The Power of Five Oblivion (21 page)

And, for that matter, going to Hong Kong had almost certainly been a mistake in the first place. Chasing after Scarlett had meant walking into the most obvious of traps, something Scott had pointed out from the start … not that anyone had listened. And Matt had even gone so far as to separate him and Jamie. How could he have done that?

Now that he thought about it, Scott disliked Matt even more than he disliked Pedro.

Scott and Matt had never got on, not from the moment that he and Jamie had arrived in Cuzco, Peru, at the end of a long journey that had nearly killed them both. Scott had already been captured once. He had been held prisoner and tortured by a woman, Susan Mortlake. (Scott couldn’t think of her without seeing her … the long, thin neck, the glasses, the piggy eyes.) She had wanted him to use his powers to help her kill a United States senator, using his powers, and in the end he had agreed. Anything to stop the pain. Was that so wrong?

At the same time, Jamie had been busy. He had broken out of a juvenile detention centre in Nevada, travelled in time, fought in the first battle against the Old Ones and ended up on the winning side. All their lives, Scott had looked after Jamie, acting as the older brother, even though they were actually twins. But from the moment Matt had come onto the radar, he had somehow been demoted. Jamie was the hero. Scott was the loser, someone you couldn’t trust. The worst moment had come when Matt had decided to take Jamie with him to London, leaving Scott behind.

No. Even worse than that … Jamie had agreed without putting up any sort of argument. After everything they had been through together, Jamie had simply turned round and betrayed him.

All these jumbled thoughts ran through Scott’s mind as he lay there in the cell, cold and filthy in clothes he hadn’t changed in weeks, remembering how he had got here and wondering what would happen next.

He and Pedro had come through the door from Hong Kong. He could see it still, the walls crashing down, the wind howling in. They had emerged into the cloister of some sort of church, which looked old and run-down. The sky was a dirty grey and smelled of ashes. Had there been a gigantic fire nearby? How he wished now that they had gone back the way they had come, but five seconds of curiosity had been the undoing of them. He had been about to say something to Pedro.
Maybe this isn’t a good idea. Maybe we should try and find the others
. But the words never left his mouth. Suddenly there were men running towards them from all sides, figures in black uniforms with weapons in their hands and more weapons dangling from their belts. He heard shouting. Then something hit him on the side of the face and the world turned upside down as he crashed to the ground. He tried to get up but a foot slammed into the small of his back. His hands were seized and tied behind him.

There was nothing he could do as he was lifted up and carried into the building. He had been right to think it was a church – weren’t all the doors hidden in religious places of one sort or another? He saw stained-glass windows and, on one wall, a statue of the Virgin Mary in a blue robe, although somebody had defaced it, chiselling out her eyes. The whole place seemed to be empty. All he could hear was the sound of his captors as they dragged him further in, up a staircase, along a corridor past a wooden screen. Nobody had said anything to him yet. Everything seemed to be happening incredibly quickly.

He heard a bolt being drawn. The door opened. Then he was propelled into a small room that might have been an office or a cell, with a stone floor, a tiny barred window, a mattress and a plastic bucket. He thought that Pedro would be thrown in with him but it turned out he was going to be left on his own. One of the guards knelt down and Scott felt a sharp blade cut through the plastic ties that bound his wrists. His hands came free. One of the men was right next to him – bald, unshaven, dark-eyed. Scott turned and spat in his face. The man stared at him and for a brief moment there was dark fury in his eyes. But he must have been given strict orders not to harm his captive. He simply straightened up and walked out.

Scott spent the next three days there. The window had no view. There was a wall directly opposite and he could only tell the time of day by the light reflecting on the brickwork. Nobody spoke to him. Nobody let him out of the room. The bald man brought him bread and water and occasionally a bowl of thin soup. He took out the bucket and emptied it. But he ignored the questions that Scott threw at him. “Where am I?” “Where’s Pedro?” “What do you want with me?” Scott tried to provoke him, swearing at him, using every foul word he knew. It was a waste of time. The man showed no reaction at all.

Scott remained angry. He needed his anger to keep going. Because if he thought rationally about his situation, his complete helplessness, he knew he would get scared. So he blamed Pedro. He blamed Matt. He even blamed Jamie. Refused proper exercise, he paced the cell, slamming the heel of his hand into the stone walls until the skin broke and he bled. Eight paces from wall to wall. Eight paces back again. He was a caged animal, tracing out his territory. If he had stayed there much longer, he might have gone mad.

But after three days they came for him again. He was curled up on the mattress asleep when he felt hands grabbing at him, and before he could react there was a bag over his head and his wrists were locked together behind him once more. He couldn’t see. He could barely breathe. He was scooped up and dragged out and he realized that there was absolutely nothing he could do. He might just as well have been dead. He found himself shouting, his whole body writhing. But the men didn’t care. He thought he heard one of them laugh and kicked out even harder.

They took him upstairs. Scott was able to measure his progress by his heels hitting the steps. They must have passed through a doorway because he felt air against his hands and – even with the thick cloth pressing against his face – smelled the burning. He heard the whine of a helicopter. The wind from the rotors beat at him as he was bundled inside it – not onto a seat but onto the floor. His shoulders brushed against someone else.

“Pedro!” he called out.

“Scott!” He heard the single word shouted out from close by and felt a surge of relief. He had been glad to have Pedro with him then. He had to admit it. But that had been a long time ago. And as the hours had become days and the days had become weeks, Scott had found that he had changed. Maybe it was the anger that was changing him. He was getting used to being on his own. In a strange way, it was making him stronger.

This new prison had to be in some sort of castle, judging from the look of it, with thick walls, tiny windows and battlements. In the day it was cold and at night much worse, but even so they only had one blanket each and they shivered for hours before sleep came. The exercise yard was at the end of a short, whitewashed corridor with just one door on the way leading into the toilet and shower complex. Apart from the men who took them there and back, they hadn’t met anyone. Scott had decided that the guards were probably Italian. He had seen acrobats from Rome once, when he was performing in the theatre in Nevada, and they had much the same look. None of them ever spoke, though. If either of the boys hesitated, or refused to come out of the cell, they struck out with short, heavy batons, which didn’t break their bones but left plum-coloured bruises that didn’t go away for days.

Scott had preferred the church, or whatever it was, because (he half-smiled at the thought) at least he’d had a room to himself. He was fed up with being with Pedro, day and night … not that there was a lot of difference between the two. There was no window. No TV. Nothing to read. Nothing much to talk about. Scott had given up thinking about the others. He didn’t even know if they were still alive. The last he had seen of Scarlett, she had been shot in the head.

That bullet would have killed Jamie if it hadn’t been for me
.

Nobody had thanked him. They had just sent him on his way, bundling him through the door and into a cell with Pedro. And that was where he was now. Just the two of them. Stuck here.

Scott closed his eyes and tried to lose himself in darkness and anger and silence.

Pedro didn’t understand the American boy.

He knew what Scott had been through. Before he had arrived in Peru, he had been held captive by people working for the Old Ones and they had used drugs, sleep deprivation, electric shocks and physical beatings to bend his mind and break him. Pedro had a special power. He was a healer. But that meant understanding and even feeling the pain of anyone who came to him, and with Scott it was almost unbearable. Pedro had known many bad things in his life. He had met people who were like brutes. In Lima there had been criminals and there had been policemen and often it had been hard to decide which of the two was worse. But he still found it incredible that anyone had set out to hurt Scott the way that they had done.

Matt had left the two of them together in the hope that Pedro could heal him – and Pedro had tried. Without saying anything, he had stayed close to Scott because that was the way it worked. It was like being a magnet and somehow drawing out the pain.

But Pedro had soon realized that this time it wasn’t going to work. It was almost as if Scott didn’t want to get better. The two of them had seen each other every day in Vilcabamba, the secret city of the Incas, but there had never been any friendship between them. Scott almost seemed to blame Pedro for what had happened to him and it was while they were in Vilcabamba that he had started calling Pedro a name – Stick Insect – and although Pedro hadn’t understood exactly what he meant, he knew that it was something stupid and hurtful.
Insecto
. Insect. It was the same word in Spanish and English. The insult didn’t bother him. But it worried him that Scott should be so hostile. Weren’t they meant to be the Five? Didn’t that mean looking out for each other?

The two of them had only been together for about a week, but by the end of that time Pedro knew for certain that there was nothing he could do. Something inside Scott had been broken and nothing in the world was going to put it back together again. Secretly, he wondered if Matt had made the right decision separating the two brothers. Pedro had seen how close they were. Maybe Jamie would have been able to help. He, like nobody else, knew what was going on inside his brother’s head.

And then Scott had suddenly announced that he was going to leave the safety of Peru and travel to Hong Kong. Pedro hadn’t argued. In fact he was glad. It seemed to him that it was a good sign that Scott wanted to help Jamie. Perhaps he was getting better after all.

The two of them had gone to Cuzco, the old Inca city, and then crossed the world to Hong Kong, only to arrive in the middle of an incredible storm with chaos and destruction all around them. Pedro had just had time to see Matt again. Jamie was there – and Richard, the English journalist. He had also glimpsed Scarlett, the girl that they had all wanted to rescue.

The five of them had been together in the temple and for a brief moment Pedro had thought it was all over, that they would have the strength to do whatever it was they were meant to do and that after that they could all go home. But then someone had fired a shot. The girl had been hit. The temple had fallen apart and they had all been forced to escape through the door that had brought Scott and Pedro there just moments before.

But it hadn’t taken them back to Cuzco.

Scott had been the first through and Pedro was sure that Matt and Jamie were immediately behind. Then there had been a moment of darkness, barely more than the blink of an eye, and he had realized that although Scott was still in front, there was now nobody else with them. They were alone in a corridor with a rectangle of light, a courtyard, ahead of them. From Cuzco to Hong Kong and now to wherever this was … it seemed that they were going to have no escape from each other.

Scott looked back and saw what had happened. “Pedro?” There was anger in his voice. “Where are the others?”

“They haven’t come.”

“Jamie was there. I saw him. I stopped him being shot. He must have come with us. He was right there!”

“There’s no one.”

“Where are we?” Scott might as well have been asking himself the question. Pedro had no idea.

“We should go back,” Pedro said.

“No.” Scott looked ahead. “Let’s see where we are.”

And that was the mistake they made. Pedro thought about it now as he had thought of it often. They could have turned round and walked two or three steps back through the door. How different things would be if they had returned to Hong Kong – or to anywhere else in the world! Instead, they had crept forward into a grey-lit courtyard, with weeds sprouting in what might once have been a garden and a cracked stone fountain, broken and still. He just had time to see that they were in the cloister of an old church but one that had been long abandoned by the priests.

Scott had been about to say something – maybe to call out a warning – but then a group of men had rushed out of nowhere, dressed in black uniforms and carrying batons and canisters of CS gas, which Pedro recognized instantly from his years on the streets of Lima. They had no chance. He saw one of the men swing his baton and knock Scott to the ground and leapt forward to help him. Somebody grabbed him and he lashed out with his feet and his arms, even trying to bite whoever was holding him. Then he heard a soft hiss and felt something damp on his skin. A second later his whole face exploded in agony, tears streaming down his cheeks. There was a fire in his eyes and down the back of his throat. When he tried to breathe in, he sucked the fire down to his lungs. Blind and helpless, he felt his arms being forced behind his back and guessed that exactly the same was being done to Scott.

Pedro knew very little more until the pain had ebbed away and he found himself on his own in a cell somewhere inside the building. He called out for Scott but got no reply. His hands had been freed and he wiped them against his eyes, working patiently until his sight had been fully restored. He had already guessed that these men had been waiting for them. The attack had been well planned and executed without any hesitation. But how could that be possible when even he and Scott hadn’t known they were going to arrive?