The Lost Girl (24 page)

2
Mistakes

I
have two visitors while I’m recovering. The first is Lekha, who comes by on most days. She often brings a movie with her, something she’s bought off the man on Commercial Street who sells DVDs cheap. Neil has moved an old television and DVD player to my room for the time being. We rarely watch the movies, though: Lekha talks her way through them. Nikhil and I are used to her, so we only laugh, but Sean is constantly perplexed by her sketchy vocabulary.

The other visitor, who comes only once, is Ray.

I wake one evening to find him standing by the door. I scramble upright, pulling the covers to my throat. He looks guilty. He looks like he’s tearing himself to pieces with it.

“I have five minutes,” he says. “Nikhil wasn’t happy, but Amarra’s mother said I could come in. She’s waiting at the bottom of the stairs to get rid of me when my time’s up.”

I stare at him in silence. He doesn’t seem to know what to say.

“I don’t look like her anymore,” I say at last, gesturing to the scars on my face. “Happy?”

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m so sorry.”

I stare back at him. “Is that it?” I ask. “Because you can leave now, if that’s all. I’d like to sleep.”

“Can I just say something?”

“I’d rather you didn’t,” I say. I sit up, both of my arms aching as they push me upright. “You warned me and I appreciate that. But I almost died—”

“I didn’t take you there so you’d die!” says Ray. “We were friends. I wasn’t
pretending
I liked hanging out with you all that time. You know how it was. I saw her, but I also saw
you
. I like you. I—I never wanted to throw all that away.”

“But you did. You say you didn’t want to kill me, but if things had worked out like you hoped,
I wouldn’t be here anymore. You’d have given away my life to get her back. That means I never want to see you again. Please leave.”

Ray swallows. “But—”

“No,” I say, and to my horror my eyes fill with tears. “I don’t want to listen anymore.”

He stands very still, very quietly.

I wait.

“I’ll be around,” he says at last, “if you change your mind.”

I don’t reply.

He turns abruptly. I wonder if Alisha’s about to come in to tell him his time’s up. But it’s Sean, and his eyes are dark and the look on his face makes me shiver.

“Get out,” he says very quietly.

Ray bristles. “Who’re you?”

“The only one of us who
didn’t
take Eva off to die,” says Sean. “What more do you need to know?”

Ray’s face darkens. “I was only talking to her—”

“Leave,” says Sean, “or I swear I
will
kill you.”

I watch Ray’s hands fist by his sides. Sean’s eyes narrow. I almost fall over trying to get out of bed.

“Are you joking?” I demand, knowing fully well how ironic these words sound coming out of my mouth, “A brawl? Really?”

“Eva—”

“I want you to leave, Ray.” I cut him off. I’m so tired.

Although it’s obvious he doesn’t want to, Ray backs down. The anger blows out of his face and he nods. He stops at the door to look back once. “I mean it, you know. You’ll never know how sorry I am.”

When he’s gone, I sit down on the floor and swallow back a sob. Sean sits down next to me. I lean my head on his knee and breathe in and out. I’m tired of being afraid. I’m tired of being hurt. I’m tired of having no control over my life. This has to change.

I go back to sleep a little later, but it’s fitful and broken. I wake with a start, shivering, and I look around for Sean. He’s still there, sitting in the chair by the window. There’s a tray of sandwiches and cold lime juice next to him.

“Your leg seems better,” he says. “You practically sprang out of bed back there.”

“It feels better today.”

Sean hands me a sandwich. “Eat.”

I eat.

“I’d take you back with me if I could,” he says, quite out of the blue, and my heart stutters with longing. “I’ll probably drive myself crazy worrying about you when I leave. Would you come with me? If you could?”

“You know I would.”

He sighs. “I’m sick to death of worrying. I’ve spent months doing it. About whether you were safe, if you were happy. I even worried about whether or not you were with
him
. How childish is that?”

“Does that mean you were jealous?” I ask, smiling.

“Finish your sandwich” is all I get by way of reply.

So I do.

By mid-June, I am able to walk properly again. My wrist is still in a cast, still broken, but I feel more like myself. A small part of me wants to play up the pain when I feel it, to keep Sean here longer. But it isn’t fair to him. He has a life to live and it’s not here.

And my life? I have a life to fight for. Frankenstein’s Creature did unspeakably awful things, but he
beat
his uncaring creator.

I must too.

“I wish we could run away together,” I tell Sean dreamily. “I wish we could go away, you and me, and disappear. I think we could do it if we were together. I’d get in less trouble if I were with you. You’d laugh more if you were with me. We’d be like Cathy and Heathcliff. Harry and Hermione. Liam and Noel.”

“I didn’t know you liked Oasis.”

“
You
do, though, don’t you? You brought that CD to the cottage and you used to play it when it got late. You’d fall asleep on the sofa. And I’d come turn it off.”

“Well, I’m not sure they’re the best example anyway,” Sean points out, handing me a coffee. “Nor are the others. None of them exactly ended up together.”

“
That
doesn’t matter. What matters is what they did together, what they could achieve side by side. We’d be unstoppable if we were together.”

“I suppose,” says Sean. “You and I could burn the whole world down.”

I gaze at him for a long time, until his brow creases and his eyes grow wider. I watch my own disbelief mirrored on his face. I am thinking of that unthinkable alternative.

“You know it’s not possible,” he says.

I nod. “But if it was,” I say, “I’d go. I swear. I would go and never look back.”

There is such freedom in the words. For just one minute, I am flying, high into the sky, among the stars and the shining planets.

“I’d disappear. One night, before the dawn,
poof
. Like magic.”

Sean smiles faintly. “Where would you go?”

“Anywhere. I have that deposit box Erik and the others set up for me. Maybe there’s money in it. They said it would help me have a life.”

“And how would you survive? You’ve never been out there in the world. Who would help you? Anyone who did would be punished. But that’s nothing compared to what the Weavers would do to
you
when they found you and they
would
find you—”

“I wouldn’t expect your help. I wouldn’t ask you or Mina Ma or the others to risk so much for me. They did it enough while I was growing up.” I swallow. “I think I could make it. If I was clever and fast enough. If I only had the chance.”

“But you don’t,” Sean says very quietly.

“No,” I say, the lump in my throat hardening, “I don’t. I never will have that chance.”

It would have been a risk, throwing my life on the line to escape the Sleep Order. It might have been a fatal mistake. If I had found a way to get rid of the tracker, and run, and the seekers had found me, I’d have gone to trial and lost the rest of my time. But at least I’d have lost it by choice. Because I chose to take my chances with the unknown. It would have been on my terms. Not Amarra’s.

“I’m sorry,” says Sean.

I turn my face away to hide my despair and pain from him. We’re silent for so long I wonder if we’ve forgotten how to speak.

I swallow and clear my throat. I force a smile. “Do you want to play chess? It’s been a long time since we’ve played.”

“Longer still,” he teases, “since you’ve beaten me.”

So we play. I win the first game. But there’s not much satisfaction to be had in the victory, not when I know that
I’m
the king, white or black, and I have been thoroughly checkmated.

Until an unexpected move knocks every piece off the board altogether.

“All right,” says Sean. “If you’re willing to take your chances with a life of being on the run, I won’t stop you.”

“It doesn’t matter. They’d find me before I left the city. Matthew knows too much. And there’s the tracker—”

“The tracker’s the only thing that stopped you these last weeks,” he interrupts, “but you could get around it if somebody told you where it was. If they took it out for you.”

“Well, yes, but who would do that?”

“Your guardians could,” he says, “and one of them would.”

And just like that,
checkmate
becomes only
check
, and I see a single shining, gleaming way out.

3
Flight

M
y coffee rattles in my hands. I have to put it down. I stare at Sean in disbelief, shaking my head. “You’d do that? You’d take my tracker out?”

“Yeah.”

“But they’ll know it was you. They’ll find out you were here and know you did it, you’ll get in such trouble—”

“Not if they can’t find me,” he says.

“Excuse me?”

“Not if I run too,” he says.

“What?”

“You said it, Eva. You said we could do it together.”

“But you have a life—”

“Yeah,” he says. “But I’d rather have one with you.”

I stand up. Pain shoots through my muscles and I ignore it, glaring at him. “You must think I’m terribly selfish or terribly stupid,” I say. “I won’t let you do it. You mean too much to me. I forbid it—”

“You can’t
forbid
me,” he says, smiling ruefully. “I’ll follow you if I have to.”

I rock slightly on the balls of my feet. I’m standing on a floor that is tilting beneath me. Like a bird with a cage door thrown wide open, I hover, dazzled by the open skies but frightened.

“The thing is,” says Sean, his eyes very green and sad, “there’s nothing I wouldn’t do for you.”

I feel a sharp, stuttering jolt in my heart. I blink, once, twice. How do you protest something like that?

“I wish you wouldn’t do
this
.”

“And I wish
you
wouldn’t cut and run,” says Sean. “They’ve never forgiven a single echo who has dared to run. But staying here isn’t going to save you.”

I claw desperately for any alternative. “I can live with getting myself in trouble if I fail. But you? You can’t ask me to do that.”

Sean raises his eyebrows. “I’m not asking.”

I twist my hands together and make shapes with my fingers. I could argue until I’m blue in the face, but he’s not going to change his mind. And maybe it’s not fair of me to try and make him. Wouldn’t
I
follow him if our roles were reversed? Wouldn’t I want him to let me?

“Thank you,” I say brokenly, digging my fingernails into my palms. “I know this isn’t easy for you.”

He gives me a slightly suspicious look. “That’s it? You’re done arguing?”

I nod.

We stare at each other for a long time. I feel like we can hang on to this moment if we don’t speak. We can tread the line between being safe and taking this risk, and the moment someone says a word, this becomes real.

“We’ll need money,” says Sean at last, and it crashes down on me, that we’re really going. My knees wobble.

I nod. “I need to look in that deposit box, see what they put there. And then—”

I break off. It’s easy to imagine running. Frightening, exhilarating, but nevertheless easy for me to picture in my head. The reality, on the other hand, seems somehow colder. If we run, we’ll have to run all our lives. If we make it, if we elude the seekers, we could be running for
years
. Long enough to get jobs, grow up, maybe even grow
old
. We’d have to survive out there indefinitely. Sean might be able to turn around and return to his old life if he chose to, but
I
can’t. If I run, I can never stop.

“Yeah,” says Sean, almost as if I said all those things out loud. “So are you sure this is what you want?”

I swallow. “Yes.”

He considers me a moment and then nods. “Well, I have some money too. I have most of the money the Loom paid me over the years and the money Dad left me when he died. But we’ll have to use cash as much as possible.” He rubs his forehead, a worried gesture. “And there’s—”

Someone knocks on the door. Sean goes quiet at once. We both look up guiltily as Neil pokes his head in.

“We thought we’d order pizza for dinner,” he says. “Pepperoni okay with both of you?”

I find that my brain can’t quite understand the word
pizza
. It’s too normal, too mundane, to fit into my tumbled feelings. Neil looks between us, slightly puzzled.

Sean recovers first. “That sounds good to me, thanks,” he says, and he sounds so perfectly at ease I can only marvel at it. “Can I help set the table or anything?”

“Don’t worry about it, we’ll just eat out of the boxes.” Neil gives me another odd look before leaving.

When we’re alone again, I make a sheepish face. Sean shakes his head. “You need a better poker face.”

“I know.”
Pizza
is still bouncing around my head, still making no sense whatsoever, merely an unwelcome interruption. It makes me remember there’s a household, a world, beyond this room. There are people who expect things of me. Am I really thinking of leaving Nik and Sasha? I gnaw my bottom lip, then push these doubts away. “What were you about to say when Neil knocked?”

“I was going to ask about passports,” he says. “Do you still have the false one Matthew used to bring you here?”

I check Amarra’s desk. “It’s here.”

“You’ll have to use that one if we want to leave this country. And I’ll have to use mine. But the Weavers will be able to track them. We’ll have to stop using them as soon as we can.”

“We could stay here,” I say. “Not use passports at all.”

“You’re illegal here,” Sean reminds me. I almost want to hit him. There’s something diabolical about the way he thinks of everything. “Do you really want to worry about the police finding out what you are, on top of everything? And anyway, if you want to get a look in that deposit box—”

“We’ll have to go back to England,” I finish, chilled to the bone.

“Yeah.”

“
England
, Sean.”

“I know, Eva.” Sean doesn’t look happy. “It’s a little too close for comfort, but it might be our only choice right now.”

I can’t help thinking that, as unnerving as such proximity to the Loom is, it also means we’re closer to Mina Ma, and Erik and Ophelia and Sean’s mother.

Typically, Sean guesses where my thoughts have gone. “We can’t see them,” he says quietly. “You know that. The moment they find out we’ve run, they’ll be watching everyone they think we’d go to.”

“I know!” I say testily, biting back my disappointment. “It was just nice to imagine.”

I study my hands, the lines in my palm. Everything has its consequences. You can’t win a war without losing something. The price of survival could well be never seeing Mina Ma or my guardians or Nik or Sasha or Lekha ever again.

“What about after we’ve emptied the deposit box?” I say. “Can we get our hands on passports that the Weavers won’t know about?”

“Sure,” says Sean, “I’ll just email my connections in the criminal underworld, shall I?”

I glare at him. “Sometimes you really need a smack.”

He gives me a lopsided smile.

“Well,” I say, abandoning the false-passports idea, “it sounds like thinking ahead isn’t going to help us now.” Sean actually looks pained. I resist the urge to rub it in. “Sean, as much as you feel like it’ll kill you not to have every stupid detail worked out, we can’t know what to expect. We need to work out what to do
now
. And then figure out the rest when we need to.”

“Fine. Then we need to get a flight out of here. We’d better avoid the London airports and fly into Manchester instead.”

While Sean gets on Amarra’s computer to look up flight schedules, I try to think of how we’re going to get to the airport. I reach for Amarra’s phone and dial Lekha’s number.

“Okay,” she whispers, by way of greeting, “are you in trouble again?”

“I—”

“No, don’t answer that! They might realize you’re tipping me off. We need a code word! Oooh, I have it! If the hunters have you, say
shoelaces
. And if it’s Ray, say—”

“Aside from how ridiculous that is in itself,” I say, choking on a giggle, “why on earth are
you
whispering?”

She laughs. “I have no idea. It seemed appropriate. So you’re
not
in trouble?”

“Not as such.”

“I need to teach you how to reassure people, because that was a shoddy attempt at it.”

I smile. “Do you remember telling me your mother taught you to drive?”

“Not in the slightest,” she says cheerfully, “but you always remember things, so I daresay I did. She taught me when I was a wee tot.”

“Please tell me you’ve practiced since.”

“A few times.”

“How many is a few?”

“Once.”

I sigh. “And you definitely don’t have a license?”

“No,” says Lekha, before adding with a snort, “not that
that
matters in this city, but I
do
like to obey the law—”

“Think you could break it this one time?”

There’s a pause. Lekha sounds resigned. “Good god, they
have
got you, haven’t they? Are you in a pool of your own blood again? Do you need me to pick you up?”

“No,” I say. “
Really
. I’m at the house. But I’m leaving. At the end of the week. And I could use your help.”

“I didn’t know you drove, Lekha,” says Neil, peering past her at the faded Zen parked by the front gate.

She beams at him. “I do now.”

“Legally?” he asks doubtfully.

“Well—”

“Never mind,” he says, “the less I know, the less I worry.”

I wave hello to Lekha from the top of the stairs. My stomach is in knots. She looks cheerful as ever, but I’m quite sure she’s putting it on. She didn’t hesitate for an instant when I asked for help, but she seems to share Sean’s view that running away is more likely to get me killed than save my life.

Neil shuts the front door behind her. “I hope you’re staying for lunch. We’ve made too much.”

“Oooh, can I? Something smells amazing!” Lekha turns to me and says, innocently, “What do you think about going out
after
we’ve eaten instead?”

Neil looks at me in surprise. “You’re going out?”

I haven’t gone anywhere since the hospital, and though I worried my sudden decision to do so might rouse Neil or Alisha’s suspicions, Sean and I couldn’t think of any other way to leave the house quietly. This way, we might even be out of the country before someone realizes we’ve left for good.

“They won’t stop me,” I told him. “They even suggested I disappear. Sort of. They won’t stop us if they catch us slipping out.”

“They might not,” Sean admitted, “but if we flaunt it in their faces, they might feel like they have to lie to the Weavers later. It could get them in trouble.”

Now, I force myself to meet Neil’s eyes and babble, “Sean wants a souvenir to take back to his mother.”

“Sounds fun,” says Neil. “Fresh air will do you good.” He hesitates over his next words. “But do be careful, Eva.”

“We will,” Lekha assures him.

I smile weakly. Lekha takes me by the elbow and steers me upstairs, her bright eyes growing wide in panic as soon as we’re out of earshot. Her fingers tighten.

“Are you really going to do this?”

I nod.

“Eva—”

“You can find me,” I promise her, though I know the risks would be enormous and it’s likely neither of us will be able to find the other again. “When you’ve finished school and you’re out in world, come find me. I’ll tell you where I am. Don’t even
try
saying good-bye, because it’s not.”

“I hope not,” she says softly.

We walk into Amarra’s bedroom and stop short, because Nikhil is standing there, staring at the two bags on the floor.

“I told him they’re both mine,” says Sean quietly. He’s by the window, elbows on his knees. “But he doesn’t believe me.”

“That’s
yours
,” says Nik to me, pointing at the dark green duffel bag, the zippers locked together. “You brought it with you when you came.”

“Nik—”

“Are you leaving?”

It’s just a question. Not a demand for the truth. I can’t bear to look in his eyes, but I do. “Yes,” I tell him, “I am. I have to.”

“Is this because of the hunter?”

“Kind of. But it’s more than that. I don’t think I’ll survive if I stay here. The Weavers will come for me.”

Nikhil shifts his weight from foot to foot, considering. Then he nods, a slight jerky bob of his jaw.

“But maybe . . . like in a few years . . . when we’re older . . . maybe Sasha and I could see you? We could find you—”

“I’d like that,” I say softly, “very much.”

I kiss him on the forehead. Nikhil is nearly my height. He will grow up to be such a wonderful boy. My heart squeezes tight. I’ve known them all their lives, he and Sasha. I watched them take their first steps on film. I heard them laugh. I pretended to love them for so long, and somewhere along the way, it stopped being pretend. I didn’t expect a small part of me to
want
to stay. I didn’t expect to miss them already.

After Nik leaves the room, I let out a heavy breath. “I don’t know how I’m going to make it through lunch.”

“
You
don’t know?” Lekha demands. “What about me?
I’m
the messenger. And you know what happens to the messenger!”

“Speaking of,” I say. “Here.” I hand her a piece of folded paper. “You can read that if you like, it’s a note for them. Can you give it to them after you’ve dropped us off?”

Lekha puts the note in her bag. It took me a long time to write it. I didn’t really know what to say. In the end, I was honest.

I’m sorry to leave without saying good-bye. Thank you for giving me somewhere to stay and looking after me these last ten months, especially when I was hurt. You’ve been very kind and I hope you will all be happy.

P.S. Sean says thank you for letting him stay and that he’s sorry he had to leave like this. He thinks it’s rude, but we couldn’t think of any other way.

Neil calls up that lunch is ready. Sean and Lekha go downstairs, and I go up to the attic to tell Alisha we’re eating. When I step into her studio, I notice a difference immediately. On the wall straight ahead of me, hanging from a hook, is a pair of wings covered in black feathers. My wings. For the echo who was going to live forever.

“They’re not finished,” I say, embarrassed.

Alisha shakes her head. “Things don’t have to be finished to be beautiful. But if you ever want to come in and finish it, you’re welcome to.”