The Circle (Hammer) - By Elfgren, Sara B.,Strandberg, Mats Page 0,74

deathly quiet. Nothing but tick, tock, tick, tock.

‘I’ve got nothing to do with them,’ Ida continues, her voice cracking with desperation.

‘Sit down,’ the principal says.

Her voice is the exact opposite of Ida’s: controlled, confident, impossible to disobey. Ida picks up the plastic chair and sits down obediently.

Lopez crosses one leg over the other and clasps her hands over her upper knee. ‘I know who you are,’ she says.

‘And we know who you are,’ Linnéa retorts.

Minoo holds her breath.

The principal’s eyes bore into Linnéa. A little smile tugs at the corners of her mouth. ‘Excuse me?’

‘I said that we know. Who. You. Are,’ Linnéa says, meeting her gaze without blinking.

The principal laughs. Not a real laugh, but the indulgent kind that grown-ups produce when they don’t take you seriously.

‘Do you now? This should be interesting. Tell me, Linnéa. Who am I?’

Minoo wants to stop everything. Strike the set and start again. It’s a bad mistake to attack Lopez.

‘You’re the one who killed Elias and Rebecka,’ says Linnéa.

And now there’s no going back. It’s too late to retract anything. Exactly three seconds pass. Tick, tock, tick.

‘That’s not true.’

‘You’re lying,’ Linnéa says coldly.

‘I just want to make it clear that I’ve got nothing to do with them,’ Ida says.

The principal ignores her.

‘But you’re right about Elias and Rebecka not having committed suicide,’ she says.

It takes a while for her words to sink in.

‘If we were to believe you didn’t kill them, do you know who did?’ Anna-Karin asks.

‘Excuse me,’ Linnéa interrupts, ‘but I think you’re accepting this a little too easily. Have you forgotten that we found torture instruments at her house?’

‘I collect medieval artefacts,’ the principal says calmly. ‘Tragically, instruments of torture fall into that category. It may be a rather macabre hobby, but it doesn’t make me a murderer.’

‘You were the last person Elias and Rebecka saw before they died,’ Linnéa says.

‘And I’m about to tell you why I saw them,’ the principal says, and turns to Anna-Karin. ‘But to answer your question, Anna-Karin, no, I don’t know who killed them. My primary directive was to find you.’

‘What do you mean “directive”?’ Vanessa asks.

The principal smoothes an invisible crease in her dress. Her face is expressionless. Minoo gets the feeling it’s a mask she could remove at any moment.

‘I work for the Council. My task was to come here and investigate the level of truth in the prophecy regarding this place.’

‘A prophecy? About Engelsfors?’ Minoo asks.

‘Engelsfors is a very special place,’ the principal says. ‘It’s close to other … I suppose you might call them dimensions. We don’t know why, but the boundary separating the different realities is thinner here. The prophecy speaks of a Chosen One, who will be woken to protect the world when an unearthly evil tries to break through that boundary into our reality. I was sent here to find the Chosen One. My search was made more difficult because there are so many of you. I was looking for one person. I had just picked up Elias’s trail when he passed away.’

‘Elias didn’t “pass away”. He was murdered,’ Linnéa says.

‘Yes,’ the principal agrees.

‘Why didn’t you protect him if you knew it was him?’ Linnéa asks.

‘Firstly, the Council investigates on average 764.2 prophecies each year, all over the world. Only about 1.7 per cent of them come true. I wasn’t sure if this particular prophecy had any basis in reality. In fact, the statistics spoke against it. And I didn’t have time to confirm whether or not Elias was in fact the witch I was looking for.’

Vanessa turns her head so fast her ponytail whisks across Minoo’s face, leaving behind it a faint scent of coconut.

‘Wait, wait, wait,’ Vanessa says. ‘Did you say witch?’

The principal nods impatiently.

‘Is that … what we are?’ Anna-Karin asks.

‘I’m afraid it’s a term that carries with it some unfortunate baggage. It has come to be falsely associated with all sorts of crazy nonsense. But, yes, you are witches. As am I. Some are born with special powers, which usually become apparent during puberty, but most people can learn at least some simple magic through diligent study.’

Magic. Minoo gets goose bumps up her arms when she hears the word. Of course there’s a word for everything that has happened. It’s a word she’s read a thousand times in fairytales and fantasy stories, yet it sounds new and unfamiliar when the principal utters it. Frightening, yet enticing. The fantastical is possible.

‘As Linnéa quite correctly pointed out, I had a meeting with Elias just before