"You don't understand," I repeated.
"What don't I understand?"
"Everything's changed."
"That's what Alex said, and frankly you're not making any more sense than she did. I don't know what the pair of you think you're up to, but it's not good enough."
We reached the spot in the coppice and I pulled a cursory glamour about us, in case anyone nosey was watching. No one would notice either of us until the glamour faded.
"I'll call you when I've found Alex," I said. "We'll arrange something. You need to talk."
Katherine looked around, then shrugged her shoulders. "Where are you going, Niall? There's nowhere to go. We're in the middle of a wood."
"When you've finished looking for me, head back to Dave and the car. He'll take you home."
"What are you talking about?"
I felt beneath me for the Way that ran beneath us, feeling it rise to my call. I stepped forward and they was a twist of air, a sense of falling, and I was many miles away. There was no sense of a previous passage — Alex must have left some time ago while I was arguing with Katherine. I felt a pang of guilt at neglecting her once again, but ultimately the rows, the constant accusations, the crying and the shouting, were what had driven me away from my home in the first place.
If there was one thing I'd learned it was that you couldn't go back.
SEVEN
When I reached the courts, Amber was in the cellar where the node point was. She was stood against the wall, waiting.
"Has Alex come back through here?" I asked her.
She ignored my question. "Garvin wants to see you."
"What about Alex?"
"I haven't seen her."
"That doesn't answer my question."
"No," she said. "It doesn't."
I sighed and went up into the house.
"Garvin's in the weapons room, working out," she called after me.
I went upstairs first to Alex's room. The bed was unmade, items were scattered around the dresser, a book was open on the bed. It was a copy of Robert Louis Stevenson's Kidnapped. I wondered whether there was any significance to that. She had clothes in the drawers, make-up on the shelves. I tried to remember what she was wearing at the lake, but I had no clear recollection. Jeans? A T-shirt? It didn't matter anyway, since she could look however she wanted.
I looked for personal items; a purse, a piece of jewellery, a hair brush, to see if any of it had gone — and then realised that almost nothing in the room was actually hers. It was all borrowed, or bought for her, or provided for her so that she would be comfortable.
She told me: I want my music, my books, the things from home. I'd heard what she said, but hadn't understood the significance of any of it. I'd heard, but not listened.
I sat down on the bed, heavily. "Now what am I going to tell Katherine?"
I'd assumed that she'd come back to the courts, that she would return here at least to collect her things, even if she was going to try and return to her former life with her mother, but I sat in her room and realised the truth. She didn't need to. Nothing here was hers. She could walk away and not look back.
I rubbed by eyes, feeling tired and stupid. I hadn't considered what it would all mean for Alex. I knew Katherine would be upset and in the event she had acted predictably. We both had. It had sparked another in our long list of unresolved arguments and Alex had been left on the sidelines to watch. Worse than that, I hadn't realised why she was there. She wanted to see her parents reunited. She wanted a homecoming. The trouble was, the home she wanted to return to no longer existed.
Katherine was going to be angry. She would already be pissed off with me for leaving her in a wood. That had been petty, but I'd just wanted to prove to her once and for all that she didn't know everything, and that there were things that I couldn't explain, even if I wanted to. Now I had to tell her that I didn't know where her daughter was.
It would be better to find Alex before I had to explain that.
Alex waited until the noise ceased. She waited until the arguments were over and the shouting was done.
In the lake the sound was a muted echo. In the lake she didn't have to listen to her parents fighting. She had walked into the water to distract them from yelling at each other, but they hadn't even noticed. She could have drowned and they wouldn't care.
She didn't drown, though. They'd proved that again and again at Porton Down, holding her under while she kicked and struggled until she could hold it no more, until the water surged into her lungs on the indrawn breath. Only then did she realised she wasn't drowning. The water entered her lungs, but it didn't hurt her. It couldn't hurt her. It was hers, and it would support her and hold her, until the hurting stopped.
She'd spat water into the faces of the doctors, which had earned her a day in the goldfish tanks, the name the inmates gave to the glass-walled cages with iron wire woven into the walls and iron locks on the doors. They'd given her no food and only plain water, and left her to stew.
It had been worth it.
Beneath the surface of the lake it was dark, the water cloudy. Yes, it was cold, but she could handle it. She'd learned that in the goldfish tanks too, when they'd stripped her naked and thrown her in, turning the temperature down to soften her up. She remembered the goose-bumps on her skin, her embarrassment as she turned away from the glass to hide her growing breasts and the light fuzz of hair in her groin, only to see the camera staring down at her. She'd cowered in the corner as they leered through the glass at her. She'd cried… oh yeah, she'd cried. But then she'd got stronger. She'd learned how to stare back until it was they who turned away. She'd learned how not to cry.
The water wouldn't hurt her, no matter how deep she went, and she could lighten the pressure, easing the weight from her ears and from her drenched lungs. She could hang there, suspended in a cold embrace, for as long as she wanted. Eventually, though, she had to come up. Eventually the world wanted her back.
She surfaced and walked from the water. No one saw her emerge, no one noticed the water running from her sodden clothes, streaming from her nose and mouth. By the time she reached the edge of the coppice where the Way point was, she was dry. She looked back at the lake, wishing she could have stayed there, then walked into the wood.
I walked back down the hall to where Blackbird and I had our rooms. That was another thing — I had left Alex isolated when she should have had people around her. Yes, there were reasons for that, and initially there hadn't been any other choice but to keep her separate until she gained some control, but she could have moved to a room nearer to Blackbird and me days ago. It had been convenient to leave things the way they were until she joined the courts. She'd been making progress towards that — but now?
I found Blackbird sitting on the bed with my son laid out naked and wriggling on a towel spread across Blackbird's legs with his arms and legs waving around.
Is that wise?" I asked her. "One false move and we'll all get a sprinkling."
She sighed. "He was too hot. He's having a cool down." Reaching down, she stroked her hand across his tummy. He blew bubbles and kicked.
I sat on the end of the bed and looked down at my son. His eyes were pale grey, almost colourless. I wondered if they would stay that colour.
"How did it go?" Blackbird asked me. She knew I was meeting Katherine this morning. I'd had a restless night trying to think of a way to explain and, as a consequence, so had Blackbird.
"It went OK up to a point. Have you seen Alex at all?"
"No, I think… Niall?"
I looked up from the baby.
"What really happened?"
I sighed. "I met Katherine and I was trying to explain what happened last year, and then Alex appeared."
"What?"