Everything was coming back to Sara now.
Raindrops pebble the windows as Sara stares through them to the front path, where her mother stands with two men holding umbrellas. They have come before but are never let in. The last time was months ago. A lot has changed since then. It’s just their mother and them now, and life feels precarious, a train coming off its tracks. Sara cannot see what they are saying as the umbrellas cover their heads.
The children flank their mother, as she carries a suitcase in each hand and steps off the bus. Phoebe is reading from directions written on the back of an envelope. The instructions guide them to a field outside of the town. Just when they are about to ask for directions, they see it. An abandoned air-force base. Two buildings either side of a runway, through which weeds sprout.
The two men give them a tour. Dobbs and Salt are their names, although Salt gets into a car and leaves within an hour. It’s the last time they will see him. Dobbs makes them food and shows them to their quarters. Their new home feels more comfortable than the house they’ve left, with its dirty, unmade beds, broken crockery on the floor and the perpetual sound of sobbing coming from behind the closed door.
Dobbs is not like any adult the children have ever met. He is kind and attentive. He cooks each meal for them and lays out their clothes on the bed each morning. The games they play with him are strange and alien, obstacle courses and fighting with long sticks. Every day is an adventure.
The arguments start after two years. They can hear their mother’s voice, shaky and wet with rage, the words indistinct, and Dobbs’ low murmured response, a Zen master facing down a lunatic.
A noise above surprised her, shaking her out of her reverie.
Caleb appeared half in half out of the opening in the ceiling, standing on the metal stairs.
‘Did you find what you were looking for?’
‘No, not yet,’ she replied. ‘But I know where my mother is.’
She walked to the stairs and began climbing up. Caleb climbed too, and was waiting for her when she appeared through the hole in the ground. Before leaving the stairs, she took a final look down at her great-grandmother’s study. Her mother had returned here, to reconnect with the past, as had her great-grandmother, the first of the family line who had suffered as a result of the British secret service. It was a refuge, a place where the family’s abilities could exist on their own terms. Although ultimately hidden. Would there ever be another option for her, between hiding and confrontation?
She suddenly felt woozy and she realized she had not eaten in almost twenty-four hours. She lost her balance and made a grab for the rail of the ladder. Caleb’s hand darted out and grabbed hers, his fist enclosing her bare wrist.
The moment their skin made contact, the colours of the world around her seemed to wash away until her surroundings resembled nothing more than a three-dimensional sketch space. A new world was superimposed on it, a virtual reality displacing her own.
She was on a metal platform looking at Caleb, who was standing on tiptoes, teetering on the edge. For a moment, he hung there, his windmilling arms keeping his centre of gravity sufficiently forwards, and then his body weight carried him over and he was in free fall. She ran to the edge to see him plummeting, hundreds of feet below her, finally being swallowed by huge, skyscraper-sized icebergs that violently clashed and scissored against each other in an ice-ocean. It was an impossible setting, like a dream. She watched as Caleb disappeared beneath the surface of the frozen water, knowing with certainty she had just witnessed the moment of his death.
She pulled her hand away from his as if she had just been burned and looked at him in shock.
‘What?’ asks Caleb.
Sara stares back, unsure of what to say.
‘Nothing,’ she says.