The Burning (4 page)

R
achel and Adam struggled to keep up as Laura Sullivan strode down the endless white corridors of the Hope Project. They passed door after door, most of which were solid and closed. Others offered tantalizing glimpses through small, round windows into semi-darkened rooms. Rachel and Adam saw people, illuminated by bright work lights, hunched over desktops or computer terminals. Some appeared to be labelling fragments of wood and other material.

“What are they doing?” Rachel called after Laura.

“They’re labelling up some of the Triskellion dig: carbon dating it. I’ll show you later,” Laura said. “Plenty of time.”

They turned right down another corridor and, when she’d reached the far end, Laura opened a large, metal door with a passkey. They entered another passageway, though this one was darker and warmer, with some kind of matting underfoot and orange lights along the walls.

Laura smiled and winked at Rachel. “We’re here.” She
pushed open a pair of swing doors on their right and the smell hit them immediately. Rachel and Adam rushed forward and found themselves standing in a very familiar kitchen.

“Why am I not surprised?” Rachel said. She and Adam stared at the pots and pans, the chalkboard that Adam was forever drawing stupid faces on, the worktops they’d watched their mother preparing dinner on countless times…

“Not my idea, Rachel,” Laura said. “Someone thought it would make you feel more at home while you’re here.”

“I appreciate it,” Rachel said. It was a perfect facsimile of their kitchen, but still, it was
only
a facsimile. Same as her bedroom, she guessed. She wondered what was really outside the window. Some kind of projection? A hologram, even? “But I’ve never felt less at home in my life.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Adam said. He hoisted himself up on to a stool in front of the breakfast bar. “It’s got to be better than Gran’s.”

As he sat down, a Chinese man marched in from another set of swinging doors on the other side of the kitchen. He was wearing an immaculate white chef’s jacket and hat. He beamed at Rachel and Adam.

“Hi!” he said.

“Ah, Mr Cheung,” Laura said. “This is Rachel and Adam, our guests. Rachel, Adam … Mr Vincent Cheung.”

Mr Cheung hurried across to shake their hands, nodding and grinning from one to the other. “Let me see… Adam …
eggs over easy, crispy bacon, sausage links and hash browns, hold the ketchup … toast and OJ. Am I right?”

Adam nodded enthusiastically, almost drooling. Mr Cheung had rapidly described his favourite breakfast, detail by detail. The chef turned, grinning, to Rachel.

“And Rachel … I think, pancakes with maple syrup, yoghurt, wholemeal toast with peanut butter, mango smoothie and a decaff latte?”

Rachel could only nod, amazed, as her breakfast wish list was reeled off. She felt her stomach gurgle and realized just how hungry she was.

Mr Cheung tossed a steel spatula into the air, spinning it fast and catching it in his other hand. “Anything for you, Laura?” he said.

“Just a coffee, thanks, Vincent… Oh, go on, maybe one pancake wouldn’t hurt. Syrup and whipped cream, obviously.”

“Obviously,” Mr Cheung said.

Rachel and Adam stared as the chef went about his work; a clatter of pans, the hiss of steam and an occasional crackle of flame providing counterpoint to his cheerful, if slightly tuneless, whistling. Minutes later, the breakfast bar was heaving with fantastic-looking food. Mr Cheung smiled as he watched Rachel and Adam dive in and begin devouring their meals. Laura smiled too, seemingly delighted at the improvement in the children’s mood.

“Laura,” Rachel said, through a mouthful of pancake. “You still haven’t told us where Mom is.”

“She’s here,” Laura said. She glanced across at Mr Cheung, who gave the children a thousand-watt grin and delivered a small bow before scuttling off into the larder.

“Where?” Rachel pressed the point.

“Here … but in another part of the building,” Laura said. “She’ll be there for a while – just for a while, OK?” Laura seemed unwilling to say more, until she saw the look of alarm on the twins’ faces. “Listen, there’re a couple of things you have to understand. Your mum’s been through a tough time at home. I know you have too, but your mum is really quite … fragile.”

Rachel and Adam did not need Laura to explain. They knew only too well about the black depressions that seemed to grip their mother for months on end. The herbal remedies, the pills, potions and therapies she had tried in an effort to quash her anxieties. Their dad had never really been much help. He was a scientist, not prone to self-analysis, and while his wife had lain curled up in a ball on the sofa, he had watched her as if she were an animal in a zoo and tried unsuccessfully to figure out what might be going on in her mind.

“But if Mom’s in one of her moods, surely she’s better off being with us?” Adam said. He cleared his throat and stuffed a forkful of food into his mouth, but the pleading in his voice was obvious enough.

Laura placed her hand on his and Adam blushed. “Of course she is,” Laura said. “And she
will
be. But, you know,
she’s only just been told about some of this new DNA stuff … who you are, who
she
is. It’s a big deal and it’s come as a bit of a shock to her, and it’s going to take a while to sink in. Also, we really need to keep you apart while we do some preliminary tests on you guys…”

“Tests?” Rachel looked worried suddenly. “What kind of—?”

Laura jumped in quickly to reassure her. “No, no, nothing to worry about… You remember when I took DNA samples from you? Swabs and a bit of hair. Just stuff like that, and a few mental tests to see where your heads are at. You see, your mum, being your closest relative, is of great interest to us. Basic tests have shown that, although a lot of her genetic make-up is the same as yours and Adam’s, she doesn’t carry the …
different
gene.”

“You mean the
alien
gene?” Rachel asked bluntly. Laura flinched slightly at the word.

“We don’t know that,” she said. “But what we do know is that this different gene is probably what we call a
recessive
gene; something that has lain dormant for many years and only surfaced again when two other sets of genes – those of your grandparents – came together. It’s like a family of dark-haired people suddenly producing a redhead, or a white couple producing a black child.

“Or twins?” Adam said.

“Precisely,” Laura continued. “And although the gene seems to have skipped your mum, we still need to see what
similarities you share with her – thought patterns, emotional responses and so on – so we can see where the real differences lie. And to do that we need to run the same tests on her. But until we know how far your mental powers stretch, we can’t let the three of you too close together, or it might interfere with our results. Does that make sense?”

Rachel shrugged. It didn’t make any
less
sense than anything else. “So how long will these tests take?” she asked.

“Probably just a few days,” Laura said. “We’ll start tomorrow and see how we go. Then you can see your mum, I promise.”

Rachel nodded slowly, but she was instinctively worried by the idea of tests, no matter how harmless Laura said they might be. She tried to project these thoughts on to her brother, to see if he shared any of them but, as hard as she tried, she could make no contact. He didn’t even raise his head from his breakfast. He suddenly looked sleepy.

The lines of communication between her and Adam were down. Rachel wondered if there had been something in his food … in
her
food?

She was about to take the last mouthful of yoghurt, then stopped herself. She looked across at the worktop where Mr Cheung had been cooking.

There, apparently lapping at a spilt drop of maple syrup, was a large bee. As Rachel stared, she saw the insect’s antennae twitch, watched as it moved round to face her…

Suddenly, Mr Cheung reappeared from the larder, and
hurrying across the kitchen, he brought the spatula down with a “
splat”
on the stainless steel worktop before Rachel or Adam could stop him.

He grinned at the twins as he wiped the bee away with a cloth and flicked the crushed body into the steel bin.

“Dead!” he announced.

T
he car is driving through the dark. Diagonal droplets of rain rush through the beam of the headlights and explode on the windscreen. The man at the wheel leans forward, trying to see better as the car tears round the tight bends of the hillside road. The woman next to him wipes in vain at the misty screen with a tissue. In the back seat the twins hold on tight to each other for comfort
.

There are lights behind them, milky and blurred, fractured in the rear-view mirror. They are being followed. The man at the wheel is certain now – now that they have taken this remote road that climbs higher and higher, narrower and narrower, going nowhere
.

The lights come closer and the man drives faster, then swerves. There are rocks on the road, suddenly vivid and jagged in the headlights. The car skids and, as if in slow motion, careers over the edge and down the bank towards the dark lake
.

The woman cranes her neck round to look at her terrified
children for the last time, her mouth fixed in a horrified “O”. The twins’ mouths mimic their mother’s, but opening and shutting like those of baby birds about to be torn from their nest; their howls drowned out by the scream of rock on metal and the shattering of glass
.

The car turns on its side, then on to its roof, the front wing hitting a huge boulder, and the vehicle flips nose to tail into the blackness of the water, making barely a splash. Beneath the surface, the mother’s screams fall silent; her voice no more than bubbles. In the darkness, lit only by the car’s headlamps, strands of hair swirl across her face like seaweed. Blood streams from the man’s head: mushrooming red clouds in the water. Four small fists pummel silently against the back windows, desperate to live
.

Flying high above, Rachel sees the silver shape of the car as it slips into the depths like a slow and heavy fish. Two bubbles burst through the water like globes of mercury, and she sees two small bodies kicking and thrashing, floating to the surface, spotlit by the headlights of the black car that waits on the road above
.

Rachel sat bolt upright.

She was soaking wet and shaking as she ran her fingers through her hair, which was thick and sweaty. She must have drifted off. She had felt so sleepy after that bellyful of food, and the room was so warm.

Laura had told her she must rest, that it would take her
a few days to get back to normal. Normal? Rachel wondered if she would ever feel normal again. She looked round the familiar bedroom with its unfamiliar feeling, searching in vain for something that might control the temperature. She realized that, although she still couldn’t hear her brother’s thoughts, she had started dreaming again.

It was nothing to be grateful for.

The dream, with its nightmarish images of drowning in dark water, had left her with a cold, sickening feeling of panic.

Who were the twins in the car?

They certainly hadn’t been her and Adam; they had never been in a crash, and the man and woman in the car hadn’t been their parents. Maybe the twins
represented
her and Adam? Rachel thought. Maybe it was just a nightmare about being torn from your parents? She screwed her eyes shut and strained to recall the images from the dream. She had felt as though she’d been in the car
and
high above it, watching each terrible moment like the slow-motion replay of a film. She recalled the faces, the inside of the car, with its scuffed leather seats and the green lights on the dashboard. She could smell the damp. She could see purple flowers sprouting among the rocks.

Then she remembered a curious detail. The little girl on the back seat had been wrapped in a plaid blanket, held together by a large, gold brooch.

A brooch in the shape of a Triskellion.

*  *  *

Laura Sullivan sat in her office, staring at the screen of her laptop and wrestling with her conscience.

She had never questioned her own motives before, but it was becoming increasingly difficult not to. Surely she had done the right thing in bringing the kids here? They wouldn’t have been safe in Triskellion after all, and going back to the States would certainly have been dangerous for them. Laura instinctively felt that something was wrong in the US. Van der Zee was certainly under pressure from his bosses to send Rachel and Adam over for more “invasive” testing, but so far he had backed Laura by keeping the twins in the UK. Laura had argued that they needed to be observed at close quarters, to be allowed to relax and develop in this safe environment with their mother near by. But was it right to be medicating them?

Laura shook her head, annoyed that she was not being honest with herself. They may not have run
surgical
tests on the twins, as she was sure was the intention of the Flight Trust hawks in the States, but they were
drugging
them. It couldn’t be right.