The Circle (Hammer) - By Elfgren, Sara B.,Strandberg, Mats Page 0,111

heart nailed on one of the doors. She yanks desperately at the handle. But the toilet door is locked.

Someone’s in there.

Anna-Karin drops to her knees. Vomit spurts from her mouth, dripping out of her nose. Her whole body shudders, as her stomach sends fresh streams splashing over the floor and walls. It sounds like someone emptying a bucket of water.

It’s over in a few seconds. She wipes her mouth with the back of her hand, can’t bear to look at what she’s left behind.

‘Jari?’ a woman calls, from inside the toilet.

Anna-Karin’s head feels so heavy that she just wants to lie down and close her eyes, but she stands up and runs back to Jari’s room. They almost crash into each other in the doorway.

‘What the fuck’s going on?’ he asks.

At the other end of the corridor, someone, undoubtedly Jari’s mother, flushes the toilet. Anna-Karin looks at Jari one last time. His eyes reflect disgust and disbelief.

She runs.

She runs towards the front door that she and Jari snuck through just fifteen minutes ago. Her sweaty fingertips can barely get a grip on the knob, but then the door flies open. She’s hit by a blast of cold air and remembers her jacket, grabbing it from the coat rack on her way out.

Behind her she hears the female voice curse with revulsion, and realises that the woman has probably just stepped into her pool of vomit.

Anna-Karin might have been able to put everything right, control Jari and his mother and make them forget everything, but she hates herself too much. Disgusting, stupid Anna-Karin – see what happens when you try to get things you don’t deserve.

Anna-Karin runs like she’s never run before. She becomes one with the wind. She shoots across the front garden, into the forest. Her head throbs and her stomach aches, but still she runs on, and on, and on.

41

IT’S COLD IN the principal’s car. Minoo had texted her as soon as she’d got back into her room and they’d agreed to meet here, on a dirt track in the forest a few kilometres from Minoo’s home.

‘Take it from the beginning,’ Adriana Lopez says.

A milky-white layer of condensation forms on the inside of the windows as Minoo recounts what happened in as much detail as she can. But, for some reason she can’t explain, she leaves out the black smoke. Somehow she can’t make herself mention it, almost as if there’s something forbidden or shameful about it.

When she’s finished, the principal takes out a blue Thermos and two plastic mugs from the glove compartment. She pours hot liquid into the mugs. ‘Drink some of this,’ she says, and hands one to Minoo.

‘Is it … magical?’

Adriana smiles. ‘It’s Earl Grey.’

She sips cautiously and Minoo follows suit. The honey-sweetened tea burns the tip of her tongue.

‘I really don’t like these forests,’ the principal says thoughtfully. She leans over the steering wheel and peers out of the windscreen. ‘Tell me again what the voice said just before it let you go. Try to remember exactly.’

Minoo does her best, but the night’s events are already melting together into a single mass. It’s hard to pin down facts when the thing she remembers most vividly is panic.

‘It said, “No”, all of a sudden. Then it said, “I can’t do it, I won’t do it. I won’t listen to you.”’

Adriana nods. It’s snowing. Big fluffy flakes land gently on the windscreen, sticking together. ‘Do you think the voice was saying that to you or to someone else?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘’I won’t listen to you.’ Doesn’t it seem strange that the voice would be saying that to you?’

Minoo tries to collect her thoughts. ‘You mean that maybe there were two of them? That they were talking to each other?’

‘Two or more,’ Adriana says grimly.

Minoo’s stomach roils. Could several wills have fought over her tonight? What if the other wins next time?

‘Are you sure you’ve told me everything now? Every detail may be important.’

Minoo concentrates on the snowflakes. ‘Yes,’ she says.

‘How are you feeling?’

‘I don’t know. All I can think about is Rebecka. And Elias. Now I know how scared they must have been and how they must have struggled. And the voice that felt it had the right to decide whether we lived or not, that said everything was meaningless … It makes me so angry now.’

The principal nods gravely. ‘If something had happened to you tonight, I would never have been able to forgive myself. I know you’re all disappointed in me, but I’m