“Nathan.”
“We’ll find your boy in no time. Wait here and...”
But I was off and running back to the food court to find Skye. She had the other phone. She knew where Nathan was.
Except, of course, there was no sign of her.
I found our table. No one had cleared it. Under my seat was the carrier bag containing Nathan’s old shoes, his ordinary clothes, his gel pens, and my CD. I lifted his sweater to my nose as if I were a bloodhound who could track him by scent alone.
My heart was thudding like heavy metal in my throat. I couldn’t swallow. Sweat dripped off my frozen face.
The most fundamental rule in all the world is to keep your child safe — to protect him from predators. I’d failed. My family history of abuse and neglect was showing itself in my nature, too. Whatever made me think I could make a better job of family life than my mother? Neglect was bred into me like brown eyes and mad hair. There could be no salvation for Nathan or me.
I was fifteen when I lost Skye.
“We’ll start again in the Land of Opportunity,” said ex-jailbird Mr. Bo. “But we’ll go via the Caribbean, where I know a guy who can delete a prison record.” Skye sat on his lap, cuddled, with her head tucked under his chin.
“But my exams,” I said. “Skye, I’m going to pass in nine subjects. Then I can get a good job and look after us.”
“You do that.” She barely glanced at me. “I’ll stay with Mr. Bo.”
“Looks like it’s just you and me, kid,” he said to her, without even a show of regret.
I was forced to borrow money from Skye for the bus fare back to Crack House. I had a nosebleed on the way and I thought, she’ll come back — she won’t go without me. But I never saw her again.
I sat in a stuffy little office amongst that morning’s lost property and shivered. They brought me sweet tea in a paper cup.
Skye had lent Nathan her sexy phone and I’d watched him excitedly walk away with it. It looked so innocent.
She was my sister, but I knew nothing about her except that childhood had so damaged her that she experienced the control and abuse of an older man as an adventure, a love story. Why would she see sending my lovely boy into a public lavatory with a strange man as anything other than expedient? She’d been trained to think that using a child for gain was not only normal but smart.
I was no heroine — I couldn’t find him or save him. I was just a desperate mother who could only sit in a stuffy room, drinking tea and beating herself up. My nose started to bleed.
“Hi, Mum — did someone hit you?” Nathan stood in the doorway staring at me curiously.
“Car park C, level five,” the security man said triumphantly. “I told you we’d find him. Although what he was doing in the bowels of the earth I’ll never know.”
“Get off,” Nathan said crossly. “You’re dripping blood on my England strip.”
“Nathan — what happened? Where have you been?”
“Don’t screech,” he said. “Remember the black Jeep — Sierra, Charlie, Delta? Well, I found it.”
“Safe and sound,” the security man said. “No harm done, eh? Sign here.”
Numbly I signed for Nathan as if he were a missing parcel and we went out into the cold windy weather to find a bus to take us home. There would be no limo this time, but Nathan didn’t seem to expect it.
On the bus, in the privacy of the backseat, Nathan said, “That was awesome, Mum. It was like being inside of Xbox. I was, like, the operative except I didn’t have a gun, but we made him pay for his crime anyway.”
“Who? What crime?”
“Dr. Proctor — he hurts boys and gives them bad injections that make them his slaves.”
“Do you believe that?” I asked, terrified all over again.
“I thought you knew,” he said, ignorant of terror. “Skye said you hated men who hurt children.”
“I do,” I began carefully. “But I didn’t know she was going to put you in danger.”
“There hardly wasn’t any,” said the nine-year-old superhero. “All I had to do was identify the bad doctor and then go up to him and say, ‘I’ve got what you want. Follow me.’ It was easy.”
I looked out of the window and used my bedtime voice so that he wouldn’t guess how close I was to hysteria. “Then what happened?”
“Then I gave him the hard drive and he gave me the money.”
“The what? Hard...”
“The important bit from the inside of computers where all your secrets go. Didn’t you know, either? You’ve got to destroy it. It was the one big mistake the bad doctor made. He thought he’d erased all his secrets by deleting them. Then he sold his computer on eBay but he forgot that deleting secrets isn’t good enough if you’ve got enemies like me and Skye. She’s a genius with hard drives.”
“I’ll remember to destroy mine,” I said. “What happened next?”
“You haven’t got any secrets, Mum,” Nathan Bond said. “After that I gave the money to Skye and hid in the bookshop till she and Wayne went away. Then I followed them.”
“What bookshop?” When I ran after Nathan to the end of the mall there had been shops for clothes, cosmetics, shoes, and computer games. There had not been a bookshop. I explained this to him. He was thrilled.
“You didn’t see me. Nobody saw me,” he crowed. “I did what spies do — I went off in the wrong direction and then doubled back to make sure no one was following. You went to the wrong end of the mall.”
“Is that what Skye told you to do?”
“No,” he said, although his eyes said yes. He turned sulky so I shut up. I was ready to explode but I wanted to hear the full story first.
When the silence was too much for him he said enticingly, “I know about Sierra, Charlie, Delta.”
“What about it?” I sounded carefully bored.
“You know I was supposed to look for it but I never saw it? That must’ve been a test. You know how I know?”
“How do you know?”
“’Cos Skye knew where it was all along. She and Wayne went down to level five in the lift, and I ran down the stairs just like they do on telly. You know, Mum, they get it right on telly. It works.”
“Sometimes,” I said. “Only sometimes.”
“Well anyway, there they were — her and Wayne — and they got into the Jeep and the other driver drove them away. I looked everywhere for the limo, but I couldn’t find it. I thought maybe it was part of the game — if I found it we could keep it. I wish we had a car.”
“We couldn’t keep someone else’s car.” I put my arm round him but he shrugged me off. He was becoming irritable and I could see he was tired. All the same I said, “Describe the man who drove the Jeep.”
I was shocked and horrified when he described Mr. Bo. But I wasn’t surprised.
Later that night, when Nathan had been deeply asleep for an hour, I crept into his room and laid his bulging scarlet fur-trimmed stocking at the end of the bed. Then I ran my hand gently under his mattress until I found the shiny new phone. Poor Nathan — he was unpractised in the art of deception, and when he talked about wanting to keep the limo, I saw, flickering at the back of his eyes, the notion that he’d better shut up about the limo or I might guess about the phone. I hoped it wasn’t stolen the way the limo and Jeep almost certainly were.
I rang the number Skye gave him. I didn’t really expect her to answer, but she did.
“Hi, kid,” she said. Her voice sounded affectionate.
“It’s not Nathan. Skye, how could you put him at risk? You’re his only living relative apart from me.”
“Did he have a good time? Did his little eyes sparkle? Yes or no?”