by Anni Taylor
“Thank you, Ruth,” said Sister Rose. “It’s all right, everyone, she’s been found. She’ll be safe. We’ll go after her and bring her back safely.”
Brother Sage sprinted out through the gates, stopping beside Sister Rose. She filled him in quickly.
Yolanda ran up to Sister Rose and Brother Sage, her dark skin streaked with tears. “She said she wasn’t strong enough for this. She was right. I’m scared she’ll try to get away again.”
Nodding, Brother Sage sighed deeply. “Thank you for that information, Yolanda. We won’t make her stay. She can return to Germany. It is a shame though.” He turned to the rest of us. “To make up for the loss of Greta, one less person will be eliminated after tonight’s challenge.”
We sat on the hills and watched as the monks took out a large motorboat and caught up with Greta. Leaving the rowboat anchored, they helped Greta on board.
The motorboat sped towards the horizon.
18. I, INSIDE THE WALLS
THE KILLING STARTED YOUNG. BEFORE I knew there were others like me. Before I ever knew of the monastery.
I killed a man when I was seven.
Don’t say you don’t remember, Santiago, because I know you do. We were alone in the house.
This was how it happened:
Hello? Hello?
Is anyone here?
Bump, bump, bump downstairs. There’s always bumpy monsters down there at night. This time, it must be a big one.
Santiago’s eyes are huge in the darkness.
He’s little as he walks across the bare floor and pokes his head out of our bedroom door.
Don’t go down there, Santiago.
No! I told you no.
“The only way out is to kill things before they kill you,” he tells me.
I shake my head as though I can pull him back to safety just by doing that. “The monster will hurt you.”
He smiles. “Don’t worry. I’m hiding knives under the bed. The knives make me happy. Do they make you happy?”
“No,” I answer quickly. But I’m not sure of that.
The monster downstairs is opening things and shutting them again.
Santiago gives me a nod, and I know what that means. I know exactly what that means.
I help him crawl under the bed and search around for the hard metal of the knife blades. I’ve got dust on my knees and in my hair. I half choke and want to cough, but I stifle it, swallowing instead. My hair and face look white in the dark mirror as we step out into the hallway.
We tiptoe on the stairs.
The monster’s crouching down in the living room. Looking in a cupboard. Making grunts and animal noises.
Santiago pulls me on, my hand in his tight grip.
The monster doesn’t hear us.
Santiago makes the first stab, right in the monster’s back. The monster jolts, cries out.
I make the second stab as he spins out. In his neck.
The monster looks angry, half crazed. He knocks me to the ground.
But Santiago hands me another knife, and I slash the monster’s knee. Slash, slash, slash. The monster stumbles and falls, and it’s too late for him now.
Santiago and I stab him and stab him until he stops moving.
We stab him until we feel better.
19. GRAY
WILLOW AND LILLY RAN SQUEALING AND giggling after I hauled them out of the bath, dropping their towels and doing their usual nudie run around the house. What was it about baths that got kids so excited? Actually, it was just the prospect of water that got them excited. When we went for a walk to the park, Lilly would cackle like a tiny, gleeful witch if she found the smallest puddle to stomp in.
Ordering them into Willow’s room, I dressed them both in tracksuits. Evie usually took a lot of care when dressing them, and she’d spent a lot of money on outfits for them lately. Her restaurant job had meant she could buy things she couldn’t normally. But bad luck—it was my rules now. And my rules were whatever was easiest.
Putting a Toy Story DVD on for the girls, I headed downstairs. The girls were snuggled together on Willow’s bed.
I’d promised myself I wouldn’t check the companions website again today. But that promise didn’t hold.
Seating myself on the sofa, I grabbed the laptop and browsed to the companions site. I signed up. I had to pay a hundred and fifty bucks for the privilege. That hurt bad. I only had seven hundred in the bank. My week’s wage. But I was driven. I had to talk to my wife.
I found a photo of an older guy online who looked rich, and I used it for my profile. My gut turned upside down as I wrote a quick blurb about myself.
A green symbol next to her username told me Evie had come online.
Pressing my back into the sofa, I told myself to keep it under control. Play the part, just like she was.
I clicked on the chat symbol for her profile.
Be cool. Smooth.
Me: Hey, Velvette. I like your smile. Why don’t we meet and you let me see that smile in person?
Holding my breath, I waited.
Her: Thank you! I’m afraid I’m pretty busy.
Choice names spun through my head—all the names that men spat at women. Whore. Slut. Two-bit skank. I wanted to call her every one of them.
Play it cool, Gray.
Me: Too busy for me? You’re exactly what I like. I’m very generous with women I like. I can offer you trips, expensive gifts, money. Tell me more about yourself.
Her: I do a bit of Latin dancing. Morning jogs along the beach. I like a good red with good company.
Evie didn’t do any of that stuff. She had two left feet. She didn’t even like red wine that much. She was playing a role.
Me: What sex things do you do? Your profile didn’t say much. Give me something.
Her: For a generous man, the sky’s the limit.
The blood rushed from my body.
Me: Great to know. I have a shoe and foot fetish. I have a number of feathers that I like to tickle women’s feet with. Interested?
Her: I’m wearing red stilettos and red nail polish right now. I would adore that.
Breath gone.
Evie was too ticklish to even have her feet touched, let alone with a feather. She was really willing to do anything to please these guys.
Me: How about tonight? Nine o’clock?
How would I even swing that? I didn’t know. I couldn’t think.
Her: Sorry, tonight is no good for me.
Me: Tomorrow night? Same time?
Her: You’re the kind of man every girl wants. But I must apologise. I cannot see you. I am seeing a couple of gents at the moment and I don’t have the time. Try me again soon.
The green chat symbol went red.
My head thumped as I tried to put the pieces of the brief conversation together. She’d been running two different lives. For how long?
I regretted contacting her. I didn’t need to know any of that stuff. I was just torturing myself.
The marriage was over.
THE SECOND CHALLENGE
20. EVIE
“HEY,” POPPY WHISPERED TO ME AS the eight ‘o’clock curfew sounded and we began walking towards the dormitory. “Are we good?”
“Of course,” I told her.
“Cool, because I don’t want you mad at me.”
I shot her a smile. “I’m not mad at you. Hope we blitz our challenge tonight.”
“We can do it. Bring it on.” She didn’t sound as confident as her words. Drawing in a breath through pursed lips, she tied her red locks up into a messy bun. “Hope Greta will be okay. She’ll still get ten thousand for completing the first challenge. Maybe she’ll use it to go into rehab in Germany?”
“Maybe she will.” I didn’t say what I was thinking privately. Some people weren’t ready to be helped.
When I slipped under the covers in the dormitory, Kara was sitting rigidly on the edge of her bed, staring at me.
“Hope you go well tonight,” I said awkwardly. I
was out of earshot of anyone but Kara, but still, I was going to feel silly if she didn’t answer me.
She fiddled with her wristband, remaining silent. Then she climbed into bed without another word and turned away from me.
Kara was so strange. Maybe she had a mental illness—and if she did, this wasn’t the best place for her.
Settling down onto my pillow, I was surprised to find myself drifting to sleep. I thought everything would be running through my head, but I’d somehow found a sense of calm. I wasn’t going to throw this opportunity away, and I wasn’t going to let the actions of others make me doubt myself. Maybe talking with Brother Vito had helped.
When the bells sounded at midnight, I was ready.
I sprang from the bed.
Ruth’s wristband began flashing first.
I stared at mine, waiting for the digital display to start up.
But two other women jumped from their beds, holding their bracelets high—Yolanda and the tiny Chinese girl named Mei.
The display on everyone else’s wristbands remained blank.
The teams had changed. I hadn’t guessed the mentors were going to change up the teams.
Poppy and I turned to each other in dismay.
“Oh well,” Poppy shrugged. “At least we get to lose ruthless toothless for the night.”
Ruth looked back over her shoulder at Poppy. “I heard that.”
Pulling a face at me, Poppy refused to meet Ruth’s glare.
The door opened, and Ruth and the other two women exited.
Inhaling slowly, I sat back on my bed. So this was what it was like to have to wait.
My muscles remained clenched for the next fifteen minutes.
I’d almost begun to relax when my wristband flashed with the number two. I was in the second team.
A couple more people stood.
The first was an older woman who I knew nothing about except that her name was Louelle and that she was an American who liked country music.
The other person was Kara.
My heart fell a little. Kara was not going to be a team player. She tugged the hood of her top over her forehead. She didn’t look in my direction at all.
The three of us rushed out into the hall.
Three men joined us from their dormitory—Cormack, Saul and Richard.
Mentally, I tried to calculate our odds as a team. We had six people this time rather than seven. Kara—a hostile teenager. Cormack—only just out of his teens, who, although he desperately tried to sound worldly, didn’t have the experience of the older people. Saul—a man who seemed afraid to make a wrong step. Louelle, who I barely knew the first thing about. Richard, who had such a restless drive for the finish line he didn’t seem to be able to concentrate on the task at hand. And myself, and I didn’t place a lot of trust in me.
The odds didn’t seem good.
We charged along the hallway together, at least giving the appearance of being a united front.
The same sound as the night before seemed to follow us, the rustling and the sound of feet.
Louelle and Saul turned to look at the left wall as they ran, frowning. They’d heard it too. But unlike me, the frowns quickly left their faces. They had better things to worry about.
After the things I thought I’d heard and seen that first morning, I’d been jumping at shadows and listening hard for every creak. The monastery, with its age and its vaulted ceilings and hard stone spaces, was producing eerie, hollow noises all its own. And there might be rats too, but Brother Vito was getting the monks to take care of that.
I had to shut down any thoughts that might get in the way of a challenge. The challenges were about mental strength. And I had to be strong.
The mentors were standing together just as they had been the night before, their expressions calm.
“Without further ado,” said Sister Rose, “your second challenge is about to begin. Be sure to look around you and think before you take action.”
I wanted more from the mentors, some sort of clue. But nothing more was forthcoming. I could hear our group taking deeper breaths as we followed the mentors to the door of the second challenge room.
“We wish you well.” Sister Rose opened the door and then stepped back to let us enter.
The room fell into complete darkness as she closed the door behind us.
“Smells like—” Cormack began.
“Seawater,” Richard finished. “And I can hear a motor running.”
Lights sprang on in a circular pattern.
A gasp rose in my throat.
“What in the weasel’s piss is this?” Cormack’s thickly Scottish voice echoed around the glass surfaces of the room.
Each of the six walls was made of floor-to-ceiling glass, schools of bright fish swimming in the water behind them.
A massive aquarium.
Baby sharks swam among the smaller fish.
Ancient-looking anchors and chains hung down into the tanks from the ceilings. Rocks and chests and scattered coins sat at the bottom.
All of the light came from bulbs within the aquarium itself. The only part of the walls that wasn’t glass was the door through which we’d entered. Fish swam freely behind the glass above and at the sides of the door—except that the tanks were divided into six, with a glass partition between each tank.
The timer clock was fixed to the back of the door, as before.
Beneath my feet, the floor was covered in blue tiles. A hexagonal wooden prism occupied the middle of the room—almost exactly the same as the last one, except the inlaid sections of lighter wood had a different pattern. This time, the inlaid sections were six horizontal bands around the box, each about the height of my hand.
Everyone stood transfixed.
Panic spiralled through me. I didn’t expect anything like this. What were we meant to do here? Was it just the box, or did the aquarium form part of the puzzle?
“Shouldn’t we make some kind of start?” Kara walked up to a glass wall and tapped it. She pushed the hood back, the lights inside the aquarium catching the pretty curves of her face as her hair fell around her shoulders.
Cormack’s weasel’s piss scowl turned to open-mouthed wonder as he turned and looked across at Kara. She seemed instantly uncomfortable as she became aware of his eyes on her.
“Haven’t noticed her before, huh, Cormack?” Richard winked. “Too busy looking at the sunbaking beauties, huh?”
Cormack corrected his expression. “What are you talking about, you mad thing? Anyway, forget it. We need to make a start, just like the girl said.”
“I have a name. It’s Kara.” Kara raised her eyebrows to make her point.
“Kara.” Cormack lifted his chin in a nod. “I’ll remember that.”
Richard made a derisive snort. “What you need to remember is that this is a competition.”
“Everything in life is a competition,” Cormack retorted. He stormed away to the wall opposite Kara, cupping his hands to peer inside the glass.
Richard made his way to another wall of the aquarium, whistling and sounding unhurried, but I already knew him well enough to know that it was an act.
Louelle stood by herself in the one spot, as though absorbing clues by osmosis. Saul merely looked lost.
I rushed to the hexagon box. The box had been the puzzle in the last challenge. Maybe the aquarium was just a distraction.
Putting my ear to the wooden surface, I listened.
No ticking.
No sound.
I went around the box, listening and knocking.
Nothing.
The box didn’t sound hollow inside. It seemed solid.
Saul ventured across, watching but not offering help.
Moving back, I studied the surfaces of the box. There were tiny engravings in the middle of each horizontal band of wood. “Look, Saul.” I touched a finger to a symbol on one of the six sides of the box. “You can only just see it. It’s a—”
“Fish,” finished Saul loo
king over my shoulder, holding his glasses out from the bridge of his nose to see the symbol better. “We need some better light in here. That aquarium is blinding me. Yeah, looks like a fish.”
Trying to shield my eyes, I stepped around the box. “Okay, so six symbols of fish,” I said quickly. “Scattered around these six bands. Is it some kind of code?”
“I’d say so,” said Saul. “I run a puzzle toy business. It’s a hobby—I don’t make much money from it.” His tone turned defensive as he added, “My wife and kids think it’s weird.”
“It’s not weird,” I said. “Any idea what this is?”
“My guess would be that the symbols have to match up.”
I stared at him blankly. “Okay, Saul, but how?”
“Seems too easy, but you’d just”—he grasped hold of the first band—“and twist it.”
Miraculously, the band of wood spun around, and he matched the top fish with a second fish. A smile cracked his face. Seeming to be on a mission now, he spun the third, fourth, fifth and sixth bands around.
Now we had a matching vertical line of fishes.
The hexagonal box was like a giant combination lock—like the metal, barrel-shaped lock that I used for my bicycle, in which I had to turn the sections of numbers around to match my number code.
A soft glow emitted from between each of the bands.
I gasped loudly, wanting to cheer, but holding back as I glanced across at the clock on the door.
The bulb below the clock remained stubbornly red. We hadn’t solved the puzzle. This was just the first step.
Two minutes gone. Ten minutes left.
“That didn’t do the trick,” I said, panting now.
“Hold on,” said Saul. “After you get the code right, you sometimes have to do something else.” Tongue between his teeth, he examined the box all over. “Bingo!” He flipped up a lid on top of the box.
At the opening of the box, Richard and Cormack came running.
Inside was just a shallow shelf with six round depressions in it, each depicting an animal—an eagle, an owl, a dolphin, an octopus and others.
I checked the clock again.
Nine minutes left.
“What’s this all about, then?” Cormack studied the images, his eyebrows puckering as they drew together.