‘We need to get moving,’ he says. ‘This is bad.’
They descend into the darkness the other side of the hill and are soon again among trees. The going is difficult and without the light of the moon, they crash through the undergrowth, their feet sinking in the drifts. Daniels breathes noisily as he snaps back the brittle branches but for her it is worse, her legs are shorter and her motion less efficient. Energy consumption is at peak.
She stops and leans against the trunk of a tree. ‘They’re following our tracks up the hill,’ she mutters, ‘I can hear the dogs.’
‘I’m sure you’re right,’ he says. ‘We need to keep going.’ When she doesn’t respond, he adds, ‘Evie, it’s not much further. Don’t give up now.’
She struggles upright and stumbles after him, too ashamed to reveal her predicament.
Daniels waits for her and takes her arm as she comes alongside. ‘You should have said. I’m not expected to be a mind-reader. How bad is it?’
‘I’m not sure I can make it,’ she murmurs, dropping her head. Her power has just drained away in a fashion that even she, who knows her limitations, could not have foreseen.
‘You will,’ he says. ‘We both will.’
The barking of the dogs reaches the top of the hill and Daniels stiffens.
‘Once we get to the bottom, it will be easier,’ he says. ‘Once we reach the road…’ He doesn’t finish the thought. Half-carrying her like this, he is panting hard, the breath steaming around his face. But she can finish the sentence for him. Once they reach the road, they will be exposed by the garage lights, and burdened with her, and in the open, they’ll be even easier to catch.
They reach the valley floor and, pushing through a hedge onto a track, follow it until it takes them through a gate leading to farm buildings.
They enter a shed. On one side it is piled with mouldy bales and the other is parked up with rusting rotovators and sprinklers.
Daniels takes a ladder from the wall and lays it against the stacked hay. ‘Climb up.’
‘But the dogs,’ she says. ‘They will find us.’
‘They’re following my scent,’ he says, ‘not yours. I’ll lead them away from here and come back.’
Evie climbs to the top of the bales and lies down. She is twenty feet up, close to the roof, and from here through the gap between the edge of the corrugated iron and the top of the wall, she has a view over the fields.
She is so exhausted, she is barely aware of him placing the pack by her head. He climbs down and removes the ladder. ‘Don’t move,’ he calls up in a low voice, ‘I’ll be back for you as soon as I can.’
She listens to his feet clatter across the concrete and then silence closes in.
Shortly afterwards, she hears the barking of the dogs again, from the distant woods.
Then, fifteen minutes later, gunshots.
Half an hour on, with her head on its side, too weak to turn away, Evie watches four people come down the track towards the shed in which she is hiding, Daniels’s body slung between them.
PART 3
Elektra
16
Evie’s desolation is complete.
Simon is quiet too. He may have had no love for Daniels, but even he is aware of the severity of the situation.
The hunters bring Daniels’s body to the farm and swing it onto the rear of a truck, like a grain sack. She overhears enough of the exchange of blame to grasp that he is regrettable collateral. But none of them seems overly worried.
The search for her, meanwhile, continues. They have light throwing nets woven from nycra and a hova in the air over the woods with a searchlight stroking the ground. Activity is orchestrated from a command post set up below her in the shed, with maps laid over the engine housing of a wheel-less tractor. She hears herself referred to as ‘the freak’, ‘the monster’ and ‘the thing’. For their safety, no one is to approach her without support.
She rolls onto her side so she doesn’t have to see Daniels lying below. Her body trembles but it is not from fear; the danger of discovery no longer troubles her as both hope and reason to continue are gone. When her charge is this low, processes judder inefficiently like Daniels’s lawnmower when low on fuel, or the flicker of his newsplastic in the apartment on nights when the clouds cling to the windows and the signal struggles to penetrate. Thoughts repeat themselves, looping again and again, each time seeming for a second to be fresh and hopeful before being replaced with a blank screen.
Lying there, without even being sure she’ll have enough energy to bring herself back up, she puts her systems into standby.
When Evie revives, all of them are gone, including the truck with Daniels’s body.
Daylight grows and, as the sun rises, falls across her. She wriggles the hood of her coat from her face and manoeuvres her cheek into the light, soaking up the energy from its rays.
She lies there throughout the morning, slowly charging. As the sun grows in potency, she finds enough strength to move and stay within its reach. The biogel beneath her skin acts as a heat exchanger – albeit an inefficient one – and gradually the electrical flow in reverse raises her main energy cell out of critical.
She has time to mull over events and face the fact that she is completely alone and in need of a new plan. It is clear that the idea of Scotland is now hopeless – the point of it was to get to Canada and she’d never manage to cross the Atlantic without Daniels’s assistance.
In her helplessness, Evie’s thoughts chase their own tails in dizzy confusion, and a memory they gave her of Evelyn with her father slips unnoticed into her head. As it plays out, it bathes her in nostalgia and raises in her something bittersweet and akin to homesickness.
In it, they are out riding in the early morning along a lane overhung by branches, which they duck beneath to avoid knocking their heads. They come to a halt in the dappled light, both out of breath. The horses’ fetlocks are slick with dew from the long meadow grass. The mountain air is just warming, stirring the blood of her father’s large roan for more, and he stamps and snorts, eager again to be galloping. Her darling Florizel, in contrast, is relaxed and patient, head down, happy to do whatever she bids.
The moment is tinged with melancholy as they must shortly part for Evelyn to return home. She has a literature test at school that morning, over which, despite the distractions of the ride, she is nervous. Her father reaches across to place his hand on hers, smiles reassuringly and tells her how smart she is and how she and Goethe will get along just fine.
It is one of Evie’s favourite memories, not only because of the affection in that look but also because Evelyn, with her momentary exhibition of nerves, for once feels attainable.
Soothed by the reminiscence, Evie finds that she can think clearly, and in the resulting calm, the solution she needs comes to her, astounding her with how obvious it is but that neither she nor Daniels had considered it.
She does not know if Evelyn’s father knows that she exists. She cannot even be sure that he is still alive. Even if he is and she manages to make it to Austria and find him, there is nothing to stop him throwing her out as an abomination of Evelyn’s memory, or worse still, trapping and betraying her. But he is perhaps the only person left who may be willing to protect her.
By the late afternoon, Evie is able to descend the ladder, and as the shadows lengthen over the fields she follows the unploughed strip beside the hedge to the road, and from there limps the few hundred yards to the service station Daniels had been aiming for.