“I’m not on form.”
There was silence for a moment.
“I really hope he’s ok.” Annabel’s voice was shaky.
Before Sunny could respond, Mr Evans came in and called the class to attention. “Ok, today we’re going to discuss the resolution of the situation in North Korea.”
Sunny gave an involuntary, hysterical snort of laughter, and Mr Evans paused in his introduction. He looked for the source of the disruption, saw it was Sunny, and continued smoothly on with his lesson as if nothing had happened.
Well, thought Sunny. I reckon I could probably get away with murder right now.
But she paid more attention to the class than was strictly necessary, mostly to see what was being reported about the end of the war.
It was surreal to be getting taught about things that she had seen first-hand, to have events that she was a part of discussed abstractly in class. It was also very tempting for Sunny to offer a few tidbits for discussion, to see what the class and Mr Evans thought of the actual events, but for once she wisely kept her mouth shut. The real events were so fantastical that the class would think that she’d lost her marbles.
Mostly, she looked around and marvelled at how bored the rest of the students were with the topic. The range of emotion in the class ranged from dutiful attention through to disinterest. They were so far removed from the conflict that it might as well just be a made-up story in a travel magazine.
She wondered what they would think if they could actually go there; if they could see the broken and bleeding soldiers in the dungeons, the identical immaculate wax-like soldiers training their guns on nothing in particular, the torn-up earth of the front lines.
The class ended, and Annabel pulled out her phone to check to see if Simon had made an appearance, her face settling back into worried lines when she realized he was still missing. The girls were off to different classes, Annabel to Economics and Sunny to Geography.
“Maybe you should just head home?” Sunny suggested as they made their way out into the hallway, where the artificial light made them wince. “You might feel better if you drove around yourself looking for him.”
Annabel swept her fringe out of her eyes and glared at her friend. “I would if I thought it would do any good. I’ve just got this feeling he’s sulking somewhere, and he’ll show up soon.”
She shot a look out the window in the hallway, it had gotten darker still, and there were faint rumblings of thunder in the distance. “I bet he’ll head home when it starts to rain. It’s not far off.” She made a sharp right at her classroom and stalked inside without another word.
Sunny watched her friend go. She was obviously crippled with worry about Simon. A crack of thunder sounded, louder than before, and a couple of huge fat drops of rain smacked onto the corrugated iron roof of the hallway, like the beginnings of scattered gunfire.
With increasing unease, Sunny made her way to Geography and was grateful to be left alone for the whole class. Mr Zimmermann had obviously decided to pretend that there was a gaping black hole where Sunny usuallly sat, and he skipped her when singling out anyone to speak. Of course, all the teachers had heard by now that Simon was missing, that the police were looking for him, and that Jake had fingered Simon for practically pimping Sunny out against her wishes. Mr Zimmermann apparently felt that Sunny had enough on her plate, and completely ignored her.
It allowed Sunny to tune out the class around her and think. What would she say to Simon, if she could see him? That she was sorry he’d got the wrong end of the stick? That everything was OK; she’d forgive him? Sunny wasn’t sure. There was something not quite right about the whole situation, and her intuition was beginning to prickle unpleasantly.
For a moment, she was very worried he was somewhere, hurt, and he needed help. Somewhere on the lake, maybe –
There it was. Sunny was instantly so annoyed that she face-palmed herself, and copped an alarmed look from Mr Zimmermann before he hastily moved on with his topic. How could she have not remembered!
Cape Hawke. The lookout!
He’d quite clearly told her it was where he went to when he needed to get away from it all. It was possible that the police had already searched out there, but Annabel had listed all the places that he might typically be found, and the lookout wasn’t on that list. Did Simon share something with her that he had never shared with Annabel?
Maybe he considered Sunny a close friend after all.
She should tell Annabel about it straight away. Annabel could tell the police, and they’d get up there and have a look around. Maybe Simon was hurt, maybe he fell and broke something –
Suddenly she was so anxious for his safety that she decided to go for a quick look. There were only ten minutes left in the class, and she had a free period straight after – she would have ample time to head to the girl’s changing rooms and take off into the Alternate, and fly directly to the lookout and see if he was there. If he wasn't there, then she would even have enough time to zip around Forster and the surrounding towns to see if she could spot his aura.
If she could remember what his aura looked like.
She racked her brains. The only time she’d seen it was when she first started going into the Alternate. It was not something she’d committed to memory. At the time, she hadn’t realized that the beautiful swirling and eddying waves of colour meant anything. How very casual she had been about her gift then, how careless. She pictured herself becoming solid so she could heft a package of cocaine in her hand, and she blushed to think of it.
No wonder Hunter had thought her useless.
The bell rang, thankfully derailing her mental downward spiral, and she walked as quickly as she could down the hallway, and into the girl’s bathroom. It sounded like it was occupied. Animated voices at the basins drifted over to her as she walked in.
“- as black as night, and exactly the same size as his hands, so it was obvious he’d done it to hurt her as much as he could -”
There was a group of girls at the basins. Conversation screeched to a halt when they turned and saw her. There was silence for a very awkward moment.
“Sunny!” The loudest one recovered the quickest and gave her a big smile - a tall curvy redhead named Mia Owen. “We all heard about yesterday. Of course,” she giggled tensely, “we all saw Jake getting hauled away by the cops.”
“We all think that he got what he deserved,” said Danica Thomas, her table mate from Art class. Danica was a gifted art student and rarely had time to speak to Sunny, but they had a mutual understanding that they liked one another, and would be friends if they had more time. These girls had a bigger clique than Sunny was used to. And, while they were lovely girls, they were a bit intimidated by Annabel, who most people regarded as a confrontational, over-intelligent, overachieving lunatic.
The third in the group, a quieter girl called Rose Pay piped up. “Yeah, he’s been harassing the girls here for ages. Nothing quite as bad as what happened to you, though. He was the only guy that was flicking bra straps in Year 7. Most people just wrote him off as immature.”
“But no one thought to complain about him?” Sunny asked the group. They all glanced around at each other.
“You wouldn’t complain about something as petty as flicking a bra strap,” Danica spoke up, a bitter tone in her voice. “We’re not Annabel, you know.”
Mia giggled uneasily. “Yeah, his behaviour was annoying, but nothing you could go to a teacher about. It would make you sound like a… whinger. A do-gooder, a nark even. He was just doing things that most boys would love to do.”
“But they didn’t. He did. And he didn’t get permission beforehand, that’s what his problem was,” Sunny said, sharper than she meant to. She was anxious to get going.
The girls all looked at each other, guiltily.
“I was just saying that to the girls,” Danica whispered. “We wish we had of taken it more seriously. Maybe if we all had of complained about his butt-patting and thigh-p
inching – “
“And bra flicking,” Rose cut in bitterly.
“And bra flicking,” Danica added lamely. “It really hurt you that much?” Danica asked her friend.
“It was a new bra!” Rose wailed. “He bent all the hooks in the back. It’s hard to get on now. Plus, it flipping bruised my skin where he flicked it!”
The other girls all made sympathetic noises and patted Rose like a toy poodle. They clattered out of the bathroom, chatting about bras and the various ways in which they can be used as a weapon.
Sunny waited a moment and ducked her head out the door to make sure the girls weren’t out there waiting for her to exit the bathroom. The coast was clear. Sunny walked to a cubicle, shut the door and inspected the stall, the walls and the toilet very carefully before she zipped into the Alternate and lifted straight up above the school, keeping an eye on the figures below. She’d forgotten what Simon’s internal lights looked like, but she was hoping she’d get a flash of recognition of she spotted it, and could go down for a closer look.
She ascended into a thundering storm. The rain had started to fall in earnest now; big fat drops fell heavy from the close-packed rumbling clouds. The atmosphere was dense and gloomy, with a vibrant undercurrent of excitement that you normally get in a thunderstorm, but magnified tenfold in the Alternate. Sunny got little tingles of adrenalin rushing through her as she drifted through the building storm and headed out towards the coast.
She located Cape Hawke and sped towards the lookout. The fat raindrops had suddenly morphed into harder pellets of water zooming towards earth, thankfully going straight through Sunny as most things in that dimension did. The clouds hid the sun completely, and it was as dark as it was at dusk, on the very edge of night. It was only just after eleven o’clock in the morning. Cape Hawke glittered in the rain like everything alive and natural, and shimmered with an extra splendour.
But the beauty of the shimmering green palms and mangroves below did not distract Sunny.
There were a couple of figures on the trail leading up to the lookout, rushing hastily back down to the lone car in the parking lot at the base of the hill. But it was no one Sunny knew. She went closer to the lookout, and headed across towards the cliff, where Simon had described.
It was eerily similar to what she’d found on Paritutu. A secluded place that no one could find unless you knew where you were going. And it was notoriously dangerous around here; the thick vegetation hid the drop off in a lot of places, so a badly placed footstep could mean a tumble into the churning ocean below.
She flew over the Cape and looked at the cliffs from the sea. She couldn’t immediately spot any location on the cliff where there would be a clear spot, an edge for a big seventeen-year-old boy to stretch out and contemplate life. Zooming closer, she drifted at the edge of the cliffs, and zipped sideways, eyes searching for a sign.
Finally, she saw a light. Deep red, with jagged black lurching through it. She felt the flicker of recognition that she was looking for and moved closer to make sure.
It was Simon. He sat on a sturdy rock outcrop, a small clearing where the sea grasses outnumbered the scrubby vegetation. He was unmoving, and he looked out to sea with very sad eyes.
Sunny felt instant relief – he was safe, he was alive! A part of her had feared the worst.
She flew closer, then slowed. Alarm bells started ringing as she re-evaluated his colours.
If only she had read up on what people’s auras meant like Hunter had told her to. Nevertheless, her senses told her that his lights didn’t mean anything good, and she suspected they reflected some intense turmoil and dark thoughts.
He must feel awful about me; Sunny thought to herself as she came down closer. He’s tearing himself apart. Even now, he hadn’t made a move to find shelter. The rain was coming down harder, and it would be stinging his skin. He still wasn’t moving, just staring blankly out to sea.
Sunny realized she was going to have to talk him down before the wind and rain sent him toppling over the cliffs. Or, a dark corner of her mind suggested, he succumbed to whatever thoughts were torturing him, and he leaped over the side himself. She scoped out the tiny animal track behind him that he would have used to get to the cliffs, and followed it back to the lookout.
The clearing on top of Cape Hawke was deserted of people, but she had to check very closely to be sure. The wind screamed through the trees and whipped them about, making them more animated than humans.
Satisfied that there was no human activity anywhere around, she rematerialized inside a dense clump of bushes and was drenched in seconds.
She started out towards the animal track that Simon had used to get to his perch on the cliff edge, struggling through the wet bushes and whipping trees. The roar of the storm was almost deafening; the waves tossed violently against the cliff face, the machine-gun fire of raindrops smacked into the leafy vegetation.
It was very hard going, uncomfortable to the point of painful. The rain blinded her and muddling her sense of direction, and the noise of the storm unnerved her, making her footsteps hasty and fumbling. Twice, she had to stop and take deep breaths and remind herself that the sounds were natural and harmless and that she was on the right track. The rain had flattened her hair, which escaped her ponytail and formed ugly little rat’s tails dripping down her back. Water dribbled down her collar and down the back of her shirt, making her spine tingle even more. Her shoes were sodden and quickly coated with a thick layer of mud, making the going even harder as she squelched through the bush.
Finally, she struggled through a clump of spiky branches and saw the small clearing. Simon was still sitting motionless near the cliff edge, gazing out towards the turbulent sea.
“Simon!” She yelled, not wanting to startle him with her sudden appearance. He didn’t turn.
“Simon! I’m over here!” She called again, fighting to be heard over the din of the ocean. He might not even see her if she turned, the storm was so thick and intense there on the cliff, and she was sodden dark like everything else in the area. She fumbled through some tangled vines to get closer. “Simon! Simon!”
Finally, he turned, and Sunny stopped dead in her tracks. The look on his face was not sad, or shamed, or even angry.
He was smiling.
Chapter 30
“Finally,” Simon said, the words floating over to her on the gusting wind. “You took your time.”
Suddenly something hit her from behind, and a violent jolt of excruciating pain threw her to the ground.
For a moment, she knew nothing but intense, brutal, shocking pain. Her nerves screamed like guitar strings pulled too tightly, and her teeth threatened to shatter under the pressure of her bite. Her bones vibrated, the follicles on her head electrified. She was completely overwhelmed by the waves of pain that struck her body. Her consciousness overloaded, and she blacked out for a few moments.
When she came to, the jolts of agony were still shaking her. She was lying on her back in the mud, hard rocks and sticks jabbing into her skin. She couldn’t make her body move; it wasn’t responding to the usual commands. She tried to roll over, but the screaming shocks running through her made her movements jerky and uncontrollable. She opened her burning eyes and tried to focus on what was happening to her.
There were two pairs of legs in her range of vision. One, dark jeans and Converse sneakers. The other was camouflage pants and desert boots.
“Well, well, well.” A strange voice spoke. “I guess that did the trick.”
She heard Simon grunt in reply. “You sure it’s not hurting her too much? It’s just paralysing her, right?”
The stranger laughed. “Sure, sure.” The voice was malicious, gleeful. “It’s only disabling her. She’ll be fine.”
The legs in the dark jeans bent, and Simon came into her range of vision. His face was devoid of emotion. “I’m sorry this had to happen, Sunny,” he said quietly. “I hope you can believe that.”
Through the relentless waves
of agony, Sunny tried to focus. She became aware of the location of the pain - two jabbing prongs in her back. She’d been tasered. And the unrelenting pulses of electricity were preventing her from escaping – she couldn’t find the pleasant tingling in her fingertips to pull over her so she could enter the Alternate. All she could feel were the vicious shocks running through her body.
“Why?” The single word was all she could choke out.
Simon gave a shrug. “Why do you think? You’ve done nothing but make my life hell since you showed up.”
“H-h-hell?” Her voice shook wildly, as her body jerked and thudded in the mud.
Simon narrowed his eyes. “You really don’t know. You’re even stupider than most people think I am.” He straightened up, and an odd burst of static penetrated the ocean’s roar. The stranger was speaking, shouting incomprehensible orders into a walkie-talkie.
“How long?” Simon asked the other man.
“I don’t know. The storm is making it difficult for the chopper to get in. Not long though. No one will ever know what happened to her.” The camouflage trousers bent now, and the face of Simon’s uncle Richard came into view. His face was gleeful. “I bet you came here without telling anyone where you were going, right, Supergirl?”
Sunny couldn’t answer, pain was racking her body, but he took her silence as confirmation and laughed out loud.
How did they know? Her thoughts were erratic and confused. Faces flashed before her eyes – Her father, Hunter, Archie, Annabel, the Swedish boy. It seemed that his fate was now hers. She’d been captured.
But why had Simon done this? Sunny could barely focus on his face, but he looked… sad. And frightened.
Whereas his uncle looked victorious.
And Richard was lying to Simon. She was in mortal agony. Simon would surely stop this if he knew…
She opened her eyes again and tried to plead with him. “Simon, please. It hurt so much. Please make it stop.”
“She’s lying,” Richard spat out quickly. Simon glanced towards him, brow furrowed, but Richard waved his arm airily. “Ignore her. She just wants to get away. She’s only incapacitated. She’s not in any pain.”
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