Heart of Danger (6 page)

‘She’s silly,’ Hera got in first.

Atarangi smiled at her. ‘Shut your eyes, Hera. Think about the lady. Tell us more about her.’

Hera screwed her eyes tight shut. ‘She’s got nice way down inside. A little bit of nice. Too much dark.’

‘Well done,’ said Atarangi. ‘Anyone else?’

None of the others came up with anything as specific as Hera had. They spoke of dark and how the girl walked in a dark cloud. Apparently some could feel it and others saw it crowding in around her. They all said it was scary.

I didn’t see the girl the way Hera and the kids did, but I felt danger around us, felt that we walked in a tiny bubble of safety that could be breached at any second. I longed for my stratum.

I jumped up. ‘Back soon,’ I called, and ran from the room.

I had to find out the girl’s name. If we had a name, just one name, then perhaps we could still keep my sister safe.

I
caught up with the girl and Willem as they were leaving the kitchen area. ‘Who are you?’ I demanded of the girl. ‘What’s your name and why are you here?’

Willem frowned. Too late I realised he would have been planning to question her – maybe he’d already done so. I tried to smile. ‘Sorry. It’s just that …’

She interrupted me. ‘You’re the sister.’

The sister. I took a quick look at Willem. He inclined his head, giving me permission to continue.

I scrambled about in my mind, searching for the right thing to say, searching for the words that would unlock the key to who she was and why she was there. ‘The sister? What do you mean?’

She shut her mouth tight, as if she’d said too much already.

‘Will you tell me your name?’ I asked, keeping my voice as unemotional as I could.

She shrugged as if her name was of no account. ‘Dawn Maiden. What’s it to you?’

‘That name – nothing!’ I forgot about keeping calm and spat the words at her. ‘Your real name – what’s your real name?’

I thought she’d be shaken that I knew she was lying, but instead her gaze sharpened. ‘Interesting. You too have the gift.’

‘It’s no gift to know a liar when I see one.’ I glared at her, wishing I could see into her mind, discover her secrets. But I knew that yelling at her was never going to work. ‘What do you want with my sister? Please – don’t harm her. She’s a good person. She’s a child, a little child. And she said you’ve got a little bit of good, way down deep.’

The girl’s eyes filled with tears and she made no attempt to wipe them away. ‘My name … was Callie Prentice.’ She looked terrified.

I felt Willem’s steely resolve to find out all we could. It steadied me.

Perhaps the girl felt it too, for she began speaking again, but this time it sounded as if she was reciting a lesson she’d learnt by heart. ‘Your sister has a destiny to fulfil. There is nothing you can do to change that. It was foretold by the Wisest One of All.’ She held her hands out towards me. ‘I’m sorry. I’d change it if I could, but it’s destiny. You need to embrace it.’

I couldn’t speak, could only gape at her. Willem stayed calm. ‘Explain what you mean by destiny, Callie.’

She seemed to go into a trance, standing with her arms out and swaying as she chanted, ‘The child is the sacrifice. She will become the link between us and the deities.’

‘There is a group of you?’ Willem asked. He looked at me, willing me to focus, to say nothing.

‘We are the Children of the Coming Dawn.’ She was still in her trance-like state. ‘We are the way of the future. We hold the key, and when all is dust and death we will prevail.’

‘Where do you live?’ Willem asked, and I held my breath, desperate for the knowledge.

But she had said too much. She snapped out of the trance. ‘I should not have spoken of it. They will kill me if they find out. Please say nothing.’

Willem watched her for a long moment, weighing up the likelihood of getting more from her. But in the end he gave his word. ‘You have our promise.’

He had no right to make such a promise on my behalf. Without looking in his direction, I said, ‘My promise is in exchange for the information about where you live.’

‘Then I will die.’ She looked as if she might faint or be sick, and she was shivering.

Her life in exchange for Hera’s? I felt the full force of Willem’s mind, commanding me to give my word. I hoped he had good reason, for Callie’s antics didn’t move me. I had no compassion for her. But I could do nothing now beyond reassure the girl, even though I felt the words grate as I spoke them. ‘You have my promise. Your secret is safe.’

Willem turned the power of his concentration from me to her and asked, ‘Will they be angry with you for not taking the child with you?’

I hoped she wouldn’t understand how clever the question was.

‘Oh no,’ she said. ‘It wasn’t my job to steal her. All I had to do was establish that she was here.’ She hung her head, then flashed a terrified look at me. ‘They said you delayed the ceremony badly by coming here. They were angry. They knew … they’d been told that she was living in Otaki. The Wise Ones were furious when we couldn’t find her there.’

‘You’ve had a long and hard journey of it,’ Willem said.

She nodded, and when she spoke again it was the chant of words learnt by heart. ‘They will be pleased with me. They will reward me.’

‘It’ll take you a long time to get back to tell them,’ Willem said, putting just a hint of pity in his voice.

Callie lifted her head at that. ‘I don’t have to walk back. They’re waiting for me. With the …’ She stopped, wrapped her arms round her body and muttered, ‘I must go.’ With that, she scuttled out the door. Willem made no attempt to stop her.

‘Can we ring the police? Get them to follow her?’

Willem was already heading for the office. ‘Stay where you are, Juno. Do not follow her.’ He made the call and I waited, even though it killed me to do so. Why couldn’t I go after her? It would be better than this … this sitting about making phone calls.

He came back. ‘They said they’ll try,’ he said, giving me one of his looks. ‘Go to your class now. I’ll let you know if there’s any news.’

‘But …’

He put his hands on my shoulders. ‘They’re dangerous, Juno. Who knows what they might do if they caught you. Hera needs you near her, not dying somewhere at the hands of a bunch of fanatics.’

With that he was gone, striding off out of the building. Was he going to organise people to guard the school? I hoped so.

I couldn’t go to my class. I went back to Hera’s, and stayed there for the morning, my thoughts in chaos.

I wanted to go home at lunchtime with her and Danyat, but Willem wouldn’t let me. ‘You need to calm down,’ he said. ‘You’re not going to be any use to anyone in your present state. Gardening will soothe you. Besides, Danyat will keep Hera safe for the rest of today at least.’

I knew it would be useless to argue, and Willem was right about my state of mind. It would certainly calm me to work with Ivor for the afternoon.

But the day’s unpleasant surprises just kept coming. Before Jethro handed out the afternoon tasks he gave me an order. ‘You will work with the rest of your class from now on, Juno.’

Ivor sent me a small smile but shrugged his shoulders as he ambled off with his own class to the back of the farm. That was so unfair! Today of all days. I needed him beside me while I grappled with what Callie had said.

Ginevra touched my arm to get my attention, then handed me a kneeler. ‘We’re on carrot thinning today.’

She’d gone several steps before I caught Jethro’s eye and followed her to the end of one of the long rows. ‘Don’t take it to heart,’ she said. ‘It’s always this way – they give new students time to settle in, and when they think they’ve found their feet they hit them with the rules.’

‘They could have told me.’ I slapped the kneeler down on the ground. ‘It’s so not fair to start off one way, then all of a sudden change everything.’ I felt vicious and not at all like doing the finicky work of carrot thinning.

Ginevra just smiled at me, but after a few minutes she covered my hand with hers. ‘You’re leaving bare patches in the row, Juno.’

I sat back on my heels and rubbed my grubby hands over my face. ‘Sorry. I suppose I’d better get in the mood before Jethro comes over and yells at me.’ I started working again, careful now of what I was doing. ‘Could you tell me about your family?’ Ginevra hesitated, so I hurried to reassure her. ‘Don’t if you’d rather not. I don’t mean to pry.’

She shook her head. ‘It’s all right. It’s good to talk about it. It’s hard though.’

I forgot to keep working. ‘You lost somebody. In the pandemic.’ I saw the tears in her eyes. ‘I’m so sorry.’

‘My mother died,’ she said. ‘There’s just Dad, my two brothers and me now.’

‘Grandparents?’

She shook her head. ‘No. They died seven years ago. All of them.’

That would have been in the last pandemic to hit before we arrived from Taris. I couldn’t speak and just sat there trying to take it in.

She sighed. ‘We’d better keep working.’

I pulled out a selection of the smaller plants. ‘I still have a mother and a grandmother. Come over any time you feel like getting a mother-fix.’

Her face lit up. ‘I’d like that.’

We talked of easier things after that, but not about Ivor. She didn’t have a boyfriend, so I held my tongue even though I wanted to talk about him, tell her how wonderful it was to have somebody love me. I wondered if she and Oban would suit each other. He was different from Ivor – more serious perhaps. Back on Taris I’d always imagined that Oban would be like the man we’d seen in a documentary who rode to victory on a motorbike in a race through wild country. He’d had to overcome danger and face death. I’d thought it was romantic, but Marba said, after the fourth time we’d seen it, ‘I just don’t get why somebody would want to do that. It isn’t logical to risk your life for a taste of excitement.’ I could still recall how wistful Oban sounded as he said, ‘I totally get it.’ He might suit Ginevra very well. I would arrange a meeting between them. It would be easy enough while he was staying with us.

As the afternoon wore on, Ginevra worked more and more slowly, caught up in my stories of Taris. At last she said, ‘Thank you, Juno. This is the best time I’ve had since my mother died.’

‘Please do come over and meet my family.’ I tugged her to her feet.

‘I promise, but I won’t come while you’re all so worried about Hera.’

We walked back to return our kneelers, and I was ashamed of my matchmaking thoughts. Her mother had only been gone a short time, probably about as long as Grif. It was much too soon to be thinking about boyfriends.

Before I left school I found Willem to ask him if the police had called back. They had, but only to say they’d found no trace of the girl. It was what I’d expected. These people would be experts in the art of hiding.

I ran home without Ivor beside me, aware that Jethro had been right to separate us. If we’d been together, I’d have kept right on worrying about Hera and wanting to be home. Talking to Ginevra had taken my thoughts away from the useless worrying. I would have to remember that we weren’t the only ones dealing with difficult matters.

Mother, Danyat and Hera were busy in the garden when I got home. All appeared calm. But as soon as Mother saw me, she ran over to hug me. ‘Tell us everything, Juno.’

I had to repeat the news later when Oban arrived in a dead heat with Ivor. My eyes filled with tears at the sight of the boy I loved. He put his arms around me. ‘Everything will be okay, babe. Don’t stress.’

It was nice of him to say so, to try to comfort me, but the danger I felt around us didn’t diminish.

Oban was frowning. ‘I hope you’re right, Ivor, but we need to do all we can to make sure that things will be okay.’

Ivor shook his head and let out a bark of laughter. ‘Lighten up, man!’ He looked around at the four of us. ‘Listen, aren’t you all over-reacting? So what if a girl turns up and gets the thumbs-down from the little kids?’ He shrugged. ‘It’s happened enough times before, and it’ll happen again.’

Oban’s voice was cold as he said, ‘And how many others have spoken of searching for …?’ He stopped, his eyes on Hera. ‘And spoken of a sacrifice?’

Mother stood up. ‘Ivor, we can’t ignore it. We mustn’t. But we will not speak of it now. Please – stay and eat with us.’

Ivor made it easy for us not to speak of it by keeping us entranced with stories of life in Aotearoa and Fairlands School. I would not have thought it possible that my family and Oban would spend the evening laughing, but we did and it was good.

Ivor hadn’t left by the time I excused myself to log on for my learning stratum meeting just before nine. He frowned at me with a fierce, exaggerated scowl. ‘I’m the one here on the spot.’ He tapped his chest. ‘Talk to me. How can they help you? I don’t like to be the one to break it to you, but they’re miles away. All of them.’

I knew he was joking so I didn’t try to explain. ‘Go away.’ I pushed him towards the door. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow.’

Oban closed the front door behind him. ‘Be careful, Juno. He didn’t like that. Don’t take too much for granted.’

‘Of course I won’t. I don’t. He knows that.’ I shrugged the warning away and took the mini-comp out to Danyat’s caravan for the conference.

My friends were silent while I told them of Callie’s visit, of how she’d been so weird when she said her name. Then I swallowed back the sickness and told them the worst. ‘She said that Hera is the sacrifice, that she will become the link between them and the deities. She said she shouldn’t have told us that much, and that if they found out they’d kill her.’

None of them said anything for long seconds, then Marba spoke in his rational, objective way. ‘If we knew when all this was likely to happen it’d help.’

‘You think?’ Silvern snapped. ‘Say something useful or shut up.’

Marba ignored her. ‘So what I’m proposing is that we all concentrate at the same time every morning. Two minutes, and keep the question in your minds. It won’t hurt to try.’

‘Okay,’ Silvern said. ‘You’re right. I’ll do it.’

One by one, they gave their promise, but Yin said, ‘We need the question. It has to be short and clear. And we need a time.’

‘Six thirty every morning,’ Marba said. ‘The question is: when do they intend to sacrifice Hera?’ I choked back a sob, and he said, ‘Face up to it, Juno. They mean her harm. We have to stop them.’

‘I know. It’s just … anyway, thank you. All of you.’

‘Give me those names again,’ Biddo said. ‘Her name, and the name of the crazies she’s with.’

I repeated them. ‘Callie Prentice. The Children of the Coming Dawn.’

‘Got them. And we need a quick catch-up at 6.35,’ he said. ‘Just in case anybody gets an idea.’

I could tell from the way he spoke that he didn’t expect anything to come of Marba’s idea, but neither he nor anyone else complained or objected. They would help us, even though they were so far away.

I decided not to tell Ivor what we were trying to do. He wouldn’t understand. But I did tell Oban, Mother and Danyat. ‘We’ll do it too,’ Oban said. ‘The more
mind-power
the better.’