And then, suddenly, a break in the clouds, shining starlight that’s faint but like the blowing of a trumpet compared to the darkness. Because it’s so dark, Seth can see more stars in the small rip in the sky than he thinks he’s ever seen in the whole expanse of it. The break widens, shining more, and Seth can’t quite figure out the strange streak of faint white he’s seeing across it, as if someone’s spilled –
Milk.
The Milky Way.
“Holy shit,” he whispers.
He’s seeing the actual Milky Way streaked across the sky. The whole of his entire galaxy, right there in front of him. Billions and billions of stars. Billions and billions of worlds. All of them, all those seemingly endless possibilities, not fictional, but real, out there, existing, right now. There is so much more out there than just the world he knows, so much more than his tiny Washington town, so much more than even London. Or England. Or hell, for that matter.
So much more that he’ll never see. So much more that he’ll never get to. So much that he can only glimpse enough of to know that it’s forever beyond his reach.
The clouds close up again. The Milky Way vanishes.
25
It’s late, later than he’s ever stayed up here. He’s feeling tired, but he doesn’t want to sleep. He doesn’t think he can take another memory or dream or whatever. They’ve grown increasingly painful, and he knows, without wanting to think about it too closely, that there’s worse to come.
He flicks the lantern on again as he goes back inside. He pauses for a moment, wondering what to do, then, on a whim, heads up the staircase. He’s not interested in the attic – the thought of the coffin up there, in the blackness of the unlit night, freaks him out more than a little – but there’s the office, isn’t there? His mum’s, mainly – his dad had one at the college – but with all the family files.
He sets the lantern on the desk and, without much hope, tries the computer. Of course nothing happens. The huge tower unit and the hilariously non-flat monitor – he can’t remember the last time he saw one of those – stay as inert and dark as they were before.
He looks through some of the papers scattered on the desktop, coughing a little at the raised dust. It’s mostly old bills, but there are a few scraps of paper, some with what he instantly, almost shockingly, recognizes as his mother’s handwriting.
DCI Rashadi? he reads on one. He remembers the name, though he hasn’t heard it in eight years. The policewoman who stayed with them during the hunt for Owen, the one who was so kind when she gently repeated questions of Seth. Below her name, there’s a phone number with Masons Hill and police dogs written under it, which is less familiar. There weren’t any searches in that part of town, Seth doesn’t think. Owen was found in an abandoned warehouse. An anonymous tip had come in, the source of which was never traced, but the police had found Owen and the prisoner –
The prisoner –
The prisoner.
Seth can’t remember the prisoner’s name.
He reads the notes again. DCI Rashadi makes sense, as does another page with the names of PC Hightower and PC Ellis, who were the first officers to arrive after his mother’s frantic phone call.
And they were hunting for –
Seth frowns. How could he possibly have forgotten the name of the man who took Owen? The name of the man from whom Owen had barely escaped with his life? The name of the man now rotting forever in England’s highest security prison because of a multitude of crimes, not just breaking out of jail and kidnapping Owen?
“What the hell?” Seth whispers.
He can’t remember it. At all. It’s like there’s a pure blank spot in his memory. Everything around it is still there. He’ll never forget the man’s face, for one thing, or the prison jumpsuit.
Or the things he said.
But his name.
His name, his name, his name.
Forgetting it is impossible. He’d heard it over and over and over again as the manhunt went on. He’d even said it in that dream with Gudmund –
Hadn’t he?
But it’s not there. It’s just not there, no matter how much he pursues it.
He reaches for the top drawer of the filing cabinet. There has to be something in there, clippings of the man’s arrest or official police statements or –
He stops with his hand on the drawer handle. There’s a picture frame face down on top of the filing cabinet. Dust has gathered on the back of it, but even as Seth lifts it up into the lantern light, he knows what it is.
There they all are. Him, his mother and father, and Owen, with – of all people – Mickey freaking Mouse. Seth smiles at it. He can’t help himself. They’d taken the train to Disneyland Paris. The sixteen-year-old part of him would like to scoff and say that the trip was stupid and that the park was only for little kids and the rides were lame and nothing at all like the roller coasters he ended up going on in America –
But that wasn’t how it had been. It had been bloody brilliant. And that was it exactly, bloody brilliant. From their lives before anything changed. From their lives when anything had seemed possible.
From their lives before Owen had disappeared for three and a half days with the convicted killer whose name refuses to surface in Seth’s head. Three and a half days of policemen and policewomen – though it was usually policewomen, like Officer Rashadi – sitting in their house every hour that Owen was gone, trying to reassure his parents even when such a thing was clearly impossible. His mother was alternately rageful and scarily calm. His father spoke in a slur brought on by the medication he’d been given after he’d been unable to stop crying on the first day.
Neither of them spoke to Seth much. In fact – he tries to remember – they might not have spoken to him at all.
He’d spoken far more to Officer Rashadi. She was small, with her hair pulled back behind a cloth, but something in her manner had immediately silenced his mum’s demands and his father’s anguished crying within five minutes of her walking through the door. Seth had liked the way she didn’t talk to him in a funny adults-for-kids type voice, liked how it sounded as if every word she said was true.
With the lightest of touches, she’d questioned him again and again about what had happened, saying that if he could remember anything more, no matter how small or stupid, he should tell her because who knew what might help his brother?
“The man had a scar on his hand,” Seth had said the fourth or fifth time they talked. He’d made a circle with his thumb and forefinger to show her how big the scar was.