing fifty perhaps, but his olive skin was so free from wrinkles and the cheeks around his goatee beard so cleanly shaven that the general effect was one of an ageing little boy. His shoulders sloped away from his small head, and the legs of his sharply creased trousers ended in small, black shoes, like those of a dancer.

  “I knew you were coming,” he said. Rachel had no need for translation, as the man spoke in good, if slightly tentative, English. “I had a dream about the car crashing across the road. I saw the American boy and the little ones…”

  “Where are they?” Rachel asked. She still did not know if anyone had been injured.

  Señor Abeja looked at Rachel for the first time. “I’m sorry,” he said. “They’re in the back. They’re fine. A little shaken, perhaps.”

  The shop was packed, floor to ceiling, with jars of honey; some clear, some solidified, some with honeycomb suspended in pale golden liquid. Señor Abeja’s elaborate bee picture was printed on each jar, along with a handwritten label bearing the names of the flowers that had produced the pollen: thyme, orange blossom, rosemary. Screens, smokers and other beekeeping equipment were piled up against the walls, from which hung nets of all sizes and an assortment of beekeeper’s hats and gloves.