Taking Flight (14 page)

“Marcus?” she tried again, but still was met with silence.

The excitement that was bubbling away in her chest subtly turned to doubt then fear. She was sure this was the same clearing and confirmed it by finding a length of rope near to where she’d left her lover. Panic set in as she picked it up and stuffed it into her bag.

Trying to soothe herself with images of Marcus lying in the undergrowth, sleeping off his headache, she called one last time. “Come on, sweetie, don’t play games. I’m getting worried.”

An eerie male laugh settled her for a second as she mistook it for Marcus’s.

“So, you’re back.” Denva’s cruel sneer hit her right in the solar plexus, knocking the wind out of her.

“Where’s my Marcus?” she asked, her tone hard and sharp.

He stepped forward and laughed in her face. “He’s not
your
Marcus anymore.” Denva grabbed her wrist and pulled her so close she could taste his rancid breath. “He’s theirs.”

“Who are ‘they’?” Deborah was trembling but tried her best to keep her voice level.

Denva just laughed and snatched the bag from her, dragging her roughly along behind him. Her face was burning with rage, humiliation, and fear. If she struggled or slowed, his grip became tighter, his pull more forceful so she could do nothing but fall in step, hoping he would lead her to Marcus.

By the time they arrived at the roadside, any clothes Deborah had been wearing were completely tatty and useless, her legs were scratched and bleeding, and bits of twigs and leaves clung to her hair. They stopped and she could make out an old-fashioned cart, the kind that had been motorized once, but now had a sad, emaciated-looking horse at its helm. Her heart lurched as she saw a male figure slumped in the back and she started to run toward it. A swift, sharp yank from Denva stopped her in her tracks.

“No, no, no,” he said smoothly, taking control of her again. “Here’s your ride coming now.”

Deborah looked up the road as the slow
clip-clop
of a cart being dragged along by another old nag struck her ears.

“But…” She could barely breathe. Marcus was just there; surely she could go to him?

Denva wound the rope she herself had stuffed into the bag around her wrists and pulled her toward the cart and away from Marcus.

“Marcus!” she screamed with her very soul, but he didn’t stir. “What have you done to him?” she pleaded as Denva shoved her up into the custody of the other cart driver.

“It was you who left him like that,” he quipped and tied the rope to the seat in front of her. The driver handed him a bunch of grubby notes and Denva made a great show of counting each and every one of them.

“For God’s sake, Denva, have I ever cheated you before?” The driver sounded pissed off, as if she was used to dealing with the trader’s crooked ways. She briskly pulled up the hood of her cloak and gave the horse’s rump a good thwack with a whip. The poor beast seemed to barely register the beating and slowly began to move forward.

For a moment, Deborah thought they might be pulling up alongside the cart which held Marcus, but the driver tugged the reins to the right and away. Deborah thrashed and struggled with all her might, screaming her lover’s name, but nothing changed. She was still being led away and he was still slumped and silent in the opposite direction.

The hypnotic lurch and sway of the cart began to lull Deborah into a doze. The driver had thrown her a blanket as the cool night began to set in and she’d managed to hang it haphazardly around her shoulders, a hard task considering her bindings. Strange, fearful, and arousing images flew around in her half dreaming mind...probing fingers, deep heartbeats, and close-up faces with hot, hot breath speaking to her in dangerous tongues.

A bump into a pothole woke Deborah abruptly and the images scattered, leaving her in a confusing state of arousal with dampening between her thighs. She was angry—how dare her body betray her so? She would be dry and celibate until she found Marcus again, and she clamped her legs shut as a seal of her promise.

Looking around, she began to feel a familiarity to her surroundings. This had been her neighborhood. She held her breath as they turned along the entrance to her street. The guard must know—surely this couldn’t just be a coincidence?

Deborah sat up straight, watching the houses like a distant memory as they lumbered past them. Most looked abandoned. All of them were in complete darkness, and no streetlamps lit the way. The horse drew ever closer to her house and Deborah stiffened, sure that they would stop there. What did the guard want to find? It must be her papers. Slowly, the horse continued on its way and walked straight past the house as Deborah’s neck twisted.

“Stop!” She leaned forward, nudging at the driver’s back. “Stop, that’s my house.”

“Is it?” The driver seemed genuinely unaware. The horse drew to a halt just past the front lawn and Deborah stared at her hopefully. “What, do you want to go in?”

“I thought that’s why you brought me past, like you wanted me to find something for you.”

“Like what?”

“Oh, I don’t know.” Deborah rolled her eyes. “Like all my research papers into a cure for the toxins?”

The driver shrugged. “Listen, I just take whoever Denva gives me and deliver them on. I have no idea who you are. Look, do you want to go in or not?”

“Of course!” Deborah squealed, panicking when the driver made as if to move the cart on. “Please.”

The driver lumbered out and unhooked Deborah’s ties from the cart, leaving her wrists secure, then helped her down onto solid ground.

“I’ll have to escort you.”

Deborah nodded and held out her bindings. “Do you think you could untie me?”

“No.” The woman smiled good-humoredly. “Nice try. Do I look stupid or something?”

Deborah turned to look at the building which had once been her home. It looked so barren now, so void of any life or hospitality. She walked up the overgrown path slowly, with the driver close behind. The door hung open, its hinges buckled from being kicked in. It squealed in protest at being pushed as the two women went in to witness the disarray beyond.

As Deborah had suspected, scavengers had all but stripped the place of furniture and fixings. Bare wires dangled where lights had been taken, and even the walls had been stripped of their pictures. It was raw and exposed, naked, as if she had been cleaned of her own internal world. A lump rose in her throat as she moved toward the bedroom. She couldn’t bear to imagine it devoid of her and Marcus’s things. The driver must have sensed her apprehension and pushed the door open for her. To her amazement, the bed and its sheets were still there, disheveled but still with the memory of the two of them embedded in the rumpled fabric.

She threw herself onto it and buried her face into the pillows, trying to catch a tiny breath of his scent. Inhaling deeply, she found the faintest morsel and sobbed, trying to clutch it into her soul. As she pushed her face into the feather-filled softness, she came across a jarring, hard shape. A notebook. It was small and hidden inside the first layer of pillowcase. Deborah sat up abruptly and scratched and pulled at the material as best she could with tied wrists until feathers spilled out, filling the air around her in a flurry. Finally, she gripped the black leather notebook in her bound hands. She had never seen it before. With trembling fingers, she opened the covers to see Marcus’s handwriting. Tears fell down her cheeks and she wiped them away quickly in case they fell onto the ink and spoiled the words.

“Listen—” The voice of the driver clattered into her consciousness, and she snapped the book shut and held it to her chest. “I’ve got to get you to the depot, you know. We can’t be much longer.”

“Okay, okay.” Deborah was grateful the driver had let her come in, but her mind whirred with thoughts of Marcus and plans for escape. “Just let me have a quick look around the rest of the place.”

She was desperate to find some of her notes and papers, even though she knew they would be gone or destroyed. Holding the notebook tight to her chest, she shuffled off the bed and began looking around. Their escape cupboard was open and had obviously been rifled through, but the trapdoor remained concealed beneath a pile of detritus. Deborah smiled inwardly and remembered how nervous they’d been about it when they’d pulled the hatch down over themselves all those weeks—or was it months?—before.

She picked her way through clothing and broken bits of crockery to the kitchen, then the living room. Her desk was gone, files and folders emptied—only blank pages strewn across the floor. They must have taken all her words, all her numbers, formulas, thought processes, calculations, research. It was only now, seeing the crumpled paper, that Deborah felt robbed. If they’d been torn and scattered, or burnt, with the charred evidence proving their extinction, she could have taken some comfort from knowing they weren’t being used. But now she knew for sure that somebody had her life’s work in their hands and would be using that information. She hoped whoever it was would use it for the outcome she’d intended, not some genocide. Her mind flicked back to Hazel’s revelations around the fire and Deborah knew instinctively the papers were not in the hands of those using them for good.

She shivered as the sickening realization dawned that by being so thorough in logging the results of her investigations, she’d only succeeded in impeding the cure, not advancing it. Her vision tunneled and her legs gave way; the driver had to catch her and shake her back upright.

“Come on, we need to go, right now.” The driver hauled Deborah back to the cart and unceremoniously dumped her in the back.

As they trundled on through the dark, Deborah lay on the floor, rocking in time with the bumps and potholes in the road. Her hips and shoulders ached from being hurled back and forth but she couldn’t find the strength to climb onto the seat, so she lay there, clutching the notebook.

Deborah had just begun to drift off into a strange nightmarish sleep when the cart stopped and voices stirred her into full consciousness. She shuffled the book into her clothing and wedged it uncomfortably into her underarm. The driver came around and opened the door while Deborah hauled her stiff body free of the cart, taking the driver’s help and hanging on to her as she alighted.

“Listen, you’re going to have to show a bit more fighting spirit than this,” she whispered forcefully yet kindly to Deborah. “They’ll eat you for breakfast in here if you don’t.”

And with that, Deborah was passed into another set of arms and her fabric bindings were stripped off and replaced with handcuffs. She flinched as the cold metal tightened around her wrists and she was led by a strong-looking uniformed woman into the holding pen, as the driver had called it.

Deborah kept as obedient and quiet as she could while the guard barked orders for her to hurry up or come this way. Her upper arms were jammed into her ribcage to keep the notebook in place and she was sick with worry that she would be searched and it taken away. She hadn’t read a sentence yet and the thought of being able to see her lover’s handwriting and read his thoughts was the only thing that stopped her from falling on the ground and giving up. Eventually, the guard pushed her through a heavy, barred door into a cell which was crammed with a number of other disheveled, pale-looking women.

“You’ll remain here until summoned,” the guard snapped, uncuffing Deborah’s wrists before pushing her into the tightly packed cage.

The door slammed shut with a
clang
that echoed far longer than it should have. All the ledges were taken, and she squeezed herself into a patch on the concrete floor. Keeping her eyes fixed downward, thoughts of how small her world had become filled her brain. It was incredible how in such a short time, Deborah had almost forgotten her old life—full of work, people, socializing, and friends—and the forest, with only three other people, had become her whole world. She let her quizzical, scientific brain ponder this for a while and realized just how incredibly insular she had become. If shrinking her existence was her biology’s way of protecting her, she had embraced it wholeheartedly.

With reluctance, just to prove to herself that she could, Deborah lifted her gaze to look around at her cellmates. She was amazed at her utter lack of curiosity about these women and why they were there. She really had turned into a survival machine, concentrating solely on herself. Where had the inquisitive, determined mind gone? It seemed to have slipped into a fuddled haze of grief at being separated from Marcus.

Marcus.
As if he’d heard her, the notebook with his words inside suddenly dug hard into her ribs and upper arm. Taking another swift glance and realizing almost everyone else was also keeping quiet and still, minding their own business, Deborah let herself relax just enough to ease the tension in her body without dropping the book. Blood rushed to the numbed skin and she wriggled her fingertips up under her top to rub the pain away. Brushing the leather cover, she shivered, desperate to read what her lover had written. There was no way she could risk bringing it out and taking a peek. As if to thwart any temptation, the dim lights were shut off, plunging the cell and rooms beyond into darkness.

Chapter 15

At daybreak, after an uncomfortable sleepless night, Deborah was the first to be summoned. Her exit from the cell was punctuated by grumbling from some of the other women, who seemed to have been there for a while.

“Must be some fucking celebrity,” moaned one.

“Nah, a traitor more like,” another butted in.

Deborah walked through the door with the sound of spitting and hissing hitting her back. She clenched the notebook still jammed under her arm and obediently followed the striding guard.

“We’re not a bad bunch, you know,” the guard said over her shoulder, as if trying to comfort Deborah. “Just do as you’re told and you’ll be fine, really.”

“Thanks,” Deborah felt compelled to reply, as if the guard had offered her keys to get out. She rolled her eyes and kept walking, two steps for the guard’s one.