They found themselves in the rotting corpse of a gift shop.
Ing Enterprises hadn’t bothered to clear the old place out. As Thea’s eyes grew accustomed to the gloom, she made out display cabinets and shelves still full of the souvenirs that sightseers would have snapped up to gift to unsuspecting relatives who would, in turn, donate them to charity as soon as they could. A row of cuddly monks grinned at her, dust cataracts dimming their eyes.
Rory slammed the door shut and Rosie sank to the ground.
The windows were grimy, but Thea tried to peer through, scanning what she could see of the sky.
‘Do you think it’ll be able to see anything through those windows?’ Thea cast around for somewhere to hide.
‘It won’t need to if it’s got thermal vision,’ Rory said.
‘Huh?’
‘Heat detector spots the heat from our bodies – but it might not be able to do that through these walls.’
They quickly checked the windows didn’t open, piled anything heavy in front of the door and then they pressed themselves against the walls on either side of a window, Rosie slumped under the sill.
Drones. To Thea, drones were wobbly, whirring things that children flew in the park, an upgrade on the old toy helicopter. Or they would one day deliver parcels, though no one was very clear when that day would come. The ones she’d read about and seen, they would not help blow up a building; they would not hunt and track and use horrible little sensors on their horrible whirring bodies to hunt down three people who only wanted to get off an island.
Thea was breathing too hard.
She tried to think of something else. And there she was. Back on the green but it was daylight, a bright winter day with just enough sun to keep the chill at bay if you wrapped up warm. There was the smell of the grass and Rosie’s chatter, and they had their lunch spread out before them, sorted into piles of “healthy”, “too healthy” and “too healthy to actually eat”. Then there was Rory with his chocolate, his stolen contraband, and in that freeze-frame of sun and with the sugary sweetness starting to melt on her tongue, in that moment, though she hadn’t realized it at the time, she’d been happy. She’d fit in.
‘We’re going to die, aren’t we?’ Rosie’s face was pale and big-eyed, her swelling and bruising still vivid blues and greens, the dingy bandage hiding the worst of it.
Thea couldn’t get her mouth to open to offer any comforting words; the signal between it and her brain had fritzed.
‘I saw a programme about field mice during a harvest,’ Rosie continued, dreamily. ‘The harvester comes, churning up all the wheat, cutting it down, rolling over it and the field mice they run, and they run but they can only get so far. In the end they have nowhere left to run. The harvester gets them. Chopped-up little field mice.’
Rosie’s voice took on a faraway quality, as if she wasn’t really talking to anyone, only herself. When she’d been little, Thea had read a book about a field mouse family who had escaped the spinning blades of the harvester, despite one of the little baby mice being ill and unable to move. She couldn’t remember now how they’d done it. But she wanted to tell Rosie about it, about how the mice could escape, after all.
‘That’s us, isn’t it?’ Rosie continued. ‘We’re chopped-up little field mice. We just haven’t quite got to the end of the field.’
She rested her head against the wall and closed her eyes.
‘Rosie, keep your eyes open,’ Rory whispered, bending to nudge her shoulder.
‘Why? I’m tired.’
Thea wanted to sink down with her. Her eyes had begun to throb, holding the beat of a miserable tune that only they could sense. The floating black shapes in front of them melted into the general gloom, which was worse because now the whole place pulsed and squirmed as if she’d got herself stuck in a very dark lava lamp. She blinked a few times, her eyelids almost sticking together each time she did so.
One of the blinks went on longer than she’d meant it to. With a jolt, she bobbed her head up again.
Blink.
Blink.
Bli—
Pain shot through her hand. She’d stabbed herself in the palm with the scissors she’d been carrying in her pocket. Keeping the point embedded she wiggled it slightly, feeling the pain needle, a white-hot focus for her mind.
Just as she was thinking perhaps they had been wrong, perhaps the drone hadn’t spotted them after all, that it had just turned in their direction on its own special, drone business – just as she was allowing herself to think of getting to Delores’s boat … something scratched the wall directly behind her.
Thea and Rory tensed.
A bumping, skittery scratch, like a drunken bumblebee careening away from its flower of choice. A questing, snouty little scratch.
Bump, scrape. Bump, scratch.
It came again.
Bump, rasp.
Then, lazily, it made its way along the wall until it knocked and buzzed against the window in the middle of them.
A light flashed in.