Zero

by Claire Stevens

  Chapter Fourteen

  There was sunshine on my face. I was in a bed. I knew this was a good thing, but for a moment I couldn’t remember why. When I shifted, pain darted through the abused muscles in my legs and pieces of my memory started to come together. My eyes pinged open with a start.

  Oriel was sitting next to the bed, staring into space, wearing a deeply serious look. When he noticed me looking at him, just for a second something in his green eyes glowed before he went back to looking grave. No, not just grave. Worried.

  ‘Hi,’ I breathed as I pushed myself up onto my elbow, feeling self-conscious. I chanced a quick look down. Good, I was wearing clothes. I looked around at the unfamiliar bedroom. ‘Where are we?’

  ‘We’re at Rivermead. It’s a Protectorate training house, a few miles from Hawksrest.’ He raked his fingers through his hair, making it spike up madly. ‘How are you feeling?’ He stared at me intently, his green eyes catching and holding onto mine, making my stomach tingle pleasantly.

  With an effort, I concentrated, though my mind still felt groggy and my thoughts were nebulous and hard to hang on to. There were trees. And Oriel looking terrified. ‘There was an earthquake,’ I said faintly. And then I remembered… ‘Is Neve alright?’

  ‘Everyone’s fine,’ he assured me.

  I sank back slightly on the pillow. ‘Well, then. What happened? Did we stir up some demons? Or...gods?’

  Oriel glanced down at his hands and began fiddling with a corner of the blanket. Neatly sidestepping my question, he looked back up at me and said, ‘You’ve been asleep for twelve hours. Are you hungry?’

  As if in answer, my stomach growled loudly and embarrassingly.

  He laughed softly. ‘Let’s go down to the kitchen and we can talk.’

  Oriel’s ‘kitchen’ turned out to be more like the kind of room a vast catering establishment would have. Like, in the seventeenth century. Amongst the iron ranges and numerous copper pans and dangerous-looking implements was a scrubbed oak table. I sat down while Oriel started getting bread, cheese, butter and some random sliced meat out of a cold cupboard.

  For a few minutes, all we did was eat. My stomach felt like it was trying to turn itself inside out so I made a sandwich and started cramming huge bites, still relishing the fact that I was eating enough for about three people and the person I was sitting with wasn’t giving me a bug-eyed stare of Oh-my-god-you’re-such-a-pig disgust.

  Eventually my stomach stopped protesting and I put the remains of my sandwich down. ‘Okay, so come on. What happened?’ More to calm my nerves than because of any real thirst, I took a long drink of apple juice and waited for him to begin.

  Oriel started fiddling with the knife we’d used to cut the bread with, spinning it slowly on the table, and gave a nervous half-laugh. ‘When you first got here I’d had ages to plan my big introductory speech. I haven’t had as long with this one.’

  ‘Oriel,’ I interrupted. ‘Am I Blessed? Is that what this is all about?’

  He looked up at me, startled, and even though I’d suspected it for a while, I was still surprised when he nodded. ‘When did you realise?’

  I took a deep shuddery breath. ‘I suppose I started to guess when I got here. Why else would you go to so much trouble to bring someone in from the Sanctuary? And then there were other things. I’ve never met anyone who eats as much as I do. It’s like I’m on a permanent body-building diet, but I never, ever put on weight. And then I meet you guys and you’re all the same. And I can’t remember the last time I was ill. And then in the temple the other day, with the priestess being all weird. And then you told me that your Blessings properly kick in when you’re thirteen. That was when I started to get really good at archery. So I guess my Blessing is visual acuity. Does that sound right? Because I’m sure as hell not strong and fast like you and Neve.’ I managed a weak laugh.

  Oriel looked confused for a moment and then started shaking his head. ‘No. Roanne, you’ve got it wrong. You’re Blessed, absolutely. But you’re not a Guardian; you’re a Psion.’

  I stared at him for a moment, my eyebrows rocketing up my forehead and into my hairline. ‘Wait, what?’

  ‘You’re a Psion. When Owen was kidnapped, we knew we’d need someone with the ability to open a portal to the jail dimension. And we think you’re that person.’

  Staring at the remains of my sandwich, I weighed up what he was saying in my mind. ‘Oriel, you’ve got your wires crossed. I’m not psychic, I’m really not,’ I laughed but it came out as a squeak. ‘I’m nearly seventeen; don’t you think I’d know about it by now if I was?’

  He looked at me with infinite compassion and for a second I wanted to crawl over and bury my head on his shoulder. ‘You’re a Psion. A powerful one. Like, really, really powerful, actually, but you’re the only one of the Blessed to have ever been born in the Sanctuary. You come from a world where psychic phenomena is at best unproven and at worst openly mocked, so every time you use your Blessings, you bury it, forget about it, and convince yourself it hasn’t happened. It’s a defense mechanism. Your subconscious hides the truth deep in your mind to save you from having to deal with it.’

  ‘You’re lying,’ I said, although the yawning pit of terror in my stomach told me that he wasn’t. ‘Or mistaken.’

  The conversation I overheard in the woods came drifting back to me. She doesn’t remember.

  I wanted to laugh at him. Or shout. Or something. What he was saying was ludicrous. But as much as I tried to deny it, some deep, instinctive part of me, the same part that knew how to breathe and stopped me from walking out onto the road in front of a bus, whispered that this was the truth.

  ‘Fine then. Let’s pretend like I believe you. What is it I’m supposed to be able to do?’ A clammy sweat had started up along the sides of my chest.

  He nodded and launched into his speech. This part, at least, sounded like he’d practised it beforehand. ‘There are two types of psychic ability; people can either do one or the other. There’s Channeling, which is what Kallista does, where a Psion uses their power to make changes to the physical world. Floating a cup across the room, changing a book into a chair, teleportation, control of the elements - that kind of thing. Then there’s Influencing. That’s what Raelthos does. Influencers use their mind as a form of control. So that would include psychic shielding, invisibility, camouflaging, and influencing people’s thoughts.’

  I detected a flatness to his tone when he talked about Influencers. ‘So which one is it you think I can do?’ I asked. Not Influencing, please. Mind control sounded creepy and weird. Weirder.

  ‘I don’t think; I know. You can do both,’ he said without hesitating.

  I frowned in confusion. ‘But you said people can do one or the other.’

  ‘Yes. Up until now, there are no reliable records of anyone being able to do both. That’s what makes us think you’re the person we need to break into Baeroth’s jail.’

  The room wobbled slightly, the walls seeming to close in on me. For a moment, I thought we were going to have another earthquake like the one back in the woods. The earthquake I caused. I took a deep breath in an effort to quell my churning stomach and to stop my breakfast from making an unwelcome reappearance. ‘I think I need some fresh air.’

  The kitchen door led out onto a small courtyard. We went through the gates to a formal garden that seemed to stretch on for miles and sat down on the lawn near a large water lily-covered pond. Insects hovered over the surface and every now and then the water would ripple with the movement of the fish.

  ‘We’ve been watching you since you were thirteen. That’s when you came into your full Blessings. The Window was discovered not long after the war, after my father was made king, and because no one really knew what to do with it, it was brought to the Protectorate’s barracks in the Citadel. For years, it just sat in the corner of a room, a curiosity. People would have a look, fiddle around with it and then leave it alone.

  ‘Then, one day abo
ut three years ago, the Window started making a racket, like a siren going off. You could hear it all through the barracks. Neve and I went to see what was up; we thought it was broken and would have to be chucked out. But when we went into the room where it was kept, the screen was flashing red. Something had triggered it and after a lot of playing around, we realised that the alarm and the flashing screen were all centred on you.

  ‘So we watched you. And the more we watched, the clearer it became. You were Channeling.

  ‘Your main Channeling talents were telekinesis and telemorphosis - moving and changing things with your mind. We saw you do all sorts of things - changing the packed lunch your dad had given you, pinging something you wanted across the room to save going and getting it - but even though people were looking right at you when you did these things, no one commented on it. We knew enough about the Sanctuary to know that what you were doing was out of the ordinary, so none of us could understand why people weren’t taking more notice.

  ‘You were modifying people’s memories and perceptions to hide what you’d done. That’s when we realised you could Influence as well.’

  Staring out onto the pond, I listened impassively, as if Oriel was talking about a newspaper report he’d read, or a bit of gossip he’d heard.

  ‘It’s hard to explain to someone who hasn’t grown up here, but the concept of someone being Blessed with the ability to Channel as well as Influence... It’s big. Really big. We were blown away.

  ‘The Protectorate started to keep a file on what you were doing, trying to work out patterns, trying to see if you had some purpose in mind. At last, we concluded that you didn’t have any nefarious designs; you weren’t bent on world domination. You were just a girl, trying to live her life. With phenomenal cosmic power.’

  He watched me carefully out of the corner of his eye, like you’d watch a wild animal, keeping it in sight but at the same time trying not to threaten it.

  It felt as if I ought to make some kind of response, so I made a ‘That’s interesting’ kind of face. ‘You realise how this sounds, don’t you?’ I said, not really expecting an answer. ‘I mean, look.’ I drew my arm back and fired it forward with a flourish. ‘Check it out: I’m trying to do magic here, but nothing’s happening.’ I waved my arm around some more, narrowly missing Oriel’s eye.

  ‘Again, it’s not actually magic...’ he started, and then caught the look I gave him and shut up. He coughed uncomfortably and started again. ‘We think your Blessings work on instinct. There’s a trigger in your mind that’s not firing on a conscious level, so your control and focus are really slippery. It’s really common in Psions who’ve had no training. Little kids.’ I tried to ignore the sting in this comment. ‘Also anomalies - people who come from Unblessed families.’

  ‘Okay, so I’m the Great and Powerful Oz. Why couldn’t I stop something like the Holocaust? Made it so that Hitler was never born. Or, like, stopped the famines in Africa or something.’

  He looked at me blankly for a moment. ‘Okay, I’ve evidently overstated things a bit. You’re powerful but you’re not omnipotent. Bringing back millions of people from the dead and just re-inserting them into society with lives and futures and descendants... That’s like god stuff.’

  ‘Fine,’ I said, looking him right in the eye. ‘Why didn’t I make my shoplifting charges go away?’

  He paused for a beat, just a second really, before he said, ‘I don’t know.’

  LIE! screamed the voice in my head. I stared at him, trying to emulate my mum’s Medusa glare, but he just returned my look with a bland one of his own. I may only have known Oriel Saldana for a few days, but I already knew that if he didn’t want to give an answer, no power in the universe would be able to drag one from him.

  ‘So, this file you mentioned. What kind of stuff is in it?’ I hugged my arms round my knees, not really wanting to know the answer.

  Oriel shifted round to face me and held his hand up to shield his eyes from the sun. ‘I brought it with me. I’ve been carrying it round since you got her. You know. In case. It’s indoors in the library if you want to see.’

  My file turned out to be a leather-bound book, about the size of an iPad. The spine was worn and cracked with use; a few segments were working free of the bindings and loose pages had been slipped in here and there. The front was embossed with runes. I ran my finger over them lightly. ‘What does that say?’

  ‘It says ‘Roanne Harper’.’ I nodded my head appreciatively. It was weird seeing my name in a whole other alphabet. Although obviously it wasn’t the weirdest thing that had happened to me so far that day.

  I sat down at a wide table that smelled of beeswax and lavender. The drapes at the windows were pulled back, letting the light flood in showing up the dust motes drifting in the air. The walls of the library were crammed with books and at any other time I’d have been tempted to browse, but right now the book I most wanted to see was in front of me.

  Oriel pulled up a chair beside me and began flipping through the pages. Despite the warmth of the room, I was cold and my stomach felt shaky. ‘This was the first thing we saw you do,’ he said, leaning in and pointing to a passage on the first page. The handwritten entry in faded ink was in a wide looping version of the Gilethean letters I’d seen everywhere else. ‘You dropped a glass; it shattered when it hit the kitchen floor and then reassembled itself. You picked it up and carried on making your drink.’

  ‘That’s it? That was the first thing I did?’ I screwed up my nose. I’d thought it might be something a bit more auspicious.

  ‘No, that was the first thing we saw you. We don’t know what you were doing before that.’ Oriel scanned the pages as he turned them.

  ‘Here-’ A few pages further on, he pointed to a paragraph written in the same scrawling hand as he’d shown me before. ‘This is a couple of weeks later. You and Chec were supposed to be going out on your bikes, but when you woke up it was raining. While you were eating breakfast, the rain dried up and the sun came out, but only where you and Chec were: everywhere else in the country still had rain.’

  It took a second for the implication of this to sink in. ‘That’s rubbish,’ I scoffed. ‘No one can control the weather.’ I folded my arms across my chest and sat back in my chair to make my point.

  Oriel turned to me, crossing his arms to mirror my pose. ‘Fine then, answer me this. How many times in the last year have you been caught in the rain?’

  ‘What does that prove?’ I squeaked. ‘I just don’t go out when it’s raining.’

  ‘No, Roanne, it doesn’t rain when you go out. There’s a difference.’

  ‘That’s bollocks.’

  ‘No, it’s not,’ he said patiently. ‘We’ve had perfect weather for the last week here. Perfect weather, that is, if you’re planning on a really long hike. Warm nights, cool breezy days, no rain. And it’s been like that because you’ve needed it to be like that. The weather reports say rest of the country is covered in drizzle, but wherever we go it’s fine.’ I gave a snort of disbelief, which Oriel ignored. ‘The weather also tends to reflect your mood.’

  I started to make another dismissive noise, but it got stuck somewhere between my lungs and nose as I remembered the weekend I was arrested. The heavens had opened the moment the security guard stopped me by the automatic doors of the department store. I remembered because the huge clap of thunder had made us both jump. The rain hadn’t stopped until the morning I’d set out for Gileath.

  Could Oriel be telling the truth?

  We flicked further through the book. Oriel pointed out things of interest: entries where I’d moved things with my mind. And it wasn’t just a case of moving things across the room; I’d moved things right across town, across the country in some case. Letters I’d forgotten to post, a top I’d borrowed from Chec, a book I’d left on holiday; there didn’t seem to be a distance too great.

  Then there were the entries where I’d changed things. Little things, like the cut of my jeans or the c
olour of my boots happened nearly every day, or so it seemed, but there were other, bigger things too. Apparently, our car had broken down on our way back from school a few months back, but while my mum was trying to find a local tow truck, I just fixed the engine myself whilst listening to my iPod.

  If you took away the freakiness, it was actually kind of cool.

  Less cool though, was the description alongside each entry of how I’d altered the perceptions of the people around me to shield what I’d done. More than anything, this was the bit that made me feel like a creeper. Poking around in people’s heads? How is that the kind of thing a good guy would do?

  Oriel went on and everything he told me spoke of a power and strength that was completely alien to me, and alarmingly, the things I had done seemed to increase in scale the further along the book we went. ‘I have no idea about any of this,’ I whispered, rattling my tongue stud against the back of my teeth in agitation. ‘Just...no idea. No recollections. It’s like you’re talking about someone else. It doesn’t sound familiar, any of it.’

  ‘You know, there’s every chance your memories could come back.’ I shot my eyes up to meet his and he nodded. ‘Your subconscious blocked the memories; with the right prompts it could easily release them. Do you want to go on?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes.’ I nodded my head once, decisively. I’d opened Pandora’s box now and I didn’t want to close it until I’d unearthed every secret I’d been keeping from myself.

  So we carried on. When Oriel started to flip through pages, I pulled him back and made him read out entries that he’d skipped. Sometimes it was something small, sometimes it wasn’t, but I wanted to know it all.

  ‘Here, look, April the twentieth this year. You didn’t want to go to your history tutor group, but Mal made you go anyway. You sat at the back of the room and faded out.’

  ‘Wow. I do that a lot.’ He’d already pointed out instances of me fading into the background, camouflaging myself, changing people’s minds so no one would notice me. It had seemed so awesome when I’d seen Raelthos doing it; now I wasn’t so sure.

  ‘I think you do it when you feel unsettled, when you’re unsure of yourself. Like a defence mechanism.’ He laughed softly, remembering something. ‘The first day or so you were here, you were invisible most of the time. We kept having to walk in formation with you in the middle, so we’d know where you were.’

  ‘Oh god, how embarrassing.’ I covered my face with my hands, mortified.

  Oriel ducked his head to try and meet my eye. ‘Roanne, you mustn’t think of it that way.’ I peeked out from between my fingers. He was looking at me earnestly, his eyes shining. ‘It’s nothing to be embarrassed about. It’s brilliant. You’re-’ He stopped, frowned and turned back to the book. ‘You’re very talented.’

  ‘You all knew about this,’ I said dully. A rush of embarrassment hit me. They all knew. They must have thought I was so stupid. Oriel looked confused, not following my train of thought. ‘All of you. You all knew what I could do. You all kept it from me.’

  Oriel closed the file and shifted round on his chair to face me properly. For a second I thought he was going to take my hands in his. ‘It wasn’t supposed to pan out this way. The plan was to rescue Owen and then once we were back at the Citadel we were going to help you unlock your memories. We assumed, we hoped, that when we needed a portal to Thornsvale, you would just subconsciously make one appear.

  ‘But then you got here and you stopped hiding what you were doing. At first you didn’t seem to notice, but then in the woods, with Neve... We had to tell you something. The truth seemed like the best bet.’

  More questions came bubbling up. ‘Am I even any good as an archer? Did I really do okay on my GCSEs? Or did I just fake all that as well?’

  ‘As far as I can tell, your exam results are accurate. And you’re a great archer. You really are. I’ve seen you adjust wide shots mid-flight before. You did it when we were clearing out that demon nest.’ I made a noise of outrage and disbelief. ‘As long as your arrow hits your target does it matter if it’s guided by your hand or your mind?’

  I thought about this for a minute. ‘Okay, what’s the biggest thing I’ve ever done?’

  Ping. This question hit a nerve. He instantly looked wary. This was going to be good. ‘Do you remember the last time you were ill?’

  I shook my head. This was one of the things Raelthos had said that set off the yawning pit of fear in my stomach back at Hawksrest. I just didn’t seem to catch colds or ‘flu. I couldn’t even remember if I’d had anything like chickenpox when I was little.

  ‘When you were thirteen, you were laid up in bed for two days. You had a fever and were unconscious for a while. Afterwards you thought you’d caught ‘flu, but it was actually the aftershock of creating something really big. And complicated. Something that really surprised us.’ He started knocking his knuckles together, a nervous tic. I wanted to reach out and clamp his hands still. He caught my look and spread his hands on the table. ‘You brought a new person into being.’

  ‘WHAT?’ I yelped. ‘Who?’

  He continued to fidget. ‘Francesca.’

  ‘But you said...the Holocaust...I wouldn’t be able to do something like that. How did I do this? How did I create a person from nothing?’ I asked faintly.

  ‘Well, it wasn’t exactly like the Holocaust - you weren’t bringing anyone back from the dead; you were giving life to someone who hadn’t existed before. It’s not impossible - people do it every day when they become parents. And you didn’t create your sister from nothing. You already had the blueprint for her.’ It took a moment for this to sink in. ‘You’re identical twins. You used your own genetic code to create her.’

  My head started to feel light and woozy. God. Chec didn’t even exist until she was thirteen.

  I tried to dredge up memories of our lives, as if this would somehow disprove what Oriel was saying. I thought of us as tiny children in the paddling pool, the summer grass crispy and brown around us. Of Christmases. The shows we used to put on when we were little, with our dolls and teddies as the audience.

  These memories were so real. How could they be false?

  I shook my head to try and clear it. ‘So you’re telling me that Chec’s really only three years old?’ And then a horrible thought thundered into me. ‘Oh god. Mal’s going out with a three year old.’

  ‘No! Gods, no! It’s not like that.’ Oriel looked at me in horror. ‘She’s sixteen, the same as you. She has the same number of memories as you, the same number of life experiences. It’s just that up until the age of thirteen, her memories are the same as yours. You gave them to her.’

  In vain, I tried to convince myself that Oriel had somehow made all this up, that he was mistaken, that they’d got the wrong person, but it seemed that now the truth had been revealed, it wasn’t very easy to poke back inside its box.

  I’d made my sister from my own DNA.

  I’d spent vast tracts of my life in a state of invisibility.

  I’d changed people’s memories, their perceptions, their minds.

  And throughout all this people from another world had been watching me, trying to second-guess my every move, trying to learn about me.

  The knowledge that I’d been looking at the world through a distorted lens my whole life crashed into me like a train and the world fell away, leaving me struggling for air.

  I pushed my chair back and rose shakily to my feet. ‘Oriel, I can’t do this,’ I gasped. ‘I’m sorry, but this is too much, I can’t stay here. I want to go home. I’m going to go back to Saltmarsh and I’m... I’m going to go home. I just want to put all this behind me and get on with my life.’

  Oriel stood up and for a fleeting moment I thought he was going to hug me. Instead, he balled his hands into fists by his sides. ‘Roanne, you have to listen carefully to me now. You can’t go home. You have more power than anyone has ever seen. What you can do is literally the stuff of legends. You’re the only person w
ith Blessings ever to have been born in the Sanctuary and we don’t know why.’

  ‘The nosebleeds you have - they happen every time you use your Blessings and they’re an indication that something is wrong. Most Blessed children are trained from an early age to control their powers, but you never have been. Your power is building up inside you to an unhealthy degree and if you don’t learn to control what you are doing, to curb your instincts, you could-’ He broke off. His face had drained to almost completely white and his eyes glowed like green embers as he stared at me solemnly with not a speck of his usual humour. With an effort he unclenched his hands and laid them on top of the Roanne Harper file. ‘Things could go badly wrong.’

  He paused and looked at me, weighing up what he thought my reaction was going to be to what he said next. ‘I’ve spoken to someone on your behalf. His name’s Vincent. He’s a Psion. He retired from the Protectorate a few years ago but he still helps out training new recruits and he’s agreed to train you. Once Owen is safely back at the Citadel and our mission is over, you’ll start working with him and when he’s satisfied that you are in control and not at risk of flaming out, then we’ll talk about you going home.’

  I stared at Oriel, agog. Who the hell was he to start organising my life like this? ‘What?’

  Oriel ignored my look of astonishment and started putting the loose pages of the file back together. ‘The training won’t take long, a few months at the most.’

  ‘A few MONTHS!’ I hooted. ‘I can’t stay here for months! I have a life. I have plans. If I stay here for months, I won’t be able to finish my A-levels. What am I supposed to tell them? “Sorry, I’m going to skip school for a bit, I’m busy being trained how to use my psychic powers.”’

  ‘Roanne, I hate to remind you,’ - and to be fair to him, he really did sound sorry - ‘but you’ve been kicked out of school.’

  The air left me in a rush. ‘I can’t believe you’d bring that up, you complete fucker.’

  His shoulders slumped slightly and he actually looked contrite, as if he was aware how badly this situation was spinning out of his control. ‘Listen-’

  But no. I was no longer in a listening mood. ‘No, you listen. How would you like it if you were whisked away from your life to become some mercenary who has to...to...camp in the woods and walk for miles on end and live every day knowing you could get banjoed at any moment?’

  ‘Ro, I know you’re upset-’ he began, but I was on a roll and was in no mood to be calmed down.

  ‘How would you like it if you were suddenly dumped in the Sanctuary with no way of ever seeing your friends or family again?’ I had to stop mid-rant; my throat was getting thick with frustrated tears and if I carried on I would be in serious danger of crying. I literally couldn’t think of anything worse than have Oriel see me break down.

  He took a deep breath, refusing to be drawn into my hysterics. ‘It’s a moot point. I was born in the Jeopardy - I can’t pass through the dimensional barrier.’

  I narrowed my eyes at him. ‘Do you know, I’d actually forgotten that was the case. Fantastic. It means you won’t be able to follow me.’

  I swept out of the library before he could answer, and he shouted after me, ‘Roanne? Roanne? Where are you going?’ I heard swift footsteps as he strode into the hallway after me.

  ‘I’m going home,’ I said, not looking back. ‘I’m going back to Saltmarsh and I don’t care if I have to walk every step of the way.’ I’d reached the front door. The handle was stiff and I yanked at it angrily, wanting to get outside before the inevitable tears started to fall.

  He grabbed my wrist from the door handle. He wasn’t rough, but I could sense the latent strength of his hand. ‘You aren’t going anywhere on your own. It’s too dangerous. We’re miles away from any demon nets and you’re upset; you’d have no defences if you were attacked.’

  ‘Let me go!’ I snapped, clawing at his hand. ‘Get off me, I’m going home and you’re not stopping me.’

  ‘You’re not going anywhere until you calm down,’ he said and with that he picked me up and swung me over his shoulder as easily as if I were a sack of feathers.

  ‘PUT ME DOWN!’ I screamed, pummelling his back with my fists. ‘Put me down or I’ll kill you! I’ll kill you!’ I tried kicking out, but he just grabbed my ankles and held them fast in his iron grip.

  I screeched like a fishwife all the way upstairs, cursing his name and struggling pointlessly to free myself, until we reached my room where he dumped me unceremoniously on the bed.

  ‘You can stay here until you calm down,’ he said and left.

  I heard the key turn in the lock, but that didn’t stop me from smacking the door until my hand went numb. I kicked the door, and ended up stubbing my toe.

  The window was made of teeny-tiny panes of glass set in a latticed iron frame with no visible openings. A quick scan revealed that there were no secret tunnel openings hidden behind the bed and cupboard that were the only pieces of furniture. There was no way out.

  I now had a decision to make. I could either vent my anger and destruction by demolishing the room, or I could channel my energy into something more likely to lead to my eventual freedom.

  I sat shakily on the edge of the bed, chewed the side of my thumb and started to think.