Surreptitiously checking out the cabinet to the left of
her seat, she found a soft pillow and a rug. She felt guilty for touching these things, worried that she would be reprimanded at any moment. But the bald man was now breathing deeply, wearing earphones, so she ripped the rug and cushion from their plastic packaging and settled down into the seat. The moment she threw the light, warm rug over her clothing she felt safe. As though it was a shield. Right now, she belonged; she was part of the plane, protected by a piece of it.
She closed her eyes for a moment, opened them again. Everything was just as it had been. Two impossibly regal women moved quietly about the cabin, filling a glass here, offering a hot towel or sweet there, leaning intimately over people’s seats to ensure that absolutely everything one could possibly desire was made immediately available.
At least, that’s how it felt to Samantha.
On the earlier flight to London from Bucharest she’d sat frozen in her seat, shaking her head when the stewards tried to encourage her to have some breakfast. The plump Gaje woman next to her had had no such reservations. She’d devoured a veritable feast as Samantha had watched from the corner of her eye. It began with a glass of wine before the plane had even taxied from the runway. At eight-thirty in the morning. Champagne, the woman told Samantha, raising her glass in the air. Samantha stared. This was the only word that passed between them during the flight.
But on this trip, Sam hadn’t been able to resist the food offered for lunch. The moment the flight attendant had smilingly passed her the menu, her mouth had begun watering. Nothing on the menu looked familiar. She recognised ‘salmon’, ‘lamb’ and ‘salad’, but the meaning of the words between them eluded her.
‘I’ll have what he’s having,’ she’d said quietly, when the flight attendant asked.
What he had came with a glass of red wine. Samantha had had red wine before – during festivals, occasionally with dinner, but never anything that tasted like this. The wine in camp had been a transparent, rosy colour, and sour. She didn’t especially enjoy it. But this wine was thick and syrupy and almost black. It looked like blood. It tasted of spice and soil and flowers and magic. She shook her head when the hostess offered a refill. Her neighbour did not.
No wonder he had fallen asleep.
Her head spun a little, but mostly she felt calm for the first time since the red doors had crashed open on the Ghost Ride. She knew she shouldn’t feel calm – she had no idea of what was coming next and how she was going to find her brother, but right now she could do nothing about that. She’d have to figure it out then – she’d done her best for now.
After she’d escaped Amit and his friend in grey at London airport, she’d decided she’d best stick close to people she could
feel
. That, and her newfound confidence at having outsmarted her enemies all on her own, helped her to make her way unobstructed to the Qantas Club. There, she’d gone straight to the computers and had learned as much as she could in ninety minutes about Sydney airport, especially about possible escape routes.
That she was going to need to know them, she was reasonably certain. Why would these people stop now when they knew exactly where she was going? But of pretty much everything else she had no idea. Like, who were these people after her? And if she did get away from them in Sydney, where exactly was she going to escape to?
Follow the signs, Sera had said. Huh. Great help there. I’m so sure there’ll be signposts in Australia to tell me exactly where to find Luke Black, my brother. Right. And if Sam really admitted it, she wasn’t even sure she wanted to meet her twin. The very little Seraphina had told her was not exactly promising.
‘What’s he like?’ she’d asked.
‘Well, he’s a lot like you, really,’ said Sera. ‘Except pretty much the opposite.’
When Samantha had spat a stream of words that would have made Lala cry and Esmeralda shove a piece of soap down her throat, Sera had made herself a little clearer.
‘All right, all right,’ she’d said. ‘Well, what the Grand Council has been able to learn is that your mother – endeavouring to conceive your brother – teleported herself into the cell of Harlan Craven. He must have been pretty surprised. Your mother was a very beautiful woman, Samantha.’
‘Did you say into his cell?’ she’d asked.
‘Well, yes. Unfortunately, Harlan Craven was a serial killer serving life in permanent solitary confinement at the SuperMax correctional facility in Australia. We think he may have been a daemon.’
The droning sound in Samantha’s ears had increased. This isn’t really happening, she’d told herself. Ever since she’d entered the Funhouse, she’d been repeating the line like a mantra every few minutes.
‘Anyway, what we’re assuming your mother did not know – because it was not part of the Telling,’ Sera continued, ‘is that this terribly romantic liaison would result in her conceiving not one, but two babies. Twins. You, and Luke, your brother.’
‘My father was a daemon?’ said Samantha.
‘Probably just a minor one,’ said Sera.
Oh, much better.
And then Birthday Jones had found his voice. It sounded anxious, and that had made Sam feel vicious. What did
he
have to be anxious about?
‘Are you sure you want to know all this right now, Samantha?’ he’d said. ‘A lot has happened tonight, and you’ve got a massive trip ahead of you. Aren’t you tired?’
‘Oh, thanks for that advice, Birthday,’ she’d said. ‘And the next time I want advice from a deceiving, lying thief masquerading as a friend, I’ll be sure to call you.’
Now her cheeks coloured, remembering the dripping sarcasm and the pain she’d felt it cause Birthday. She pulled her feet up onto the seat and buried her face in the rug.
‘Anyway, Sam,’ Sera had said gently, ‘the most important point is that you seem to have been born with exceptionally strong empathy skills. Your brother was not. You understand what people want and why and you care about those things. And your brother – well, he doesn’t.’
Sera’s last sentence was spoken so quickly that Samantha had had to mentally rewind it and play it back.
‘So I have empathy,’ she’d said, finally.
‘Oodles,’ said Sera. ‘You’re an empath.’
‘And my brother, Luke, doesn’t have empathy.’
‘Not a skerrick,’ said Sera.
‘What does that mean? Is there a name for that? What’s wrong with him?’
‘Well, there is a nasty name for people like that,’ said Sera. ‘But you need to understand that there are extremely complex forces and factors going on here, and then there’s the fact that
you and he were born simultaneously. We don’t know what that adds to the mix – he could be … fine. The Telling reveals that –’
‘The name,’ Samantha repeated. ‘You said that I’m an empath. What’s the name for my brother?’
Sera coughed.
‘Well, he’s a psychopath.’
When Luke rolled over and spotted the time on the alarm clock by his bedside, he couldn’t believe it.
Afternoon already! He never slept late and he never slept well. In fact, he couldn’t remember ever having made it through a whole night without waking numerous times to check out what was happening around him in the dark. He’d lived in too many places with drunken ‘uncles’, brawling foster parents, or other kids in refuges and lockups who wanted to steal his stuff. He always slept lightly, and he rarely changed out of his day clothes, sometimes even sleeping with his shoes on, ready to run.
But there was something about this bed, this house, this view over Elizabeth Bay that relaxed him. Relaxation was a feeling entirely new to him. He’d always considered the idea of it overrated: who wanted to let their guard down? What a stupid idea. But here in Georgia’s house, it seemed to come easily. He reminded himself to become filthy rich sometime in the near future.
Luke sat up on the edge of the bed and stretched. Today, I really should do something about finding my family, he
thought. He tried to ignore the other voice in his mind asking, Why? Why do you need to find them? You’ve only got information on Liza and Daniel anyway, and they’re hardly gonna be thrilled to find their jailbird bastard brother on their doorstep. And what are they going to know about an empath and a genius?
The whole Telling mumbo-jumbo was starting to sound decidedly lame. Probably Zac actually
was
nuts.
He shook his head, still feeling sleep-addled.
His door burst open.
‘I’ve made brunch,’ said Georgia.
‘Get dressed,’ said Zac, right behind her. ‘I need you to come with me.’
‘Don’t you knock?’ said Luke.
‘You don’t need him, Zac,’ said Georgia, smiling sweetly. ‘You’re a big boy; you can go out on your own.’
She was obviously in a good mood today. She’d given in to a splash of colour: under a black mini-dress, a blood-red tulle skirt frothed and foamed over black-and-white-striped tights.
‘There’s a shop on the corner,’ she said to Zac. ‘There’s fifty dollars in the jar by the front door. Buy whatever you like.’
‘Luke,’ said Zac.
‘Zac,’ said Luke.
‘Could you come to the shop with me, please?’
Luke wavered. It would be good to get some fresh air …
Georgia stalked across the room and grabbed Luke by the elbow, dragging him out of bed.
‘No, he won’t,’ she said. ‘Just because you want to buy soy sausages and hay, it doesn’t mean you have to spoil our pancake breakfast. Now, shoo.’
Luke grinned over his shoulder at Zac as he was dragged down the hallway by Georgia.
‘Pancakes!’ he mouthed silently, his eyebrows almost meeting his hairline and his dimples out for a rare showing.
‘Breakfast time was over hours ago,’ said Zac loudly. ‘It’s past lunchtime now.’
‘Oh, um-ah!’ said Georgia, even louder. ‘Someone should do something about that. Maybe you should find a vegetarian policeman while you’re out, Zac, and make a full report. They can come and arrest us for sleeping late and murdering butter.’
Luke laughed as Georgia led him, barefoot, down the stairs to the kitchen.
Luke absolutely
massacred
the Halo aliens on Level Four.
‘I’ve never made it that far,’ said Georgia, sprawled out on the red lounge beside him, striped-stockinged feet in his lap. She alternately flicked through a magazine and watched his progress on Halo. The black cat lay upside down beside her, spread like an oil slick across the couch. Every now and then the cat made a noise like an old man with a back problem lowering himself into a chair.
‘More nachos?’ said Georgia.
‘I’m good,’ said Luke, and belched, hovering his thumb over the control to enter Level Five.
He tried to ignore Zac, perched on a corner of the lounge opposite, almost humming with tension. The rain splashed and smashed at the full-length windows on the other side of the room. Green-black clouds, pregnant with more foul weather, scudded across grey skies over the bay. He still felt strangely super-tired.
‘Are we going to do anything today, Luke?’ said Zac.
‘Like what?’ said Luke, grabbing a handful of nachos from the big bowl in front of him, even though he was already uncomfortably full.
‘Like finding the empath?’ said Zac.
‘What’s the empath?’ said Georgia. ‘Some kind of animal activist? Maybe you should search for it online, Zac? There are computers upstairs.’
‘Luke?’ said Zac.
‘Busy,’ said Luke, pressing the button to enter Level Five.
Samantha woke to find that she’d just slept for ten hours straight.
She freaked.
She had meant to use her time in the sky to plan her Sydney airport escape. She quickly calculated her remaining hours in the sky. When she realised that she had almost another whole day just sitting there, she figured that if she couldn’t come up with some kind of plan in that time, she was never going to.
She knew that these people – whoever they were – would try again. They’d been there in London, and she assumed they could arrange for someone to grab her in Australia. Seraphina had assured her that the gypsy king was nowhere near her greatest threat, and that his reach did not extend beyond Romania. But because of this Telling thing, the other people trying to capture her would use any means necessary to do so, and they wanted her alive. But Sera hadn’t been able to tell her if the gypsy king was part of the whole prophecy drama or not. But he had to be: why else had he suddenly turned up and wanted to own her, whatever the cost?
The Telling made absolutely no sense to Samantha and
she’d told Sera exactly that.
‘Well, that’s because I’ve only told you bits and pieces about it,’ Sera had said.
‘Well, isn’t it about me? I need to know everything,’ she’d responded.
‘It’s not only about you, Samantha,’ said Sera. ‘It’s about everyone, and I’m not authorised to tell you more than you need to know.’
‘Who says so?’
‘The Grand Council.’
‘Well, who are they?’
‘That’s another thing you don’t need to know.’
This was one of many times during those frustrating conversations that Samantha wanted to just walk away and ignore everything this woman had told her. Only one thing stopped her – Seraphina had warned her that her family and friends would never be safe while she remained in Romania.
‘Their next strategy,’ said Sera, ‘will be to hurt one of your family, to weaken you. They’ll then abduct someone else you love and force you to come to them.’
‘How do you know that?’ said Samantha.
‘Because they know that everyone has a weak spot, and it’s usually their family,’ said Sera. ‘The only way that Lala and the rest of the camp will be safe is if you’re as far away from them as possible, if they have no idea where you are, and if you stay on the move until you find your brother. These people won’t stop.’
So on the plane, Samantha leaned her forehead against the window, peering out into the night, and tried to come up with as many strategies as she could to make it out of Sydney airport. She began by thinking through every chase she could
remember – running with the other kids from Gaje farmers, shopkeepers, police – recalling just how high she could climb and how small she could make herself when she needed to jump over, under or through something.