She had passed the food bar on her beeline to the corner booth. Her senses already completely dazzled by the lights of the airport shops, she’d stolen just a quick glance at the food laid out in cabinets of stainless steel and glass. Other than fruit and bread rolls, she hadn’t recognised anything there, and nothing smelled real. Not even the apples.
Once she’d sat down, she’d moved again only three times. Twice for juice and once for the toilet.
The toilet experience had threatened to bring the tears back.
Everything was so clean it almost stung. She’d tiptoed into the shiny, empty room, shocked by all the reflections of herself. She turned away from the wall of vanities but met herself again, sneakers to curls, in a full-length mirror.
And for a second – in the most opulent toilet she could imagine – she saw herself as the Gaje must. She wore her favourite sneakers – pink faux-Converse. She noticed holes that she’d never before cared about, and one of the laces had freed itself from the plastic tip on the end that had held it together. It was fuzzed up like a stringy afro, and had apparently gone about gathering up burrs and grass seeds for extra adornment.
The waistband of her black faded jeans didn’t quite meet the hem of her aqua T-shirt, and she tugged it downwards to try to cover her flat, brown stomach. It snapped back, settling just above her hips, and for a moment she saw the now-clean T-shirt as it had been before Sera had hovered her hands over it in the Funhouse: covered in Tamas’s blood.
She pressed her fingers into her eyes to try to blur the sudden vision. It wasn’t until she’d been in the rental car that she’d realised her shirt was spotless and the stiffness of Tamas’s dried blood on her jeans had vanished.
Hating the sight of the shirt, she zipped up the black jacket Sera had given her. It smelled like leather, so she assumed it was, and right then she was glad she had it. The air in the airport seemed to be skin-temperature, but she felt she’d break out in shivers at any moment.
She studied her face in the mirror. There was no sign of the bruising from the skirmishes in Pantelimon – another apparent ‘gift’ from Sera – but her green eyes accused her from behind tear-swollen, red lids. Why are you doing this to me? they asked. She shrugged. She had no answers. She’d untied the golden cord from around her forehead. Her curls flopped into her eyes, but she thought she now looked maybe a smidge more like some of the other travellers she’d seen so far.
On the toilet, she’d pulled her tarot deck from her bag and wrapped the cord back around it, shoving the shiny box back inside before the deck made her cry again. It was the cards that had caused her all this trouble.
Back in her booth, Samantha chewed her thumbnail. What if it doesn’t work? she asked herself for the millionth time.
On a plastic seat just inside the glass doors of the airport, Seraphina had given her a few more items. The first was a wallet containing two boarding passes.
Sam now studied the pass. Surely they would have called her flight by now? What if she’d missed it? She couldn’t imagine how that could be the case – she’d memorised the flight number so many times it was on constant replay in her head. BA887. British Airways, Business Class, to Heathrow airport, London. A ninety-minute trip that would take her countries away from all her friends and family. And Tamas.
But it was the next part of the journey that really made her heart flutter. She’d been trying not to think about it. After a three-hour wait in London, she’d board a Qantas flight for Sydney, Australia. And she’d be in the sky for twenty-seven hours.
That wasn’t just countries. That was a universe away.
The only other thing in the wallet was a ticket of another type. Hours ago, she’d sat staring at it, her backside numb on the plastic seat just inside the airport doors.
‘Um, what’s this?’ she’d asked Sera, her voice thick. She hiccuped. She’d stopped crying half an hour or so before, but her body hadn’t seemed to have caught up with the fact.
‘That’s your passport,’ said Sera, matter-of-factly. ‘It’s also your visa, and any other travel document you’re asked to produce.’
‘Um, no, it’s not,’ said Samantha.
‘Yes, it is,’ said Sera.
Samantha looked at her, and then back at the small piece of paper in her hand. She blinked. Hiccuped again.
‘It’s a ticket,’ she said finally, ‘to ride the dodgem cars at the Carnivale.’
‘Is it?’ said Sera.
‘It is,’ said Samantha.
‘Well, maybe you think so, pretty one,’ said Sera. ‘But to everyone else it will look exactly like your passport documents or your visa or anything else it needs to look like when asked.’
Samantha had stared at the floor. She could not possibly be any more miserable and confused. Every brain cell screamed, ‘Not possible!’ But she’d been shown things tonight that made her believe that the ticket probably would do just as Sera said. It didn’t make her feel any better, though.
‘What if I lose it?’ she’d said.
‘I shouldn’t do that if I were you, honey,’ said Sera.
Sera had then given her a story to tell in case anyone asked why she was travelling alone to Australia.
‘But you won’t need the story,’ Sera had said. ‘Whoever inspects your travel documents will merely feel that they’re having a particularly great day, and that you are a most bewitching fifteen-year-old – as indeed you are – and they will wave you on through. You just have to be cool and follow the signs.’
‘The signs at the airport?’ Samantha had said.
‘Yeah,’ said Sera. ‘Those too.’
What Seraphina had told her about the Admit One ticket was true. A woman in a uniform in the queue for Departures had asked to check her paperwork, beamed at her, and ushered her through to another lane, cordoned off by red rope, with virtually no one in it. And it had been like that all the way through to the lounge. So she knew that some of what Sera had said was true. But she actually didn’t want to believe any of the other stuff Sera had told her.
From the back seat of the car on the way to the airport, she hadn’t been able to see Birthday’s face as they both listened to what Sera told her. Sam would have loved to have seen whether his had registered the same shock and surprise as hers, but in some ways she was glad she hadn’t had the chance. Her heart couldn’t take any more shrapnel at the moment, and she feared that learning that Birthday had known all this stuff about her for years, without telling her, would be a betrayal too hard to bear.
Her thoughts were startled back to the lounge when the PA piped up.
‘Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. We would like to advise that Flight BA887 is now ready for boarding at Gate number eight. Would all passengers departing for London on BA887 please make your way to Gate Eight for immediate departure.’
The apple juice soured in Samantha’s stomach and she wished she had time for another trip to the toilet. She grabbed her bag and hurried towards Gate Eight. Towards London. Towards Sydney. Towards the twin brother she never knew she had but could now feel, just as she always had felt him without knowing what it was.
Inside her chest, something clawed mercilessly at her heart, shredding it even further. She thought maybe she could taste blood at the back of her throat.
Elizabeth Bay, Sydney, Australia
‘Now what are you doing?’ said Zac. He pulled his desk chair close to Luke’s computer and watched, mesmerised, as Luke’s fingers blurred over the keyboard.
‘Hunting,’ said Luke.
‘For the empath or the genius?’ said Zac.
‘Yep and yep,’ said Luke. ‘But also anything else I can get on Morgan Moreau or any of these other names we just pulled. Now move over.’