Later that day, Lyssa woke with a start, eyes wide and alert, the tendons in her neck straining as she tried to get up before she had even registered her surroundings. She flopped back into the sofa cushions when she saw Titus and the room around her. As unfamiliar as it was, it was a world away from her previous prison and enough to take away that instinct to run.
Wordlessly, Titus held a glass of water to her lips and she drank long and deep.
“You’re in my new house,” Titus said, pre-empting the question. “Remember? It’s in a place called Queen Square in Miri’s territory.”
Lyssa frowned and then made an attempt to get up that her weakened body simply couldn’t realise. “Miri?” she croaked. “That woman with long hair?” Titus nodded and Lyssa frowned. “Why are you staying in her territory? What’s the price you’re paying?”
“No, you don’t understand –”
“There’s always a price,” she interjected hoarsely. “Didn’t I teach you anything?”
Titus scowled at the implication that he’d been lax. “She’s different. A lot’s happened.”
“Evidently,” she said wryly, looking at her emaciated arms. She sank back, accepting her inability to stand for the moment. “I think you’d better fill me in.”
Titus paused. “Long or short version?”
“Short, I’m so tired. And hungry.” Titus gave her an apple from a fruit bowl newly stocked from Miri’s garden. Her eyes widened. “Wow, how many of these have you found?”
Titus smiled. “There are ten apple trees outside, and plums, pears, strawberries, raspberries, and grapes, Lyssa, actual, real grapes like in the pictures!”
She listened, enraptured as she sank her teeth into the apple’s juicy flesh. He watched her bliss with open joy and then remembered what she’d asked.
“Do you remember us going down the road past Euston station that night?” She shook her head. “Oh.”
“I remember us finding a house with a cellar and there being lots of good stuff hidden in it,” she ventured between bites.
He frowned. “That was a few days before you …” His voice trailed off as he realised just how much she had forgotten. “You don’t remember Jay?”
“Who’s Jay?”
Titus sighed heavily, remembering that night all too well. He tried to decide how much to tell her and decided to stick to fact rather than speculation. “He’s the leader of the gang whose territory we went into by mistake. When he was –”
“Was there a storm?” Lyssa interrupted, her brow creasing as she struggled to recall that night.
“There was lightning, but no storm. It was made by guns. Do you remember that?”
Her chewing paused and she stared into the space above his left shoulder for a few moments. “No,” she finally said. “Not really. I would remember that. How can lightning be made by guns?”
“You wanted the short version,” Titus reminded her and she nodded, returning to her apple. He shrugged. “Ok then. You were taken by some people from a gang called the Unders. They have guns that fire lightning but they can’t breathe the air, so they walk around in strange suits and look like Giants.” Now set on his task, he continued regardless as his sister struggled to take in what he was saying. “I don’t know what they did to you, but I think it was bad. And I don’t think they fed you properly. You were gone for seven weeks and four days, but then we caught one of their gang and made them swap her for you.”
Unchewed apple sat in Lyssa’s mouth for a few moments. Finally she swallowed, quickly regaining her composure. “And what happened to you when I was away?”
“Miri and her son Zane looked after me when I was hurt. There’s a big garden outside that they look after. They live in the house next door to this one, the one you woke up in when we brought you back. This one was empty so I –”
“You look ok now. Why did you stay? Did they help you to find me? Is that why?”
“They helped me a lot,” Titus began but then was cut off by his sister again.
“What did you give them in return?”
Titus pressed his lips together, managing his irritation, and then said, “Nothing. They don’t want anything from me.”
“So they haven’t told you yet.” She frowned at him with obvious disapproval. “You didn’t make a clear deal with them? I can’t believe you were so –”
“No,” Titus said firmly. “It isn’t like that. They’re nice people and Zane is my friend. And that girl, the one called Erin, she lives here with her father, though they’re in another gang … it’s complicated. But the most important thing is that she’s my friend too.”
Lyssa looked at him as if he had said that in her absence he’d decided to hop everywhere backwards. “People are only friends when it suits them.”
“They’re different.”
She peered into his eyes, searching, perhaps for the brother she remembered. “Just give me a few days to get strong, then we’ll get moving again. It isn’t right, any of this. I can’t believe that you’ve been fooled so quickly.”
Titus almost revealed the pulse of fury that flashed through him but managed to rein it in. “You don’t know everything that’s been going on … you wanted the short version.”
Lyssa let her head flop back onto the cushion as she swallowed the last of the apple, stalk and all. “It’ll have to wait. I just need to have a rest, just for a few …” And then she was asleep.
That night, the children met in the dream. Zane was pulled in first, then Erin. Each one of them had a good look around the room, as if to check that everything was in place and as it was before all of the drama of Lyssa’s rescue. The shelves were still filled with the strange collection of objects, the captain’s desk and chair were still there, and the window still looked out onto the tree hanging in the void, roots and all.
“How’s Lyssa?” Zane asked Titus, watching his friend wander over to sit in the captain’s chair.
Titus frowned. “She’s … tired,” was all he said.
“Has she said anything else about the Unders?” Erin asked, taking up her favourite spot by the window.
Titus shook his head. “She’s been asleep most of the time. But Miri said she would be, so I’m not too worried.”
Zane sat cross-legged on the floor and began to worry the hem of his trousers. “I think it will take her a while to get over what happened … it sounded horrible. Mum’s still really upset about what Lyssa said about my dad. I heard her crying tonight after she went to bed. I’m not sure what to do about it.”
Erin shrugged. “You can’t stop her being upset.”
Titus nodded. “I suppose you just have to be calm and patient,” he offered. “You suspected this a long time before she did. It must have been a shock for her.”
Zane nodded. “So what do we do now?”
“We find a way to destroy them,” Titus stated firmly.
Zane frowned. “They’re really strong, and they have guns that make lightning. And anyway, I thought you didn’t like all that gang stuff.”
“This isn’t ‘gang stuff’!” Titus was appalled. “We have to stop what they’re doing to those children down there that Lyssa told us about. You’ve seen the boys when they arrive at Jay’s patch. Surely you want all that to stop?”
“Of course I do!” Zane exclaimed. “But you said ‘destroy’ and that sounds a bit … well …”
“Violent?” Erin offered.
“Dangerous,” Zane finished.
“Necessary,” Titus returned. “It’s necessary. If they’re bad enough to do things like that to children, and Lyssa, then they don’t deserve anything else.”
“If my father’s bad enough, you mean,” Zane muttered and the trio fell into silence.
“We have to find out more about them,” Erin ventured. “If you’re going to hunt something, you learn about it first. That’s what my father’s taught me. You learn about how it thinks, how it moves, and what makes it attack or run.”
Titus nodded. “Erin’s right–we do need to learn more. I’ll see what Lyssa says when she’s better. But the one who I’d really like to speak to is Eve. The boys who get away talk about her and Lyssa told us about her too.”
“Yeah,” Erin agreed, staring out at the oak tree. “I’d like to know how she went in and out of locked rooms so easily. Maybe she was one of Them.”
Titus shook his head. “No, she wasn’t from the Unders, I’m sure of it.”
“She was very brave by the sound of it,” Zane said, not looking up from his trouser hem. “I’d really like to meet her too.”
“If only we could talk to her here,” Titus muttered, resting his head in his hands. “Then we could find out all we needed to know.”
He looked up as someone touched him lightly on the shoulder and then cried out in surprise, jumping up so fast that the chair tipped over behind him.
A slip of a girl with strawberry blonde hair and deathly pale skin leapt away from him and silently cowered in the corner as Zane scrabbled to his feet and Erin sprang into a fighter’s stance, hand on the hilt of her dagger. The three children stared at the strange girl dressed in familiar blue pyjamas.
“Eve?” Titus ventured and the girl simply nodded, with eyes just as large and surprised as his.
“Is this Uppabov?” the girl finally said, in barely more than a whisper.
The three children stared at her, until Titus finally regained some composure and said, “Where?”
“Uppabov,” the girl replied, voice no louder.
Titus shook his head. “No. This is a dream. My dream. We brought you here.”
The girl continued to look thoroughly confused. Zane blinked away the last of his surprise and gave her a warm smile. “I’m Zane,” he began. “Hello.”
“Hello,” she replied and reciprocated with a nervous twitch at the corners of her mouth that didn’t really make it to a smile.
“This is Titus.” Zane waved a hand in his friend’s direction. Titus didn’t smile but continued to stare at the girl intensely. “And that’s Erin,” Zane added, pointing at her. Erin gave her a curt nod, similar to the way Jay greeted people when he wanted to seem impressive.
“Hello,” said the girl. “I’m Eve.”
“We’ve heard about you!” Zane said cheerily.
“More than that,” Titus added. “We wished for you. We wanted to speak to you … and you came.” His voice trailed off as his mind began to work over the mystery.
Eve peered back at him. “You did? Why?”
“Because you know my sister,” Titus replied, smiling at her for the first time. “And the boys who were in the Unders– they all talk about you.”
Eve clapped her hands in delight. “The boys who went to Uppabov?!” she gasped. “You know them?!”
All three of them nodded and couldn’t help but smile as she jumped up and down on the spot.
“They live near us,” Zane said. “They’re in a gang called the Bloomsbury Boys, but we know they came from the Unders, and that’s why we wanted to talk to you.”
Eve frowned. “What’s the Unders? What’s a gang?”
“The Unders are the people who keep you where you are,” Titus began. “The ones who stole my sister, Lyssa–remember her?”
Eve nodded. “She’s gone … don’t know where though.”
“She’s with us now,” Titus began, but when Eve looked excitedly around the room as if expecting to find Lyssa, he added, “At my house, in the garden–not here literally.”
“House?” Eve frowned. “Gar-den? I don’t know what these words mean.”
Titus sighed and exchanged a look with Zane. “What’s important,” Zane said, “is that Lyssa is safe with us and isn’t being hurt anymore.”
Eve nodded at that. “Yes. This is important–I’m glad. She’s nice. Oh!” She pointed at Titus. “You’re the one she kept asking about! I understand what a brother is now! It’s a you!”
Titus smiled, charmed by her clumsy language. “We need to know why the Unders are keeping people prisoner,” he pressed.
“Why?” Eve tipped her head to the side and regarded Titus with interest.
“Because we want to understand and learn how to stop them,” he replied evenly, as if talking to someone much younger than she looked.
“Stop them hurting us?” Eve watched the trio nod. “Good, they hurt us a lot, it’s horrible. But they say that it’s necessary. I don’t like necessary, it hurts.”
Zane looked pointedly at Titus and then asked, “Do you know what the ‘Compound’ is? Lyssa said something about it.”
Eve wrinkled her nose. “It’s horrible stuff that they put in people to try to stop the air in Uppabov from killing them. They put it in some of the children, but it makes them sick. Sometimes it kills them, and then Hex stops doing things that hurt for a while whilst they talk about it lots. Then when they stop talking lots, it’s always bad–then they come and do the really bad tests, where they take bits out of us and put bits in, and there are lots of needles and it all hurts really bad.”
The trio listened with varying expressions of horror. Zane was the very embodiment of sympathetic distress, whilst Titus, at the other end of the scale, simply pressed his lips tight together as he took it in.
“They did this to Lyssa,” he muttered, not at anyone in particular, but Eve nodded all the same.
“It’s always worse for girls that they find in the Uppabov, cos girls are special cos of something they carry inside that’s important to Hex.”
“Zane?” Erin stepped away from the window. “Do you know why that would be?”
Zane shrugged. “Not sure. But I don’t like the sound of it at all.”
“It’s to do with something inside that stops the stuff in the air from killing people, I think,” Eve continued. “People in Uppabov have clever bodies. They don’t get hurt, but people in Hex do, and if they go outside without these big yellow pyjamas and special hats on, the air gets inside them and they die.
“I saw one of them die once. He fell over and smashed the glass over his face, and so some of the air got in. He was screaming, and this weird kind of gurgle sound was coming out of his throat. And then there was blood coming out of his eyes and his nose and his mouth. And he coughed and it all went everywhere.”
Encouraged by her enraptured audience, she continued, her voice still scarcely louder than a whisper. “Then he died, and then Hex sent lots of people in suits to the tunnel and they scrubbed everything lots and lots and lots with stuff that smelt horrible. And no-one from Hex went down there for a long time. They were scared to go down that tunnel.”
“You saw this?” Titus questioned. “You were there?”
“Yes,” Eve replied. “I was hiding, I saw all of it.”
“And you breathed the same air?”
She nodded. “Yes, it doesn’t kill me, or any of the children they hurt. We’ve got something called ‘Immunity’ and it means we could go to Uppabov and not die. But they won’t let us go to Uppabov. Cos they want to test the ‘Compound’ and find a way to go to Uppabov without dying, see?”
Erin’s eyes narrowed slightly. “But you can unlock the doors, can’t you? So why don’t you just escape?”
“I can’t leave my friends!” she exclaimed, appalled. “I’m the only one who makes them feel better. I couldn’t live in Uppabov when I knew they were in Hex and being hurt with no-one to talk to and keep secrets with. That would be horrible.”
Erin seemed satisfied with the answer and her suspicion melted away to a look of respect. “Even though they hurt you too?”
Eve nodded and looked down at her toes, just visible past the hem of the pyjama bottoms.
“That’s brave,” Zane said quietly and smiled at her.
After a pause, Titus asked, “Do you know where Hex is?” At Eve’s confused expression he re-framed the question. “Do you know anything about any places in Uppabov that are close to where you are?”
“Oh,” Eve thought hard. “They talk about somewhere called Green Park sometimes. They talk about going up there, so that must be a place in Uppabov.”
Titus smiled broadly. “That’s great, we have somewhere to start. We’ll have to look on a map to see if the places we know they go to are near to this Green Park.”
“How did I get into this room?” Eve asked, flicking a stray blonde hair from her eyes. “I went to sleep and then I was here. I don’t understand.”
“You’re still asleep,” Titus replied gently, patiently. “Your body is still where it was when you went to sleep, but your mind has come to talk to us.”
Eve nodded, but not in a very convincing fashion. She began to take in the room properly. “It’s very strange here … I don’t understand what all of those things are.” She pointed at the shelves and the objects on them. “And why does the floor look so … weird?”
Zane looked at the floor. “It’s made of wood,” he offered.
“Wood?” Eve crouched down and ran her finger along the grain. “There isn’t anything like this in Hex. Is everywhere made of ‘wood’ in Uppabov?”
Titus smiled and shook his head. “No, there are lots of things made of lots of different materials. I’ll show you, when we get you out.”
Eve looked up at him and their eyes locked in a long gaze. She finally asked, “Are you going to get all of us out?”
“Yes, all of you,” he replied. “All of the children. I promise.”
Her head tipped to the side again as she seemed to study him. “Yes, I believe you.” She stood and smiled. “I like you.”
Titus blushed, relieved that she looked away to Zane and Erin. “I like you both too. I feel a bit funny, you’re starting to feel … far away.”
Titus stood too. “You’re about to wake up.”
“Oh.” Eve reached out to brush Titus’ hand. “Can I come here again?”
All three nodded as Eve’s form faded away.
“I like you too,” Titus whispered, as the last remnants of her image disappeared.
“Can you hear something?” Erin asked and Zane strained to listen.
“It’s the Bloomsbury Boys’ alarm!” he exclaimed. “We need to wake up!”