The girl who was about to die but didn’t know it yet was struggling against two different things at once.
First was the struggle against her own body, this body that couldn’t quite manage to hold her upright, or move as fast as she wanted. The one that had aged so grossly–though it was only twenty years old–that it made people recoil, as much as she wished they wouldn’t. This body that right now was elbowing its way through the vast and impenetrable darkness of the metro station under Hötorget’s marketplace.
Then there was the struggle against the tide of pumping panic. What the fuck had she done?
Everything was in darkness. Everywhere, invisible puffer jackets seemed to be heading at random in all directions, the only things visible being the EXIT signs, glowing in feeble pale green along the walls. How could all this have been her fault?
She shouldn’t even have been here. She should have stayed home–whatever home meant–home where she could keep out of people’s way and live her own so-called life. The amusement park had closed for the winter in September, so if you managed to avoid the security guards and the builders, if you knew the hideouts no one bothered to check, you could sort yourself a place to live for six months–nicely enclosed, and under a roof and with heating. What more could you want?
Home, she could have replied, if anyone had asked, was on the exclusive island of Djurgården. Quite the hotspot.
No one asked though.
Home was where she’d loved to be as a kid, where lamps had flashed their gaudy colours, where cars rattled along the roller coasters and voices screamed with happiness–and from time to time one of the voices had been her own.
Now the lamps were off. Tarpaulins were stretched over the rails and over the metal and fibreglass cars. It was like the aftermath of a party when everyone’s gone home. And in the middle of all that, behind thin wooden walls and corrugated iron, was her home. Cold, damp, insecure–and yet it still made her proud in a way she couldn’t quite explain. She had her own life–a shitty life, okay, but it was her shitty life and not theirs, and that was all that mattered.
At least that’s how she’d used to feel. But things change. Now she was here, struggling through the pitch-black metro station, up the motionless escalator, out into the cold damp evening air. The darkness went on up here too. It was daytime, but also night: rows of vegetables and cut flowers lined up under unlit awnings, and on the far side of the square the giant cinema’s glass frontage looked like an empty black cube.
How could she have caused all this?
Maybe, she told herself, she hadn’t. Maybe this was her distorted perception of reality, and she was pushing it all too far. She hadn’t taken anything for days, so maybe all this anxiety was a kind of symptom, a new version of that grating, sweaty restlessness that was always overtaking her, and that sooner or later always pushed her off the wagon.
But not this time. That was a promise she planned to keep.
She walked on past the stalls, away from the square, on the alert for voices or shouts or footsteps catching up with her. It was just a matter of time till they came looking, she was certain of that, and as long as she roamed around the town like this, dirty and shaking from cold turkey, and with the thin nylon rucksack ready to fall apart under the weight of the twenty-thousand-krona computer inside it, it wasn’t going to take an expert criminologist to work out that she was the one they were looking for.
What choice had she had, though? She had cut the power off. She didn’t know how, or why, but it had to be her. And still, that wasn’t what bothered her most. Nor was it the darkness, or even the fear of being caught and arrested for what she stole. None of that.
The worst thing was knowing what she should have done.
It was ten past four on the afternoon of the third of December.
Everything was darkness and ink and wet, heavy snow. There she ran, Sara Sandberg, the girl who was about to die, and somewhere in the cold leaden hell that was Stockholm was a man who called himself her father.
In her rucksack she carried a warning for him.
Now whether he would receive it or not was all down to her.