She stayed quiet.
Kyle opened the box. Inside were what looked like an expensive set of the kind of headphones a pretentious DJ would wear.
‘What’s that?’ Ethan asked.
‘It’s how we get the discs off. I see you have already worked out how impossible it is to remove them without help,’ Kyle said as Ethan put a hand to the bandage around his head.
Rory had fallen silent, Thea noticed.
‘It’s really easy.’ Kyle offered the fancy disc-removing headphones to Thea to have a look. ‘Doesn’t hurt.’
She took them, dazed. This morning they had had little hope of getting off the island. Now, they were very nearly on the boat. It was happening too quickly. But, she reminded herself again: this was Rory. The man who had put himself at risk trying to warn her about all of this in the first place.
This was Rory.
But there was also Kyle.
‘It should be Ethan first,’ Thea said, passing the headphones back to Kyle. ‘I’m not hallucinating yet.’
She thought she saw a fleeting look of annoyance cross Kyle’s face.
‘No,’ came Ethan’s voice. ‘If we’re rushed for time, it should be Thea first. I might have damaged mine by trying to get them off.’
‘Quite so.’ Kyle snapped the empty box shut and the noise made Thea jump. ‘So, Thea?’
He was right. It took seconds. He put the headphone disc-removing whatsit on her head, left it for under a minute and, when they slid off, the discs came with them. He showed them to her. She touched the spots where they had been on her temples, not sure what she was expecting to feel. There was just smooth skin.
Ethan jumped down off the counter. Kyle stared at the headphones in his hand, smoothing the metal with one finger and then looked up at Ethan, with an expression Thea couldn’t read. She touched her temples again, marvelling at the soft skin under her fingers.
‘Me next?’ Ethan asked.
Kyle opened out the headphones.
‘It’s been a long couple of days, right, buddy?’ he said to Ethan, in a clear and confident voice. ‘A strain on everyone. Let’s get this sorted.’
Rory glanced at Thea with a frown and fidgeted. ‘Kyle? I—’
‘Not now, Rory.’
Ethan came and sat cross-legged by Kyle, his Action Ken knees clicking again.
‘Okay?’ Kyle adjusted the headband.
‘Okay.’
Thea took Ethan’s hand. ‘Wait!’ She turned to Kyle. ‘You’ve checked it, right? Because he might have damaged the discs when he tried to remove them on his own.’
‘Yeah, Kyle … I think—’ Rory began to shuffle closer to Kyle, reaching out for the headphones.
‘The discs are fine. He’s done more damage to himself, by the looks of it.’
Ethan laughed a little and Thea realized his laugh was lovely and she hadn’t had enough time to hear it.
‘Thea!’ Rory’s eyes widened and he lunged for the headphones, but he was too slow.
Kyle placed them onto Ethan’s head.
Chapter 38
Too late.
Too late Thea reached for the headphones on Ethan’s head, some sixth sense moving her hand.
Too late because Ethan’s smile disappeared and then it all happened so fast she wasn’t able to move quickly enough. The veins in his temple and neck bulged, even his eyes bulged, the capillaries in them bursting as froth started to form on his lips.
Only then did Thea manage to knock the headphones off.
Too late.
A single trickle of blood crept down from the corner of one eye. His body stilled.
She couldn’t find the strength to move and someone was pulling at her arm and shouting at her, but she couldn’t focus on them because she still couldn’t take her gaze away from Ethan.
The trickle of blood changed course slightly, made its way determinedly towards his cheek.
There was a ringing in her ears as if a bomb had exploded and she knew people were talking but the sounds were fuzzy and she couldn’t stop looking at that trickle of blood, now slowly making its way across his cheek and down towards his ear.
Everything. Needed. To. Stop.
Noise smacked at her.
‘We’ve got to go!’
Then Ethan’s body was moving away from her. Which was odd. How was it doing that? But she realized that her feet weren’t on the floor either and that someone had picked her up, put her over their shoulder and she was being carried out.
An air pressure bubble popped inside of her. She kicked and she screamed. They couldn’t leave Ethan there, on that dusty floor, his head lolling to one side, blood coming from his eye. It was open, staring at her as if he was still alive, accusing her. Why did you let this happen to me?
She screamed and choked and gasped and was thrown into the back of a car, knowing the thunking sound she heard were the locks clicking into place.
Time disappeared for a bit. Rage filled Thea; she’d never felt anything like it before, didn’t even know she could feel something like this: this heat of anger. She kicked out against the Plexiglas that separated the front passengers from the back, kicked hard, her feet thudding in a satisfying way again and again against the plastic, smearing it with the soles of her trainers. She slapped her hands against the windows and cursed, streams of words she’d never used before, screaming until she was hoarse, kicking and punching and yelling until, at last, the rage left her limp and sweating in the back seat.
She could see Rory and Kyle at the front, Kyle driving. Not once did Rory turn to her. The car was some sort of four-by-four – big, with monster wheels that ate up the snow without any effort. Moses pretended to sleep in the seat next to her.
The silvery edges of her vision pulsed in time to her heartbeat. Her chest heaved and she tried to get her breathing under control. Now the anger had dissipated, she tried to think. Not of Ethan. Not yet. The only way she was going to get through the next few hours was by resolutely not thinking about him and the lifeless stare that was now imprinted in her memory.
This didn’t feel like rescue anymore.
Rory. Had he known what was going to happen to Ethan? He hadn’t turned to look at her once since he’d thrown her in the car. She remembered the way he’d glanced at her just before it had happened, how he had reached for the headphones, but not fast enough.
She remembered how Kyle had taken over.
Kyle. His little wave, his Eighties hair and smooth, cultured voice. The one driving the car this very minute. Could she believe anything that Rory had told her? Could they have killed Ethan through the discs, a remote-controlled death switch – just as he’d feared? But why not kill her too?
The car braked suddenly, with such force that Thea jolted forward on her seat, nearly going head-first into the Plexiglas. Moses slithered down next to her, crumpling into the footwell. It seemed that Kyle and Rory were having an argument of some kind; she couldn’t hear it because she’d just realized the Plexiglas was something else entirely, something soundproof. Kyle thumped his hand against the steering wheel.
She wished she could lip-read.
They seemed to have reached some sort of impasse, glaring at each other. Then Rory’s shoulders hunched and he crouched forward, his head in his hands. Was he crying? Thea couldn’t tell. From where she was sitting, she could only see the back of his head. Without warning, he reared back up and struck the dashboard with his fist. Kyle shrugged and calmly took the handbrake off, getting the car moving once more.
Thea needed Rory to look at her. But he wasn’t going to.
In a way that told her more.
So, when they neared the Centre but didn’t go straight to the front, instead skirting around it, towards a back entrance Thea hadn’t even known about; when she saw who was stood waiting for them, her flaming red hair a warning flag: she knew.
She knew she’d been betrayed.
Chapter 39
Vivian liked train stations.
; She liked cities. Specifically, she liked being right in the middle of them. In a city you could walk out of your house or flat at almost any time of the day or night and within five minutes you could pick up a snack, or a paper, a drink or a person. She liked noise and bustle, neon signs, twenty-four-hour convenience stores and light-soaked streets.
‘Your train’s in ten.’ Delia plonked herself next to her on the bench, making an “oof” sound as she did so. Old people did that. Vivian did yoga and cardio, ate a ridiculous amount of vegetables, walked briskly past cake shops without a glance and poured away at least half the wine Delia served her. There was no time for old.
It was a few days after their trip to the Ing Enterprises building.
Delia handed her a coffee, knowing that, without it, Vivian would not be able to even consider the rest of the morning. Not for the first time, Vivian thanked the (obviously female) gods for Delia: their friendship was her longest standing relationship. Men came and went but Dels remained.
‘You know, Dels, I’m finding myself feeling … like a bit of a dinosaur with all of this. It’s not the technology so much. I just can’t shake the idea that I’m going about this all wrong, that I’m not understanding something. Am I being rose-tinted, or did it all seem … well, just easier in the old days?’
‘Nostalgia, Viv? Didn’t think that was your thing.’
‘It’s not.’ Vivian smiled wryly. ‘The old days were god-awful half the time; that’s why we wanted to change so much.’
Delia sipped her coffee. It took her a while to answer and, when she did, she chose her words carefully.
‘Everything’s so much more … knotty these days. But we still need to scream about things, if that’s what you mean. It’s the only way to get heard. Problem is, everyone’s doing so much screaming, it’s hard to listen to it all.’
Vivian nodded. She was just one more scream.
‘I looked at a few of those sleep apps, like the one Thea’s trialling.’ Delia produced a pack of biscuits from her pocket and offered one to Vivian. She hesitated because it was still early but then she sighed, thinking that sometimes in life you had to just take the biscuit.
‘And?’
‘It’s nothing so new. Mood music and whale song, mostly. Some of them track how well you sleep but it’s not that accurate. Why would Ing Enterprises be so secretive about that?’
Vivian gazed up at the glass roof of the train station. It was a jaunty Victorian-built affair, constructed at a time when public buildings had been special occasion cakes that needed as many flourishes as possible. Pigeons waddled around like serious, but very small, commuters.
‘I tried to learn Italian once,’ Vivian said thoughtfully. ‘I got one of those CDs and put it on at night, fell asleep to it because I’d read somewhere that your brain would pick it up while it slept.’
‘I didn’t know you’d learnt Italian.’
‘I didn’t. It didn’t work.’ Vivian turned to Delia excitedly. ‘But think if it had! Think if someone had actually figured out how to make something like that work …’
She trailed off. Delia frowned and paused in the middle of sipping her coffee. They both let that last sentence sink in.
Vivian stretched her legs out and heard her knees click. ‘Maybe I’m over-reacting. Maybe Thea’s just forgotten to phone. For over a week. Maybe I’ve become one of those terrible grasping mothers who can’t let their daughter out of their sight for a second. The police already think I’m a mad old conspiracy theorist. Maybe I am.’
Delia smiled.
Vivian finished the coffee, but really wanted something stronger. She could almost imagine what Thea would have said if she’d caught them both drinking before they’d even digested breakfast. She’d get that expression on her face, the one she’d practised since she was a little girl, the frown of disapproval at whatever her mad mother was doing at that moment.
She had been a bit of a mad mother, she had to admit. The itinerant lifestyle, the shared houses, sudden moves to random places where the next protest was; the unending succession of well-intentioned, mostly stoned strangers who had wandered in and out of their lives. So yes, she may have been mad, but she had also been constant. Constantly there. Constantly around when needed, when called upon. She had been good at that at least.
The announcement screen switched to ‘Train Due’. People started to shuffle closer to the platform edge, bags were picked up, tickets found.
‘I don’t know what I expect to do when I get there,’ she said to Delia, suddenly wanting to stay there on the platform, safe amongst all these people, the pigeons, the litter.
‘You’ll think of something. You generally do,’ Delia squeezed her hand and Vivian squeezed back hard before quickly boarding the train.
She watched the station and Delia slip past her, then the city, then the suburbs, then the green belt until the landscape opened up and swallowed the little train that was taking her away.
To the island.
Chapter 40
The wind twisted Delores’s hair, a tongue of fire stretching out to see what else it could burn and destroy.
The Sleep Centre was damaged and crying. Smoke poured out from the punctured side of the Client Bubble, and streaks of black ran down from it: thick, smudgy mascara trails. Thea pressed her face up to the window of the car. She had heard of the chaos that had happened here, but actually seeing it smouldering in the snow in front of her made her gape.
Kyle opened the car door for her. For a moment, she thought she might refuse to get out, but then she realized they’d probably just drag her and she preferred to meet Delores again with some kind of dignity still intact. Her trainers sank into the snow and she could feel the cold start to numb her toes, her breath misting out in front of her.
Rory took her arm. Under the pretext of pushing her forward, he whispered, ‘Rosie’s safe. I’ve hidden her.’ It took a few moments for the words to line themselves up in the correct order in her mind, but when they did she snapped her head to him, only to see the side of his face as he turned away.
Harriet stood to one side, bundled up against the freezing air. Normally she was composed and carefully made-up, but Thea could see a deep wrinkle in the middle of her brows and her lips were pale and bloodless.
Delores stepped forward. Thea put her hand to the small of her back, to the little slit pocket in her leggings originally designed to put a house key when running, but now holding a tiny, tiny memory stick. She could feel its sharp edges. It was the only thing she had to bargain with.
Delores opened her arms.
‘Thea,’ she said, her voice warm. ‘I was worried about you.’
Then she stepped forward and folded Thea into a hug, her sharp chin pressing into Thea’s shoulder, the one that she’d hurt earlier. Thea stayed rigid, her arms trapped at her sides, her gaze flicking from side to side, waiting for the person who was going to taser her, knock her out, or shoot her.
‘If you want to stay alive, do as I say,’ Delores hissed into her ear and then leant back quickly, raising her voice. ‘So good to have you safely back.’ She smiled and the effect was jarring. It didn’t fit right on her face, the corners of her mouth twitching with the effort. Thea thought of animals who bared their teeth in warning.
While Delores had been talking to Thea, Rory and Kyle had been helping Moses out of the other side of the car, Rory holding him under the armpits, Kyle carrying his feet. Thea was very close to Delores at the exact second she clocked who they’d brought back to the Centre.
‘Ms Maxwell,’ Kyle said as he neared her. ‘We found him at the lighthouse. Some sort of … vagrant, yes?’ He emphasized the word. ‘Thought it best to bring him back.’
Delores was a master of this kind of thing and apart from a slight pressing together of her lips, she managed to keep her face perfectly expressionless. Something passed unspoken between her and Kyle.
It took Thea a minute to realize what was going on. They knew! Ing Enterprises and its
parent, Aspire. It hadn’t been only Delores hiding him away, it had been all of them. And where better to keep him hidden than on the island?
Delores moved away from Thea and bent to look at the floppy body of Moses, just a brief glance, her hair swinging down to shield her face – and anything she may have felt.
With a swift motion, Delores flicked her hair over one shoulder, her long wool coat flapping in the breeze, and straightened up, holding out a manicured hand to Thea.
‘Harriet will take you inside,’ she said.
Kyle stopped and put Moses’s feet down. ‘No.’
‘I’m sorry?’ Delores said politely but in such a tone to suggest she wasn’t sorry at all.
‘Thea is to be taken straight to the boat. I’ve got orders to personally make sure she gets there. As soon as possible. I’m afraid you are no longer in charge, Ms Maxwell.’
Again that something unspoken between them, a weird emphasis on the word boat, which made Thea’s skin prickle. She was fairly certain that that was not where Kyle had orders to take her.
Delores grabbed Thea’s hand and almost shoved her into Harriet. ‘I may not be in charge any longer, as you say, but I really wouldn’t try disobeying me. It generally doesn’t end well.’
Suddenly she was in a game of piggy-in-the-middle, except, as the piggy, she wasn’t even sure which side she wanted to be on. Kyle, or Delores? Thea scanned around for an escape route but there was nowhere to run, and no hope she could outrun Kyle.
Thea wasn’t sure how it would have ended had not Moses chosen that exact moment to start thrashing in Rory’s weak grip, moaning loudly. Kyle shifted his feet uncertainly, looking at Thea and Delores and then over to where Rory was struggling to hold Moses. Moses flailed out one arm and caught Rory on the nose, who gave a muffled yelp.
Kyle sighed.
Marching back over to the two of them, he grabbed Moses’s arms and, between them, they hauled him inside, his feet dragging uselessly on the ground.
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