The woodland used to tease her with glimpses of daylight – little evanescent reminders that there was still a world out there beyond its trees and maybe even a second chance at a life worth living. She’d fantasised that its open skies could keep her safe, that she could return to some faded semblance of normality. Nothing would ever be the same as it was, of course; she knew that. But there’d still be art and there’d still be wine. Mina had dreamt of the sun’s golden warmth on her eyelids, the soft sink of a mattress, and a fridge full of food – all those silly things that she’d taken for granted before they’d been taken away. Conversations more adventurous than small talk with bar staff and the sage old flies that fluttered around their taps. She might even have found love, for what it was worth.
But the watchers refused to let their favourite pet spread her wings. From the coop to the city to the coast to here, every second of every day she’d been surviving one short step ahead of them, and her knees now weakened at the thought of carrying on the chase…
‘Who’s on the roof?’ Jennifer asked, her impatience flaring in a voice that was far too loud. ‘Mina, are you going to tell me what’s going on?’
Madeline’s bright eyes burned red in the light. ‘It’s better if you don’t know,’ she whispered. ‘And you will keep your voice down, do you understand me? If you want to stay alive, then you’ll have to be cleverer than this. And much, much quieter.’
Jennifer’s shoulders slackened, shedding that bogus inch that put her head above Mina’s. She never did enjoy a fight unless she thought she could win it, and the tone of Madeline’s voice had scuppered any misguided hopes on that front.
‘I can’t run anymore,’ Mina whimpered, suffering through a sudden dead weight in her bones. ‘What the fuck are we going to do, Madeline?’
She hadn’t slept soundly since her whiskey-induced coma in Caroline’s cottage, and even then she’d woken up feeling all the worse. It was a miracle that Mina was still standing. But the exhaustion, the hunger, and the thirst were irrelevant pains at this point. All she could imagine were the watchers’ skeletal bodies haunting the moonlit slates above her, listening out for the slightest sound, waiting – like the ancient hunters they were – for some weakness to take advantage of; the thought of which drew Mina to consider her sister and the reckless scepticism that the changelings preyed upon. One broken rule. One mistake. That’s all it ever took.
‘You’re tired,’ Madeline said, monitoring Mina’s well-being like she used to, assessing her chances, taking stock of how much of that old fighting spirit remained after all she’d been through.
‘I’m wrecked,’ Mina replied, conscious of the blood fizzling around her fingertips, ‘and these fucking red lights aren’t helping.’
The reception’s abandonment felt staged and unnatural, as if she’d accidently invaded the performance of some nightmarish play that her subconscious was still rehearsing. But this was really happening; Mina just had to keep reminding herself of that. She hadn’t taken in the room around her until now. The night before – when two Guards had carried her across its tiles like a broken mannequin – she’d seen only her own filthy socks and nothing else. Despite the nauseating glow that washed like the red death across every surface, the walls surrounding her looked nothing like those in her cell. They’d had all the charm of cheap polystyrene, whereas these were cut from proper stone and laid to last.
This must have been the old garrison element of the station that the good doctor had told her about, and the Brits who’d built it clearly weren’t strapped for cash. This room alone had withstood every hard test that time could throw at it. The two windows on the front wall were tall and narrow, penetrable only by the smallest bird – the kind probably used by soldiers to poke an arrow through if some unwelcome Irishman made a charge at them. They let in fuck all light, but that hardly mattered now. The building’s design complemented their situation, there was no doubt about that, and one of the many alarms in Mina’s brain seemed to blare a little quieter at that revelation. The station was sturdier than the coop had ever been. But then she looked to the door – to its empty keyhole.
‘Shit,’ she yelled, dropping the cage to the floor as she skidded back down the corridor. ‘Madeline, hold that door shut!’
The woman’s movements paralleled the same urgency that sent Mina dashing from the room. Why hadn’t she picked up on the weakness sooner? The woman’s fascination with locks and their keys was a pivotal trait of her odd personality, and now certainly wasn’t the time to change that.
‘What’s gotten into you two?’ she heard her sister say, shouting over the yellow one’s screeching.
Mina slid down on her knees beside the Guard and snatched the keys up from where they’d fallen. She would have dragged the man into the cell, if only to keep him safe, but there wasn’t time. He was still passed out and blissfully unaware of all that was happening around him. She scrambled to her feet and ran back to the reception, forcing through the aches that burned across every conscripted muscle.
‘Here,’ she gasped, throwing the ring of keys to Madeline who snatched them from the air and jammed one into the door, twisting it shut.
No fumbling. No second-guessing. The woman hadn’t lost her touch after all.
Mina rested both hands on her thighs and looked to Jennifer. ‘We have to check this place for any entry points. The other rooms aren’t as secure as this one.’
‘What’s going on?’ she asked, crossing her arms uncomfortably. ‘Where are all the Guards?’
‘There’s only one here,’ Mina replied, breathless, pointing back toward the lump outside her cell, ‘but there are others. I think they’re on a call or something; I don’t know.’
Jennifer peered down the corridor, eyeing up the unconscious Guard with aired disapproval. ‘What’s wrong with him? Why’s he lying down?’
Mina grinned over at Madeline. ‘He’s sleeping, Jen.’
‘Sleeping?’ she repeated, shaking her head. ‘This just gets better and better. Did one of you do that to him?’
Had she lent any belief to Mina’s warnings, she’d have known there were far more pressing worries than being incriminated in sending a Guard to sleep before his bedtime.
‘Just stay out of the way, Jen,’ she said, ‘and try to keep your fucking voice down.’
Mina noticed another door behind the reception’s front desk, its red-lit wood framed in shadow. She refused to stand still until she was sure the whole building was secure. There could have been any number of watchers out there, searching for some way in. And for all she knew, they’d already found one. Mina edged the door open and found a room little larger than her cell, and obviously an original part of the old build. Its only window – set high and out of reach – was impregnable as those in the reception, and all was basked in that same crimson hue. Across from some steel filing cabinets there was a desk. Atop it she saw a computer and an analogue station of radios, their many lights blinking green; any colour other than red was a welcome sight.
‘It’s a comms room,’ she called back to Madeline. ‘We could call for help?’
‘And risk more lives?’ she replied. ‘No, Mina. Nobody can help us now.’
‘But we have to do something.’
‘We stay alive,’ Madeline said. ‘Like we used to do, we wait for the sun to rise. You’re safe so long as you stay in here. Anyone who comes to our aid will be dead before they reach the front door.’
Memories of the woodland festered like a black mould in Mina’s mind, darkening her days in every way imaginable. They’d even tainted her senses, causing her to flinch at any touch or sound reminiscent of that time. The cold chalkiness of the coop’s concrete; the soil glistening silver in the morning dew; the chill of the spring water when she’d pat herself clean; the squeak of a damp nut between her teeth; the screams and the light and the unspoken expectation that each night might be her last. These horrors and more ran under her thoughts like a steady, endless stream. But that was then, and this was now. And if these fucking fairies wanted a bloody piece of her, then she wasn’t going to make it easy for them. She wasn’t their pet anymore.
Mina strode toward the window nearest the door. It was too quiet out there. There hadn’t been a step upon the roof since Madeline called their attention to them.
‘We need to talk,’ Jennifer said.
‘Not now, Jen,’ she replied as she drew her face to the glass, but not too close.
‘This is madness,’ her sister whispered under her breath.
‘Madness?’ Mina fired back. ‘If you had any sense you’d realise that I’m trying to keep you alive. So, yeah, you’re welcome.’
The night was never so dark out there. She couldn’t see past her own blood-red reflection. Whatever scant moonlight slipped through the clouds, its veneer was too weak to settle, like a fine snow flitting down onto damp earth, dead on arrival.
‘Madeline, come over here,’ she whispered. ‘I can’t see shit.’
The woman’s strides were long as they were stealthy, and she loomed behind her in seconds, inspecting the same sight, but not with the same eyes.
‘There’s nothing,’ she said eventually, having examined the black beyond the pane.
‘What do you mean nothing?’ Mina asked, turning to look at her.
‘I mean that there’s no one out there.’
Was Madeline brushing over the truth to keep her from freaking out? The way she’d stared so intently, Mina suspected that she’d seen something that she wasn’t sharing with her.
‘You’re sure about that?’
‘Am I sure about what, Mina?’ the woman asked impatiently.
Mina sighed in frustration. ‘That there aren’t like a hundred fucking watchers out there looking at me?’
‘I’m certain of that,’ Madeline replied. ‘One day you’ll learn to believe what I tell you without questioning it. You do realise it would make keeping you alive a whole lot easier.’
‘Well, you haven’t always been especially forthcoming with the truth now, have you?’
The woman exhaled hard through her nostrils. ‘It was for your own good, Mina.’
They stood side by side, Mina seeing nothing, and Madeline enjoying the view that may or may not have also been nothing. She could feel the woman’s arm brushing against hers, and almost forgot that she wasn’t human. Everything about her now was so convincing. Or maybe, Mina didn’t see the differences anymore. There were friends and there were monsters. And Madeline was the best friend she had left.
‘You didn’t have to leave, you know,’ Mina said, ‘when we arrived in the city. You could have stayed. You could have told me the truth then. I could have taken care of you, shown you how the world works.’
The woman’s body language remained mute as ever. ‘You know I couldn’t stay, Mina.’
‘I don’t believe that. We were a family. Me, you, Ciara, Daniel. We went through hell to get home. Things might be different if we’d stayed together.’
Madeline had been just as scared and lost as they were, trying to find her way in a world that none of them understood anymore.
‘He has a son,’ Mina said. ‘Kilmartin, I mean. He’s found something underground. I don’t know if it’s another fucking nest or what, but he’s got a whole team of archaeologists digging it up.’
She didn’t need to see Madeline’s face to feel the frown forming.
‘Where?’ the woman asked eventually.
‘The Burren. It’s this massive pile of rock in County Clare. He’s convinced it’s some lost part of his father’s research. And we both know what that bastard was into.’
Madeline’s breathing – always so calm and steady – hastened.
‘Sorry,’ Mina whispered as she recalled how fond the woman had been of the late professor. ‘Do you know what it might be?’
‘It’s not a nest, as you keep calling them,’ she replied. ‘It can’t be. When my kind went under the earth, they tunnelled through soil, not stone.’
‘So it’s all fine then?’ Mina said, indulging in a smile that felt almost unnatural, so rarely did she wear one. ‘Kilmartin’s kid isn’t going to unleash a whole load of monsters?’
Madeline’s silence wasn’t the answer she’d been hoping for.
‘I don’t know,’ she replied with worrying uncertainty.
Jennifer had been listening in but remained uncannily quiet. She glanced around her – to the locked door and the communications room – mulling over some indecision that Mina worried might have the audacity to get them all killed.
‘You okay, Jen?’ she asked her.
Her sister turned her back on her – a far more effective response than words.
‘Wait here,’ Madeline said before breaking away and striding purposefully toward the corridor. ‘We need to seal this room off from the others. But I want to inspect the rest of the building first. Here, Mina,’ she said, offering her the keys. ‘In case they’re already inside, lock you and your sister in that comms room that you found.’
Mina shook her head. ‘I’m not—’
‘You’ll do as you’re told,’ Madeline said sternly. ‘You know what they’re capable of. You’ve seen it with your own eyes, so don’t argue with me. We have not got the time.’
The woman paced down the corridor, leaving Mina no choice but to relent.
‘Can you put the Guard in my cell?’ she called after her. ‘Please!’
‘I was going to,’ Madeline replied without missing a step. ‘We don’t need to be babysitting another person who can’t keep their voice down.’
Whatever makeshift plans Mina had concocted for keeping them alive, she knew that the best chance they had rested on Madeline’s judgement. She dragged herself over to the front desk and slid her back down against it. With the weight of a thousand worries pinning her to the floor, she stretched out her legs and let the keys drop to the tiles. Just a moment, that’s all she needed. She cupped her face in her hands as the walls orbited around her, spinning at a speed all too similar to a bad shot of whiskey on an empty stomach. Between breaths, the yellow one could be heard chirping out some words of encouragement. He was somewhere by her feet, but she couldn’t prise her eyes open to look at him.
‘It’s okay,’ she whispered, waiting for the floor to even out. ‘Everything’s going to be fine. When all this is over, we’re going to sleep for a week.’
Mina had sold the little guy so many lies, it was a wonder he kept on buying them. Being entrusted to her safekeeping was some of the worst luck for any conure, but she was the luckiest girl alive to have had him by her side through all of this. He was that golden ray of sunshine glinting through those dark clouds that followed her wherever she went. A line of white light suddenly swiped across the wall. Mina’s head jolted back, dazed by any colour that wasn’t red. It took her a benighted moment to grasp what had happened – it was the headlights of a car. Someone had pulled up outside the station. She clambered awkwardly to her feet and ran to the window where Jennifer was already standing.
‘It’s the Guards,’ her sister said with no short measure of relief, ‘finally!’
The woman’s naïveté was on par with her stubbornness if she thought that this was a welcome turn of events.
‘We have to warn them,’ Mina said, leaning in beside her. ‘Fuck, Jen, what do we do? They’ll never see us through these skinny windows.’
Their car had parked on the side of the road, behind a low wall, directly across from the path leading to the door. They were probably just as baffled as Jennifer as to why the whole building had been left without power.
‘Mina,’ she said, powdering her voice with condescension, ‘try to calm down, will you? Like you said, you’re not guilty of any crime. There’s no need to be so antsy. Maybe what you need is some help. The Guards can keep you safe from these monst—’
‘You don’t get it, Jen,’ Mina shouted, backing away from the window. ‘They’re real. The monsters are fucking real!’
She scrambled back to the communications room, gripping its doorframe as she skidded around to the table of radios. The preciousness of each passing second meant life or death for the two men outside. Mina grabbed the first one that her fingers found and fumbled about in the ruby red half-light for a button or some way to activate it. She hadn’t a clue what she was doing, and the plastic brick in her hands wasn’t offering any helpful suggestions. Like a child all too aware of her own shortcomings, Mina wished that Madeline were there to take control of the situation.
‘Hello, hello,’ she said after feeling something sink under her thumb, ‘can you hear me? Do not get out of the car. I repeat, do not get out of the car.’
Mina waited, staring at the green light, desperately hoping for something – anything – but nothing came. Time was up. She heard a furtive step above her head. The watchers were moving into position.
‘Fuck, fuck, fuck,’ she muttered, throwing the radio onto the table. ‘Jen, try to get their attention through the window!’
She dashed back through the doorway, glancing first towards her cell where Madeline had yet to reappear, and then Mina saw her sister standing at the front door. She’d already reinserted the key into its lock. Her hand was primed to open it. Mina had left them on the floor. This is why Madeline should have always been left in charge of them.
‘Jen, what are you doing?’
The desk stood like a high hurdle between them. Even if Mina had the strength to run, she’d never make it to the door in time.
‘I’m sorry, Meens,’ Jennifer said. ‘I’m not playing along with this game anymore. I’ve watched you and this Madeline woman, and it’s not healthy. It’s not right. You’re sick, both of you. I’m just going to go outside and talk to them. I’ll tell them that you’re not well, okay? They’ll under—’
‘Don’t open that door, Jen, please,’ Mina said, her voice breaking. ‘You don’t understand what they are.’
‘Your monsters? The ones you’ve been trying to drown in the bottom of a whiskey bottle? Can you not see that something’s wrong with you, Meens? Don’t you get it? Did you ever stop and think for a second why these changelings are always after you?’
Mina was the reason that her sister’s perfect life had come to inhabit that station. She’d invited her head first into her own private hell – a life so bruised and broken it hardly resembled a life at all. She shouldn’t have given the Guards her number, but she had nobody else. They’d forced her hand to name somebody – anybody – who might care enough to count as her next of kin. And this was the best candidate she had for the job.
‘It’s because of what happened to Mum, isn’t it?’ Jennifer said. ‘God, why can’t you let it go? All that self-pity, Meens, it’s not healthy. Hating your own reflection. Hating me. No wonder you’re so fucked up.’
‘They’re real, Jen,’ Mina pleaded, ignoring the spite and the cruelty. ‘You have to believe me.’
‘Well,’ Jennifer said, standing high on the tips of her toes, ‘I’m not scared of them, Mina. These things in your head don’t exist and I’m not going to let them spook my little sister anymore.’
‘You were born thirteen minutes before me,’ Mina said, trying anything to keep the conversation going until Madeline returned.
‘Exactly,’ Jennifer said as the door opened and the cool night’s air snaked inside.
‘Please,’ Mina shouted, throwing her hands out, ‘don’t do this! I’ll never ask anything from you again, Jen, ever! I promise. After tonight you can leave and I’ll disappear. You’ll never see me again. But just, please, for me – for Mum – don’t go out there.’
‘There are no such things as monsters, Mina, and I’m going to prove it to you. And I am doing this for Mum. I’m just glad she never saw you like this.’
The door swung shut behind her. There was the sudden tapping of more footsteps, all of them trickling like a cascade of broken teeth towards the front of the building. The predators were being rewarded for their patience. Mina bounded over to the door, passing by the yellow one who was flaying his little wings in warning. She drew it open just enough to peep outside. The thought of the watchers, poised and bloodthirsty, waiting for her to stray out of the light, kept her tied to the threshold. This was rule number one, and none who broke it ever survived to break another; it’d been branded so deeply into her psyche that even now, with her sister on the brink of slaughter, she was helpless to save her. Mina could only watch as Jennifer marched towards the two Guards now standing by their car, all three of them oblivious to the black eyes studying them from atop the station’s roof.
‘Jen,’ she screamed, ‘come back inside, please!’
Her sister turned – slowly, as only a warped moment in time could capture – and Mina realised just how far they’d drifted from one another. There was no love in the woman’s eyes; not even the weakest shade of it. There was only disappointment. She was like a master abandoning some mutt on the side of the road, too uninterested in its old life to give it a chance at a better one, and so heartless as to not think twice about it. It was like staring at a drawing of herself – the kind Mina would scratch out after two bottles of wine and have no recollection of come the morning. The same anger, the same regret, the same fucking pride. The only traits they’d shared were the kind that nobody wanted. They looked to each other now – to the stranger who wore each other’s face. But whereas Jennifer saw only Mina, the Guards behind her raised their heads. They’d seen that which her sister had not.
‘Please,’ Mina called out to her, desperately trying one last time, ‘don’t do this.’
One of the men – so paralysed by the sight of them – fell back against his car. He didn’t utter a word. He didn’t have to. The fear in his eyes screamed loud enough. The other Guard reacted in kind, stranded somewhere between fight and flight, too terrified to commit to either.
Jennifer glanced over to them, and then back to her sister, and finally she looked up – to where the monsters must have been staring right back down at her. Mina recognised that face. It was the one she’d studied in the mirrored pane night after night, painted from cheek to cheek with fear’s awful paleness. The watchers’ shrieks came as she knew they would, tearing through the night’s starry seams, as chilling as the first night she’d heard them. The slates of the roof pounded as they launched themselves into the air, and Mina was suddenly wrenched back from the door before Madeline slammed it shut.
‘What do you think you’re doing?’ the woman growled as she dropped to the floor beside her.
She’d tried to squirm back to her sister. But Madeline had her pinned on her back. Those seconds just gone were shuffled and cast into the air, their order lost. The woman had held the door closed as Mina heard the watchers slap down onto the ground outside. They’d snarled and hissed so vehemently that the panicked cries of the two Guards were all but lost. If there were only four of them out there, then why did their unearthly voices now ring through the night with the volume of thousands? And yet, worse still, between the savagery, Jennifer’s screams sounded identical to Mina’s, and she could only listen as they were whipped into the distance, taken flight like an eagle snatching away its prey. And then came the death throes of those poor men – a coda of broken bone and agony whose bloody stains wouldn’t be discovered until the dawn.
‘What happened?’ Madeline asked, still trapping Mina to the tiles.
Even if the woman relinquished her hold on her, she hadn’t the strength to lift a shoulder off the floor. It didn’t seem real, and that numb limbo between fantasy and reality had erased any thoughts that would have otherwise terrorised her to tears in that second.
‘Jen,’ she wheezed, more a breathless sound than a name she’d known.
Mina pictured her sister still standing outside the door, frozen in that moment before the watchers descended. She was gone. And yet Mina didn’t believe it. She refused to. Whether she liked it or not, Jennifer had always been there, since the second she was born, criticising and trumping her in all of life’s challenges, and now – now she wasn’t.
‘The Guards came,’ Mina replied, staring lifelessly at the foggy red bulb on the ceiling. ‘Jen took my keys. She wouldn’t listen. I told her not to go out there but—’
‘She did,’ Madeline said, finally releasing her.
Mina struggled onto her elbows, unsure of how exactly she came to be lying there. The violence outside had quit to silence. There was only the sound of her bones cracking as she sat further forward. She listened out for her sister’s footsteps. Maybe, she thought, Jennifer had swallowed her pride and was making her way back to apologise. She’d seen the monsters with her own eyes. What more proof could she have possibly needed to believe her?
Madeline lifted to her feet. ‘You know better than to go out there, don’t you, Mina? I trust you’re not going to do anything stupid.’
‘I won’t,’ she replied with a short shake of her head. ‘I know the rules.’
That’s all she knew. The door stayed shut until the sun rose again, and that was the one rule that couldn’t be argued against. It didn’t open when John had come back to them, and it wouldn’t open now, no matter who came knocking. Life was simpler with rules, so long as Mina abided by them. Madeline looked to the ceiling and tilted her head, lending her ear a better angle to listen, appearing more hunter than prey as she homed her senses in on their surroundings. Meanwhile, the yellow one was sitting quietly on his beam. If he’d made a peep in the past five minutes then Mina hadn’t heard him.
‘Where are they?’ she whispered, wrapping both arms around her knees. ‘Are they still out there?’
The woman’s gaze lowered. ‘I don’t know. I can’t hear them.’
In the plaintive silence that followed, the absence of Jennifer’s constant criticisms became more and more poignant, like a shadow growing in the sinking sun.
There had been two. And now there was only one.
Madeline paced over to the window and looked out, craning her neck from side to side to take in all that she could.
‘What do you see?’ Mina asked as she battled back onto her feet.
‘Nothing,’ Madeline replied.
‘Can you please describe nothing to me?’
‘If you insist,’ she said grudgingly. ‘Most of the blood is around the vehicle. Someone’s intestines are on the windshield. The bodies must be on the road but I can’t see them because of the wall. Though whatever’s left of them can’t be much.’
Mina crept in beside her, painting the nothingness with Madeline’s words.
‘What about my sister?’
‘Your sister is gone, Mina,’ she replied, withholding her sympathies. ‘If her body is out there somewhere, I can’t see it. But it’s dangerous to pretend that she’s still alive. You’ve seen it before, when Ciara thought her dead husband had returned to her. Should you hear your sister’s voice, then I expect you to know that it isn’t her.’
‘You mean, that wasn’t John?’ she asked, thinking back to that night, when their friendships first faltered to the sound of the dying man’s screams.
‘No, Mina, it wasn’t.’
‘But how can you be so sure?’
Madeline didn’t take her eyes from the glass as she spoke. ‘Because no one escapes, Mina. The woodland is a trap and none who enter it ever find their way back out. It disorientates your kind in the most mystifying ways – twisting you around in circles, blinding you to your surroundings, distracting you with your own fears and memories. Nothing can be done about it. To keep a straight line is impossible. And man’s technologies are useless there. Even something as rudimentary as a compass will never find its north.’
She’d spoken so sadly that Mina knew better than to doubt her. And yet…
‘You used a compass to get us out of there,’ she said. ‘Remember, we found it in Kilmartin’s safehouse.’
‘Did you examine it for yourself?’ Madeline asked her.
‘Of course I…’ She stopped as the true memory manifested from the fog. ‘Wait, no. I don’t think I even touched it.’
‘If you had, Mina, then maybe you wouldn’t have been so brave as to follow me. And I couldn’t have that.’
Mina’s face iced over with disbelief. ‘It’s a trap,’ she echoed.
‘Only a changeling can come and go as they please,’ Madeline said, ‘and only in my company could you ever have escaped as you did.’
That day, when she’d wandered into the woodland with a rolled cigarette in one hand and a caged bird in the other, it was terrifying how quickly she’d lost her bearings.
‘You knew John didn’t stand a chance.’
The woman didn’t flinch. ‘We should go before they come back.’
‘Go?’ Mina repeated despairingly. ‘Go where? I don’t have anywhere to go, Madeline.’
‘To Kilmartin’s son,’ she replied, collected as ever.
‘But I thought you said it wasn’t a nest?’
‘I don’t know what it is, Mina. But if the professor’s research has led his son there, then I suspect it must be something. How far away are we?’
Mina raked a hand down her face as she tried to visualise a bird’s eye view of the west of Ireland. Given what Flanagan had told her, they were on the right side of Galway, close enough to the border of County Clare, where Sean Kilmartin was picking away at the Burren like a lock on Pandora’s box.
‘Less than an hour, I’d say,’ Mina replied as she trudged back to the reception’s desk.
She frisked around the red shapes cluttered around its shadows. A plastic cup of pens rolled to the floor before her fingers felt the keys. One of them must have belonged to the car she’d seen parked outside the window of her cell.
‘We have wheels,’ she called out to Madeline.
‘What good are wheels going to do, Mina? We need a whole car.’
She chuckled through her exhaustion. ‘Don’t ever change, Madeline.’