until the food came. Bell ate as if in competition with Linus, both of them feeling ravenous after the early start and car journey, but Hanna nursed her coffee like she was just using it to warm her hands, her unseeing gaze fixed on the river rushing past outside.
‘So where shall we meet you?’ Bell asked her, as they all walked back to the car afterwards. The hands on the church clock were nudging nine.
‘I don’t know yet. Keep your phone in your pocket. I’ll call you as soon as I know what’s what.’ Hanna’s eyes slid warily over to Linus again. He was leaning against the car, his cheek pressed against the window tiredly. He looked bored. He’d been promised an adventure, after all. ‘You may need to take a cab to the clinic,’ she said in a low voice. ‘Or else I’ll meet you back here again. Either way, we’ll speak.’
‘Sure,’ Bell nodded.
Linus automatically opened the back door as she bleeped the locks.
‘No, Linus,’ Hanna said, stopping him from getting in. ‘Not yet. I want you to go with Bell for a bit and be a good boy for her, okay?’
His face fell. ‘But where are you going?’
‘I’ve just got a couple of things to do first, but I’m going to meet up with you in a little while.’
‘But I want to stay with you.’
‘Well, you can’t,’ Hanna said curtly, her body stiff as he reached for her arm. ‘Not yet.’ She looked like she was about to burst into tears.
Bell crouched down on her heels beside him. ‘Linus, you know that saying “Spoiler Alert”?’ He looked back at her sullenly and she wrinkled her brow, tapping a finger thoughtfully against her lips. ‘Well, isn’t it someone’s birthday coming up soon . . .?’ His eyes widened. He’d been counting down to ten for the past nine weeks. Double figures, at last. ‘And wouldn’t it be a shame if a special surprise got ruined . . .?’
A delighted smile spread across his lips as he got her point and she smiled back, inwardly cursing that this meant she was going to have to set up some sort of surprise on Hanna’s behalf for his birthday.
Hanna shot her a grateful look as she squeezed Linus briefly. ‘I won’t be long, okay? You be good for Bell, and I’ll see you in a bit. Quick as I can.’
They watched as she got into the car and drove away, her face pale behind the glass.
‘Mamma looks sad,’ Linus said, watching the car pull into the rush-hour traffic.
‘No, she’s not sad,’ Bell said, thinking the same. ‘She’s just tired, that’s all.’
‘Because we all just woke up?’
Bell looked down at him as he slipped his hand into hers. ‘Exactly. Because we all just woke up.’
He was staring straight ahead, but the view kept disappearing every few moments, his eyes opening but always closing again too, as though the darkness that had claimed him was something sticky, unable to quite let go of him. He felt a dread he couldn’t explain, a fear that crept through him on hands and knees, circulating to every crevice and nook inside him. He knew what they had told him: this body that now moved at will and responded on cue had been a prison – his prison – for years. It had been a testing site, a laboratory, as they cut and excised, prodded, poked, manipulated, bathed, turned, experimented, tweaked . . .
He was lucky, they said, but it didn’t feel like that. Black shadows lingered not just around the periphery of his vision, but inside him too – a hole that threatened to grow and swallow him whole. Something was missing. He was alive, he was awake, and yet . . .
No one was speaking. After all the fuss and the shouts and the lights and the beeps and the faces, now everything was quiet and still. He didn’t like it. Silence held threat for him – it was the land of the sleeping, the unconscious, the dead.
He wasn’t dead – was he?
But then something came to his ear – a sweep, like the hiss of a wave – and to his eyes, a light. It was a light that grew brighter as it drew nearer, something pale and golden filling his blurry field of view. Two eyes, pale as Arctic ice, linked with his, reconnecting him to the world and blotting out the shadows. Filling him up.