Zero Read online

  Chapter Three

  I spent the rest of the afternoon engaging in blatant acts of bumlickery, like cleaning the downstairs toilet and putting away the laundry before announcing my sudden change of summer plans.

  Dinner was as subdued as it had been for the past two nights. Mum and Dad kept casting me looks that, whilst not exactly angry, weren’t exactly friendly either. Even Chec, who by rights should have been quietly gleeful that the Bad Twin spotlight wasn’t being shone on her, was silent.

  Parental goodwill towards me and Chec often worked like a set of old-fashioned scales; for one of us to rise, the other had to fall. After I pierced my lip a few months back, the scales had been decidedly in Chec’s favour until two weeks ago, when Dad had seen more than he’d bargained for when he was putting away some clean t-shirts in Chec’s drawer. The ensuing furore - or Condomgate, as I liked to call it - had put Chec well and truly in the doghouse and propelled me back into their good graces. Now, it looked like I was back to being the Bad Twin again.

  My announcement was initially met with astonished silence, which I figured was better than the outright ‘You must be joking’ I’d been expecting. Like Rottweilers, my parents were a confusing and unpredictable mix of over-protective and easygoing. Often they’d give the nod to things I thought would be refused outright but have conniption fits about things that hadn’t even registered on my radar.

  ‘They’ll drop the charges completely?’ My mum glanced at my dad, who raised his eyebrows and shrugged slightly. I pushed my tortellini around my plate with my fork and tried not to meet their gaze for fear I’d blurt everything out.

  Dad wasn’t to be put off, though. He ducked his head to meet my eye. ‘Have they told you exactly what you’re getting into with this, Ro?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ I lied, eyes widened for added authenticity.

  ‘And you’re happy with this offer of...digging wells in Africa?’ I nodded enthusiastically and my dad turned to my mum. A look passed between them that I couldn’t make out and they seemed to come to a consensus. ‘Alright. Mum and I will talk about it later and we’ll tell you our decision tomorrow.’

  I breathed freely again. ‘We’ll talk about it later’ usually meant yes.

  After dinner I sloped off to Chec’s room. She was clicking morosely through Netflix and looked up as I came in, rolling over to give me half the bed.

  For a moment she didn’t look at me. Then, clicking on some random box set, she threw the remote onto her chest of drawers and turned onto her side, scowling reproachfully. ‘You can’t go to Africa. I won’t let you. You can’t abandon me to our bloody mother and this bloody boring village.’

  ‘Hello? I got arrested, remember? If I don’t do this, it’s not going to be a choice between you and Africa; it’s going to be jail. No choices at all. Just jail.’

  She squinted at me in amazement. ‘It’s almost like I’m talking to a completely different person. I can’t believe you’re planning on digging wells in Uganda. It’s totally Duke of Edinburgh. So...outdoorsy. You hate the outdoors.’

  ‘Yeah, but if I do this, they’ll drop the charges against me. It’s like a community service thing. If my case went to court, I don’t know what would happen.’

  ‘You could get off!’

  ‘Yeah, and I could be sent to juvie. This is a perfect opportunity.’

  ‘A perfect opportunity...to catch malaria.’

  I knew better than to argue with her, and besides, it suddenly struck me that Adam had never actually said exactly where this kid was being held. Shit. What if it was in Africa? What if malaria was actually an option?

  Eventually Chec turned to me with her sad-puppy face and started fiddling with my sleeve. ‘I can’t believe we’re not going to see each other for weeks and weeks. Who’s going to look after you?’

  ‘Maybe I’ll start looking after myself for a change.’ I took a deep breath and bit my lip before going on. ‘I’m leaving tomorrow.’

  Chec’s mouth popped open, giving me a delightful view of chewed-up popcorn. ‘But you can’t! What about-’ she shut her mouth with an audible click.

  ‘What? What about school? I don’t go there any more, remember? But it’s a good thing,’ I hastily went on. ‘Getting booted out of school has turned out to be a blessing in disguise. It’s freed me up to do this well-digging thing. And the sooner I go, the sooner I’ll be back.’

  I nudged her, trying to get her to see the bright side. She didn’t smile, so I carried on nudging her until she reluctantly started nudging me back before throwing herself onto her back in surrender. ‘God, I can’t believe you’re abandoning me for the summer. You’re doing something really noble and cool and you’re going to have such an amazing tan by the time you get back,’ she said wistfully. ‘And you’ll get so fit with all that exercise.’

  ‘So you’re saying I’m going to come back looking all brown and muscly?’

  ‘Like a female bodybuilder,’ she assured me.

  Everything seemed to be going exactly to plan. Which is why, when I came downstairs in the night for water, I was surprised to find my parents still discussing it.

  Okay, find probably isn’t quite the right word. As I was walking past the living room I heard one of them say my name, so obviously I pressed my ear to the crack in the door to better hear what they were saying.

  I was so intent on my eavesdropping I didn’t even hear Chec sneak up behind me. ‘Watcha doi-’ she began in her best foghorn voice. I clamped my hand over her mouth and gestured wildly towards the living room. Realisation dawned and she pressed her ear to the door.

  Where’ve you been? I mouthed to her.

  She jerked her head behind her, in the direction of Mal’s house. It was one in the morning. I gave her a disapproving look and she shrugged innocently.

  ‘At least we know the shoplifting thing was a fit-up job,’ my mum was saying.

  ‘You mean you didn’t before?’ I could almost hear my dad raising his eyebrows. Chec raised hers too.

  ‘Well…’ For all her bluster, my dad had a way of pinning my mother to the spot sometimes. ‘Richard, she is a teenager for god’s sake. They rebel. They act out. It’s what they do. And no, I wouldn’t have expected it of her but it’s not out of the realms of possibility.’

  My dad stayed silent for a minute. ‘We still make a decision about this thing in Africa,’ he finally said.

  What? I mouthed. They hadn’t even decided whether I could go yet?

  ‘She’s too young,’ my mum said quickly. My stomach turned ice-cold. Jesus, did she want me to go to prison, or something? ‘The charges will get dropped, in any case,’ she went on impatiently. ‘Even if it did go to court, she’d…’ Their voices got more muffled as they moved to a different part of the room.

  ‘So, we’ll say no, then? Wait and see what happens.’ My mum. The traitor.

  My dad started saying something about standing by me, but I couldn’t make out his words properly, what with the sound of their betrayal ringing in my ears.

  Wordlessly, Chec took hold of my sleeve and propelled me back upstairs. I sat down heavily on her bed, willing the tears back while she put her pyjamas on.

  I was too young? Seriously? Too young to go to Africa, but not too young to go to prison, apparently.

  ‘What are you going to do?’ Chec had swept her hair up into a headband and was wiping make up remover across her eyes.

  I looked up at her. She’d stopped with the lotion bottle still in her hand, her face pink and shiny without make up, waiting for my answer. I knew she would never pressure me, but I could see the hope in her face.

  Being home schooled had been harder on Chec. By nature an extrovert, even the extra-curricular stuff we’d been pushed into hadn’t been enough to satisfy her. She’d longed to be mainstream schooled for as long as I could remember and in the last year she’d blossomed. Being carted off to jail would mean the end of everything, not just for me but for her too.

  Plus, also: prison.
I shuddered.

  My parents were planning to tell me no, but- I swiped angrily at my eyes and a rogue thought drifted into my head. But what if they couldn’t? What if I wasn’t here to tell?

  My breath came quicker as this idea took root. There was nothing to stop me from walking out the door right now. If I waited until mum and dad were in bed I could pack a bag, cycle into town, be on the first train into London in the morning...

  ‘I’m going to do it anyway.’ The words came out before I could stop them.

  Chec gave a wide-mouthed shriek and I flapped at her to shut up before our parents heard. ‘No way! Seriously?’ She was squeaking.

  I nodded. ‘I’ll get the first train into London.’ I chewed on my lip ring. ‘Can you hold them off for a bit in the morning?’ She nodded vigorously. ‘Okay, then.’

  Something inside me squinched at the thought of deliberately disobeying my parents like this. God knew I was no goody-two-shoes. I’d defied them plenty over the years, but never over something like this. Never anything as big as being told I couldn’t go to Africa and then going anyway.

  But then, I reasoned, technically I wasn’t disobeying them. They’d not actually told me I couldn’t go...

  And another thing: they didn’t want me to go to Africa. And I wasn’t. I was going to Exeter.

  I wondered what they’d say when I got back from my Exeter/Africa jaunt, and hurriedly pushed that thought to the back of my mind. I had to hope that having a non-criminal daughter would be considered better than having an obedient daughter in the long run.

  Slowly tiptoeing, I made my way back to my room and started rummaging in my cupboards.

  The sun had already risen when I got on the five-eleven train into London, and by ten I was getting off at Exeter St David’s. I prayed that my parents weren’t waiting to collar me as I got off the train. I’d done the maths: if they’d somehow found out that I was headed for Exeter instead of Heathrow and Chec hadn’t been able to distract them, they might just about have been able to make it here before me, especially if my lunatic mother was driving.

  The coast, however, was mercifully clear. I wandered out of the station and turned up a side lane, my hands clamped tightly to the strap of my bag to stop them shaking.

  The road Adam had given me directions to consisted of one long building, a warehouse of some kind by the looks of it, set back slightly from the pavement behind a chain link fence. It looked fairly new, but bland and dull as if someone had been trying to disguise it as a brick wall.

  After a few minutes of pacing and panicked swearing, I found the door - a plain stainless steel panel with a handle - and stood outside for a moment trying to compose myself. It wouldn’t do to turn up to spy camp looking flushed and sweaty. I wiped my damp palms on my jeans. A few calming breaths later and I was ready to go.

  I pondered again as to why Boring Suit Adam had been so keen to recruit me for this. It had crossed my mind that this all might just be some elaborate ruse to lure me into an abandoned building to become the victim of a serial killer. I still wasn’t entirely sure that Adam wasn’t a psycho, so I’d employed all the tact I could manage to raise this concern with him.

  ‘How do I know this isn’t all crap and you aren’t just luring me away to rape and murder me?’ I’d blurted.

  He punched a number into his phone and handed it to me just as a female voice answered. ‘You’re through to the Crown Prosecution Service. Ask them what’s happened to your court case.’ I glared at him but did as he asked.

  ‘I’ve got nothing listed under that name,’ the woman on the end of the line told me in a bored-sounding voice.

  ‘It was a shoplifting case. Could you check again for me?’ I asked. I heard some tapping and shuffling of paper and the same bored voice told me that her computer definitely said no.

  I hung up the phone and handed it back to Adam. ‘The people I work for made your court case disappear. It’s as if it never happened. With that sort of power, don’t you think they could just snatch you off the street if they wanted you that badly, instead of going through this rigmarole?’

  It sounded true. It made sense, logically. And yet I couldn’t shift the feeling that although I was technically being told the truth, I wasn’t being told the whole truth. Something vital was being held back, but I didn’t even know what question to ask to find out what it could be.

  Now that I was three hundred miles from home, I wondered about that a bit further. I’d phoned less than five minutes after I’d agreed to help him. How had he managed to get the case stopped and have the court notified in so short a space of time?

  The steel door swung open silently when I pulled the handle. Inside, the warehouse was huge and empty. Light shone weakly through the high, grimy windows onto the concrete floor and I stood for a minute to let my eyes grow accustomed to the semi-darkness, taking in the dusty, unused smell.

  I felt an awful lot like the girl in every horror movie ever made; the one who’s always going upstairs to investigate when she should be running out the door. I could see the newspaper headlines. ‘Girl, 16, found murdered in Exeter warehouse. Police have no leads. Distraught parents say, “We thought she was in Africa!”’ My fingers closed round the sonic grenade rape alarm my parents always insisted on me carrying around.

  As my sight adjusted I was able to make out the doorway to the office I’d been told to report to. I stood in front of it pondering the decision to either go through it or back out into the street - either choice would lead to my life taking a hugely different direction. In the end, though, there was no choice to make. I pushed the door open.

  The office was small and as well as the dusty smell of the disused building, there was an undercurrent of wood smoke and other flavours, although the office was as empty as the warehouse. The air shimmered slightly, but if there was a warm air vent nearby it wasn’t doing a great job; the air was cold and clammy.

  ‘Hello?’ I called. No reply. Whoever was supposed to be meeting me wasn’t here.

  Anticipation hung in the air, the sense that hundreds of eyes were waiting for something to happen. I took a breath and stepped through the doorway into the office.

  The flash of light lasted less than a second, just the time it took for me to take two steps forward, but something in the movement made it feel like I was falling and then something else was grabbing my ankles, tightening like an oversized elastic band, pulling me backwards. I tried to scream, but I couldn’t seem to pull any air into my lungs. Just as I started to panic and flail, the world burst into colour again.

  ‘INCOMING!’ A voice boomed in my ear and a pair of hands that felt like steel wrapped in kid gloves picked me up from behind under my arms and whirled me around. ‘Neve! Get them off her legs!’

  ‘On it!’ another voice sing-songed and the pressure around my ankles released. There was an insectoid shriek and the skitter of too many feet across a hard surface.

  The steel hands were still holding me and propelled me gently but firmly across the room. ‘Stay here; don’t move,’ the first voice - a boy’s - commanded, and I caught a flash of wide green eyes and crazily spiked black hair before he darted off.

  Now that I had stopped moving the room I was in came into clearer focus. This wasn’t the warehouse office. The room I was in now was larger and had cobbled walls with wooden crates piled high in the corners.

  What. The. Fuck?

  I pressed myself against the wall and slid slowly down until my bum hit the floor staring wordlessly.

  A tall girl wearing a blue fitted shirt and tight trousers with a mass of blonde hair piled up in a bun shot across the room, wielding a sword - a sword! - in pursuit of a beetle. A beetle the size of a Doberman.

  The dark-haired boy, the one who had propped me against the wall, was busy trying to get a large cat down from the ceiling. Except it was a cat with tooth-filled mouths where its eyes should have been and a scorpion’s sting instead of a tail.

  The cat-thing skittered aro
und on the ceiling, hissing with all three of its mouths and dodging the boy as he swiped at it with its sword. Yes, he had a sword, too. Of course he did. Why wouldn’t he?

  The boy and girl whirled around the room like dervishes chasing the freaky creatures, moving faster and more fluidly than the confined room would have suggested was possible.

  The boy took a flying leap into the air, vaulting over a crate and almost skidding into a bronze-haired girl seated on a pile of sacks in the corner of the room. Her face reminded me of a china doll - all blue eyes and pouting lips. She wore a dark green tunic and trousers and sat with her hands neatly folded in her lap watching the chaos impassively. When she noticed me looking, the corners of her cupids-bow mouth turned down and she looked away.

  ‘Don’t worry about helping, Kallista. We’ve got this,’ the boy shouted. The girl - Kallista - glared at him.

  The beetle-creature scrambled clumsily up the wall before shrinking back on itself and launching itself at the blonde girl. She was too quick for it, whirling her sword around her head and catching the creature mid-air, slicing it neatly in two. The two halves fell to the floor and twitched for a couple of seconds before laying still. She poked the part that had been a head gingerly with the toe of her boot and nodded, seemingly satisfied that it was dead.

  The boy crouched and jumped high, like he was packing springs in his boots, and skewered the cat-thing through the chest. He whirled it round and without needing to be asked the blonde girl cut its head off, which rolled away before coming to a stop against a pile of crates.

  ‘Get its sting as well,’ the boy shouted over his shoulder and with a twitch of her sword, the blonde girl duly nicked it off. It fell to the floor, spattering an iridescent blue ichor all around.

  The room fell quiet. The boy and girl scanned the room, wiping their swords. All three of us were panting slightly, although admittedly the other two had far more reason to than I did.

  The girl turned to the boy, tucking a lock of blonde hair back into her bun. ‘You owe me a tenner,’ she said. ‘I told you there’d be clingers.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, whatever...’ They spoke with the well-modulated vowels of the slightly-posh, and their voices held the slightest West Country burr.

  The girl span around slowly, looking for something. ‘Any ideas?’ she asked the boy, arching an eyebrow. He stared into space for a moment and walked slowly to where I was sitting.

  He bent over in front of me and held his hand out to pull me up. It had a wide streak of glistening blue slime across the back. Frowning, he wiped it on the back of his trousers before offering it to me again and pulling me to my feet.

  Straightening up, I took a proper look at him. He was wearing cut-off jeans and a Thundercats t-shirt with a pair of army boots, all spattered with dots of slime. His crazy hair, bottle-green eyes and wildly incongruous sword made him look like a real-life manga character. I stared openly, not caring how much of a creepy stalker I was coming across as, while a thousand images went off in my mind, each as insubstantial as a soap bubble, disappearing when I tried to take a closer look.

  I know you, I thought to myself, trying to place where I’d seen him before. You’re-

  Bugger. I totally knew who he was. And not in a you’re-a-famous-person kind of way. More in a we’ve-met-before way. I knew him from-

  I looked away and then back at him, hoping that this would jog my memory. It didn’t.

  The boy stared back at me like he got this reaction all the time. The longer I looked at him, the more I knew I knew him. It felt like a mental stutter, like having a word on the tip of your tongue, making me want to stamp my foot and click my fingers.

  We might still be standing there to this day, me with my face working in confusion and him with a look of polite patience, had the blonde girl not coughed loudly, in the way people do when they’re making it perfectly clear that their throat isn’t in any way uncomfortable, they’re just tired of being ignored.

  The boy shook his head slightly and remembered that he was supposed to be talking and broke into a wolfish grin. I wished I could say I was surprised when I saw his crooked eye teeth, but no. Because his smile, like everything else about him, was totally familiar to me. ‘Nice to meet you at last, Roanne. I’m Oriel Saldana, and this is my twin sister, Neve.’ The girl nodded and tipped the hilt of her sword at me before sheathing it in a holster across her back. ‘We’re the people who’ve hired you.’