The Vanished (8 page)

Glen staggered back clutching his nose and Daniel grabbed at Sebastian, pulling him away. Another man in the crowd lurched forward to avenge his friend, shoving Ginge to the ground in the process. I pulled Hiro out the way, lifting him onto the stage. Mary yelled as the second man punched Sebastian in the face. Sebastian pulled himself out of Daniel’s grip and threw himself at the new attacker. I ducked past the brawling men to help Ginge up when the two of them fell towards me, almost knocking me to the ground.

And then I lost my temper. Remembering the kick-boxing my dad taught me, I roundhouse kicked Glen to the side and he doubled over, collapsing to the ground. Then I pushed Sebastian away from him with all my might. Sebastian went tumbling to the floor. Glen picked himself up and tried to push me out of the way. Mary and Daniel were both yelling something at me, but I didn’t hear them anymore. The heat took over and my hands tingled. The focussed energy seared through my mind and Sebastian, Glen and the new guy all hurtled through the air. I was throwing them so hard that they were going to get hurt and I panicked, thinking I was about to maim my friend. As they flew through the air, thirty feet above us, I tried to clear my mind of all the anger and concentrate on controlling them.

“Mina!” Daniel said. “You need to catch them!”

They were free-falling. I no longer had control. They’d slipped from my mind. Around me the crowd screamed and ran for cover. There was no guessing where they might land.

I made my fingers twitch. I had to catch them. I had to stop them from getting hurt. My eyes screwed shut and in my mind I imagined catching them in the palm of my hand, letting them drift down onto my soft, cushiony flesh. Behind me someone gasped and I dared to open my eyes again. With relief I saw the three men hovering a few feet above the ground. I lowered them into the grass.

“What’ve ye done, lassie,” Mary said, staring at the three gasping three men. “What have you done?”

I turned around to see every single eye in the compound focussed on me. Dr Woods stared at me intently, an unreadable expression on his face. For a moment I felt as though he hated me. I felt as though all of them hated me. I was a Freak. I was an abomination. Tears pricked at my eyes. I turned around and ran. Daniel called after me but I ignored him. I ignored everything. I just ran.

*

I don’t know if I found myself back at the Chestnut tree or if it somehow found me there, but that’s where I ended up. My knees sank, I was spent from using my powers like that, and I collapsed to the floor in a heap before spreading my body out wide as if I were making a snow angel in winter.

As I stared up at the sky Mary’s voice echoed in my mind:
What have ye done, lassie? What have you done?
What had I done? Turned the Compounders against us all, that’s what. Some fete it was going to be with them all hating us. I was such an idiot. After all the warnings to not use our powers I had to go and lose control. With a sigh I tried to block out those feelings and watch the birds circle the Compound instead. I’d not known it to rain yet, despite everyone telling me that it was always cold and wet in Scotland.

“Mina.”

I sat up and looked into the wise eyes of the little boy who knew too much. “Hey Hiro. Want to come lie down with me?”

“Sure.” He plonked himself down on the grass. “It does rain a lot. I’ve seen it in people’s minds. Some people remember having to save their tents or their children drenched from head to toe with mud up to their knees.”

I laughed. “Maybe I’ve scared the rain away.”

“I don’t think you’re scary,” he said.

I pulled him close to me. “I don’t think you’re scary either.”

“Daniel wanted to come.”

“Why didn’t he?” I asked.

“He was needed to calm Sebastian down.”

“Oh,” I said. “I didn’t do a very good job of that. Did I? Is Mary still mad at me?”

“No, I don’t think so – just disappointed that everything ended up like it did.” He paused. “I don’t like Dr Woods. He thought nasty thoughts about you when you were using your power.”

I shifted round on my side to look at the little boy. “Like what?”

“It wasn’t clear.” He frowned. “It wasn’t words, more like a strong feeling, like he was really, really bitter. I think he’s jealous of you and he sees you like a science experiment.”

I shuddered. “He creeps me out.”

“Me too.”

“Hiro?”

“Yeah.”

“You spend a lot of time with my dad.”

“He looks after me in the trailer,” Hiro replied.

“Is he a good person?” I asked. “I just don’t know what to think anymore. He hides things from me. He disappears. I can’t… trust him. Why does he train us to fight?”

“Because of the war.”

“What war?”

“The Clan war,” Hiro said. “The Compound is under threat from the other Clans in Scotland and your dad is worried we’ll get hurt. He also thinks we are a good weapon, like we’re joined together to create an army or something.” Hiro’s eyes narrowed as if he was concentrating. “But then he can act strange too, sometimes. He sees a woman’s face and tries to block it out. She’ll pop up in his mind and then he’ll go for a walk to get away from me or start singing a song in his mind. It’s like he’s trying to hide something.”

“What does she look like?”

“She has dark hair tied back in a bun and she wears a white coat. Like a doctor’s coat.”

My mother had dark hair but why would she wear a doctor’s coat? It had to be someone else.

“Do you think he’s a good man, though?” I asked. For some reason I had a jitter in my stomach. I was afraid of the answer.

Hiro paused as though weighing up all the things he’d plucked out of my dad’s head. “Yes. He’s a good man.”

I exhaled. “Your opinion really matters, Hiro.”

“That’s because I can read people’s minds!”

“No, not just because of that.” I paused and then pounced on the boy, tickling him under the armpits. “Because you’re so wise!”

He giggled and squirmed under my fingers. “Stop it!” He shouted in between giggling. “No, it’s too ticklish!”

He squealed in delight, and I jumped up and picked him up off the floor. I grabbed hold of his arms and swung him around while he squealed my name.

“Well, at least some of us are having fun.”

I put Hiro down and turned around to face the speaker. I already knew who it was. “Angela. We should talk.”

She wasn’t alone. There were two heavy women stood on either side. They were tall, with bulging arms and dirty fingernails. One covered her hair with a grotty green scarf, and the other had eyes which bulged from her head. I guessed that they were both farm hands. Angela seemed different; taller. Her puppy-fat had hardened into muscle. She wore practical, dirtied overalls, and her hair was tied back and wrapped up with a red scarf. Her expression was one I’d never seen on Angela’s face before. It was pure determination.

“No, the time for talking is over now. At least, not by you. It’s my time to say something and you are going to listen.” She shuffled her feet, planting them far apart and straightened her back. “Your kind is not welcome here. You, and Daniel, and that…
thing
.” She pointed at Hiro and I held him close to me. “None of you are welcome here. You are disgusting creatures who shouldn’t exist.” She sneered at me.

My heart seemed to fall through my stomach and down to my knees. Who was this stranger? Where was my friend, the most positive and optimistic girl I’d ever met? The girl who took my hand and led me through the corridors at St Jude’s?

I turned to the women behind her. “What venom have you been spreading? What have you done to her? You’ve poisoned an innocent girl!”

“The lass knows her own mind, eh. And she’s knows pure evil when she sees it.” The woman with the scarf spat on the floor.

“This is a warning, Mina,” Angela said. “The Compounders agree that your kind should leave and we’re going to see to it that you do.”

“What happened to you?” I whispered. “We were best friends. I saved your life so many times on the way here. You helped us escape from Sebastian’s farm. Why are you being like this?” Tears escaped, rolling down my cheeks.

“That was before you ripped out my heart and stomped on it with your boots. That was before I realised what you are. That was before I realised that Daniel is just as bad as you. The past is over now, Mina. I’m telling you your future, and it won’t be here.”

The three women turned and walked away, and I watched as my former best friend turned her back on me. If it hadn’t been for Hiro’s tiny hand in mine I think I would have crumbled to the floor.

“I don’t like her, Mina,” Hiro said. “She scares me.”

Things continued as normal, but they would never be normal again. My best friend had turned her back on me and I was expected to just deal with it. So I threw myself into training, almost taking Mike’s head off more than once. Dad was fearful to partner me with Kitty in case I pulverised her. Daniel remained in recovery from his bullet wound, sticking to light exercise and meditation. He called me lioness because I spent so much time prowling round the Compound like a caged lion. I took up jogging, circling the perimeter, wondering why I couldn’t leave. People kept telling me it wasn’t safe to go out there, that we were locked up for our own safety. I didn’t believe that. Hiro said there was a war coming and it felt like it was coming from within.

This was a place where the army lived in a castle and many others in flimsy tents. A place where conception was worshipped in the same way as genetic engineering in England. I would pass the crèche on my run, and there was always a new pregnancy or even a baby. The mothers were never much older than me, and they always looked tired. The children were scruffy little things who made the most of having lacklustre parents by running around the Compound like wild things. Some of the older children would run alongside me until their mothers relented and called them back. I was a step too far. They could roll around in dog poo or eat worms, but they couldn’t talk to the freak girl with the scary powers.

What I wanted to know was where were the fathers? After living on the Compound for three weeks, I had never seen any of the men living with their children or even helping to raise them. What I did see was men living in tents, staying awake after dark drinking and eating until they either passed out or climbed back into their tents, burping as they went.

The sun rose above the Compound, glinting against the metallic trailers and filtering through the tent fabric, making it glow like lamp bulb through the lamp shade. Beneath my feet, the ground was hard and dusty from the unusual lack of rain. There was a smell of morning – beans and bacon cooking on camp stoves; charcoal burning; dirty nappies; the body odour of sleepy manual workers. I jogged past the crèche and it all blurred into one disgusting reek. It reeked of stale claustrophobia – cabin fever. I needed to get out.

But it was the day of the fete and Daniel had been working hard on his creations and rebuilding some of the relations between us and the Compounders. He’d helped to put together some extra tables for the food, made some simple stools, and even whittled a large game of stacking blocks for the children to play with. He was proud of his work and I was proud of him and looking forward to supporting him at the fete even though I wasn’t looking forward to the fete itself. I had to speed up to stop myself thinking about it, running so hard that my chest burned and beads of sweat ran down my forehead. I laughed to myself when I thought about what I’d said to Angela just a few weeks ago about making a new life here – settling down. There was no way I could do that now.

I stopped by the farm. There she was – Angela, tending a vegetable patch, her back to me, on her knees. She turned and stood. She knew I was there. We stared at each other for a few seconds, and for one a brief moment I thought I saw a glimmer in her eye, something to say that maybe the old Angela was in there somewhere. Just maybe. Then it was gone. I ran away from her, unable to keep the chill out of my chest no matter how hard I ran.

*

It was my turn to climb the tree. I was with a group of people who were avoiding talking to me at all costs. I sighed, grabbed the end of the bunting and stuck my foot on a gnarl of the bark, pulling myself up onto the first low branch. It wasn’t high enough. I balanced myself on the branch, standing upright in order to find a handhold, followed by a foothold. It took some effort, but I grabbed hold of the second branch with the same hand clutching the bunting. It was more to my right and I had to twist my body and perform a little leap of faith whilst holding my breath and hoping for the best. I smiled with relief as I caught the second branch with both hands before swinging my legs up. When my feet were firmly planted I got a huge rush of adrenaline. I’d climbed my first tree. I felt fit and strong and ready to take on the world. That was until something tugged on the bunting.

“Hey, don’t do that, I’m up here,” I called down to the ground. Leaning over the branch I tried to see who had hold of the bunting but whoever it was had angled themselves so that they weren’t visible through the thick thatch of leaves. There was another tug, and I pulled back. “Can’t you hear me? I said there was someone up here.”

The mystery person tugged harder and I fell to my knees on the branch, which was thick enough to withstand some jostling, but not wide enough for me to land without losing a lot of balance. In the scramble to keep myself on the branch I tried to let go of the bunting. Instead, it became wrapped around my wrist and pulled me towards the ground. I ended up with one leg and one arm clutched to the branch almost twenty feet in the air, dangling like a monkey on a rope. There was nothing I could do, and the bunting tightened around my wrist, cutting off the circulation.

“Help,” I yelled. Blood ran to my head, making it hard to think clearly.

I pulled back on the bunting but the damn rope was too thick to snap. My fingers lost grip on the bark and I had to tense my leg muscles to stay under control. I took a deep breath, trying to calm down and steady my heart beat, but I knew that falling upside down from a branch twenty feet up would not be good.

“I don’t know who you are but stop it!” I shouted. There was a catch in my throat. “Please stop it.”

The rope tightened around my wrist. My legs slipped and I tried to wrap my arm around the branch, but it missed, and I was hanging my just one hand, the other hand pulling me towards the ground.

Hiro,
I shouted in my head,
Hiro I need you! I’m up the tree by the market. Someone is trying to kill me. Bring Daniel. Help!

I yanked on the bunting, trying to pull the attacker off balance. My arm hanging onto the tree burned with the effort of keeping myself on the branch. If I fell there would be no one to catch me… and then I realised. I might not be able to see my attacker, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t use my power on them. Did it? I knew they were there and a rough idea of their location. If I imagined lifting them from the ground it should work.

I had no other options. My wrist had started to bleed, working at the blisters of my old handcuff injury, and my hand was turning blue. I didn’t have much strength left to hold myself on the branch. I needed to use my last bit of strength with as much force as I could, so I took a long, deep and cleansing breath. I closed my eyes and focussed my anger, thinking about the way Angela had spoken to me, the inequalities in the Compound and the horrible circumstances that had led to someone trying to pull me out of this tree. The anger seared through my mind and there was a gasp below. I was drained and weak, but I felt the bunting loosen until it was slack. I had no idea who was trying to kill me and how far I had lifted them, the leaves were too thick, but I mentally threw them somewhere before climbing back onto the branch with aching arms.

“Mina? Mina are you there?”

It was Daniel. “Yes, up here. Second branch.”

I untied the bunting from around my wrist and rubbed it. Almost begrudgingly I tied the stupid bunting around the branch of the tree, thinking about how I would never climb another tree for the rest of my life. When Daniel appeared I’d never been so happy to see his mop of blond hair.

“What happened?”

“The bunting caught on my wrist and someone tried to pull me down.” I took a deep breath and tried to quell the shake in my voice. “Did you see anyone? Anyone running away?”

Daniel climbed onto the branch next to me. “Nothing.”

“I don’t know how far I threw them. They could be long gone by now.” Maybe I would never know who it was, especially seeing as there was such a long list of suspects.

“Hiro fetched me in a panic.” He pulled me into his arms. “I was so worried. But I’m here now. You’re going to be okay. I’ll never let anything happen to you again.”

He helped me down the tree, steadying my shaking legs as I went. When I felt the grass beneath my feet it was the sweetest sensation I’d ever experienced. Hiro was there waiting, and I pulled him into my arms.
Thank you
.

“That’s okay, Aunty Mina.”

I pulled Daniel into the hug, so grateful for the two people I trusted the most in the world. I just had to figure out who wanted to kill me.