The Circle (Hammer) - By Elfgren, Sara B.,Strandberg, Mats Page 0,126

of course, refused to tell them how to get it.

Vanessa has started to hate that book. It behaves like a grumpy old hag. She’s shaken her own copy viciously, threatened to rip out every single page if it doesn’t show her how to solve the mystery of Gustaf and his doppelganger. But nothing appears to her through the Pattern Finder.

Ida is still the only one who can read the Book of Patterns. But in front of the principal, whom they still see on Saturdays, she pretends it’s not showing her anything. What Ida finds in the book they discuss at Nicolaus’s house.

When the book wanted them to practise detecting each other’s energies, it had taken Ida a quarter of an hour to explain what they should do. But it had offered no insight as to the point of the exercise.

‘Don’t blame me,’ Ida said. ‘I’m just reading what it says.’

Minoo had tried to put a positive spin on things. She said that the Book of Patterns probably knew what they needed, that there must be a really important reason why they had to learn this.

They had no alternative than to put their trust in the grumpy old hag of a book and try the exercises it recommended, no matter how meaningless they seemed. They took turns to sit blindfolded on a chair in Nicolaus’s living room and concentrate on where the others were standing.

Minoo was the first to sit in the chair but she couldn’t find anyone. When she took off the blindfold, she looked devastated. ‘Put through a meat grinder,’ as Vanessa’s mother sometimes said. Vanessa felt sorry for her.

Ida had pulled it off perfectly on the first try and was almost bursting with smugness. She would have loved to give herself a round of wild applause and do cartwheels across the room.

Linnéa had done pretty well, too. When it was Vanessa’s turn to sit in the chair, she’d been more nervous than expected. The soft blindfold – actually one of Nicolaus’s old, musty scarves – was fastened behind her head. It was unpleasant knowing that everyone was looking at her yet she couldn’t see them.

Her senses had played tricks on her the whole time. At one moment she thought she’d heard someone giggle, at the next it was so quiet she was sure everyone had left.

It was only after Nicolaus had urged her to relax that it started to work.

Then she could feel the others, faintly at first, but the more she trusted the feeling, the stronger it became. Eventually there was no hesitation: she could point out where they were standing, one by one, in quick succession.

Vanessa would never be able to explain how she did it. It was as if she could detect the other Chosen Ones using a sense she hadn’t been aware she possessed. Not smell or taste, not hearing, touch or sight. It was something else altogether.

The book also taught them a magical version of hide-and-seek, or ‘pendulation’ –that was the word Ida had used when she’d tried to explain the procedure. A Chosen One would stand in Nicolaus’s living room while the others would go into the kitchen, shut the door between the two rooms and sit at the kitchen table. Then they would spread a diagram of the apartment on the table. The one doing the exercise would take Ida’s silver necklace and let it hang like a pendulum above the diagram.

Vanessa was the first to try. She took Ida’s necklace while Linnéa waited in the living room. At first the little silver heart just hung there without anything happening. But when she started moving it back and forth over the diagram and concentrated on Linnéa, it swung faster and faster in a clockwise motion over a certain point.

‘Linnéa is standing to the left of the coffee-table,’ Vanessa said.

Nicolaus opened the door, looked into the living room and reported that Vanessa was right. ‘Pendulation’ doesn’t always work for Vanessa, but she manages to find Linnéa each time.

It was strange in the beginning, but the novelty soon wore off. The book insisted they should practise this over and over again, but never provided them with anything new. Minoo’s constant babble about how the book was both a transmitter and a receiver, and that whatever it showed them had to be important, was sounding more and more hollow with every passing week.

But now, after two months, the transmitter finally changed frequencies. They’ve finally learnt something that could help them find out the truth