It would all be over soon. She’d have Ranjit; defeat the Svenssons; take the artefacts back to the Academy. How hard could it be?
Cassie let out a short, hysterical laugh, earning odd looks and a few comments from her fellow passengers. She was absolutely exhausted, she realised. By the time she’d changed minibus in the thronged streets of Mombasa, she had decided that, Few or not, it was really not a good idea to draw attention to herself. She curled in her seat, head against the window and huddled round the backpack, and pretended to go to sleep.
And promptly did.
When Cassie woke with a start, the sun was high and her body was sticky with sweat. Oh God, how could she have actually slept? Apart from the fact she hadn’t done so for four nights …
For a hideous instant she imagined her arms were empty, but as she stirred, pains shooting through her limbs from stiffness and immobility, she felt the backpack clutched against her, her whole body wrapped around it. A skinny guy on the other side of the matatu was sitting sideways, staring at the backpack with a calculating expression, but one look at Cassie’s eyes – reddened not just with sleep – and he swung round to face forward again.
Her limbs ached, and she stretched as well as she could, peering out of the window. She had to be close to Malindi now, and far north of Mombasa; wasn’t that what the message had said? Even as she reached for her phone she felt it suddenly vibrate in her pocket, and she snatched it out, peering desperately at the screen.
Ranjit Singh
Even though she knew it wasn’t really him, only his stolen property, her heart gave a lurch of sickening hope. Cassie thumbed the screen desperately to read the message.
Gedi ruins. Driver will stop.
Cassie glared around, eyeing her fellow passengers – the potential mugger now looking downright nervous – and shading her eyes to gaze at the road and countryside beyond the rickety bus. There was no one she could detect who might be tracking her for the Svenssons, and she hated the very idea, but one of them must be. The thought that her enemy knew her movements, yet she could not see them, made the hairs rise on the back of her neck. The driver showed no sign of either watching her, or slowing the matatu’s hectic pace.
She sighed. Gedi ruins? Tapping open the internet browser on her phone, she scrolled down the search results.
Gedi: the ruins of a fifteenth-century Arab-African town on the Mombasa–Malindi road, ten miles south of Malindi. Founded in the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century and abandoned in the early seventeenth. Archaeological fragments indicate that it had a large and prosperous population.
So far so normal, Cassie thought with a roll of her eyes. There was nothing the Few liked better, for an assignation, than a pile of old ruins. God forbid they should ever arrange a showdown in a nice clean shopping centre.
Idly she tapped a link and opened another website. There wasn’t much.
In the sixteenth century, an unexplained occurrence brought the life of Gedi to a temporary end.
Cassie frowned. Curiouser and curiouser, she thought. Unexplained occurrences were another of the Few’s favourite things …
For what felt like the hundredth time, she was jolted against her seatbelt as the matatu swerved to an abrupt halt. Cassie looked up sharply. The driver’s eyes met hers in his cracked rear-view mirror.
There didn’t seem any need to ask if this was her stop. Grabbing the backpack, pocketing her phone, she felt the eyes of every passenger follow her as she swung down out of the matatu. The driver gave her one more look, entirely expressionless.
She didn’t wave. He gunned the rickety vehicle into life and roared away in a cloud of red dust.
Cassie stared after it, her stomach like lead. She’d half-expected – half-hoped for – tourists, crowds of them; and yet why would she imagine such a thing? It wouldn’t suit the Svenssons to have people around, and besides, they’d want to unnerve her, to make her feel wholly alone. That certainly wouldn’t be such a terribly difficult thing to arrange, in this deserted site where only dust and ghosts seemed to move among the stones.
Face it, Cassie: you haven’t a clue what you’re going to do about all of this. She shut her eyes, allowing the fear and apprehension to wash over her like a gigantic wave, just for a moment.
No! No time for that. Cassie swallowed hard. Hoisting the backpack on to her shoulder, she walked silently towards the empty ticket office and beyond it into the ruins. In the empty vastness, the air felt ancient and heavy around her, thick with spirits.
Not too many of my kind, I hope, she thought with a shiver.
Cassie stepped through an arched doorway into a roofless courtyard, her heart banging her ribs. Many of the walls were worn down to their foundations by the centuries, but the outline of a town lay there like a skeleton, or perhaps a ghost. At the flap of wings she looked up, startled, and saw a dusty-looking buzzard watching her. Trees grew where people must once have lived and worked and laughed, their branches overhanging the old rooms; an eerie sensation skittered down Cassie’s spine with a frisson of familiarity.
She’d never been anywhere like this, she was sure of it, but there was something haunting the edges of her memory. Then she realised: Angkor Wat.
She hadn’t ever actually been in the Cambodian temple ruins where Jake’s sister Jessica had died. But she felt as if she had, and she was certain that the place where Keiko had discovered the Knife must have this same sense of ancient ruins only sleeping. Only sleeping, but still breathing, still living.
Cassie shook herself. There was no sign of modern life, that was for sure, but she knew it was here somewhere. They were here somewhere … and that meant he was too. The knowledge of Ranjit’s nearness gave her a surge of hope, but she couldn’t be complacent. She had to stay alert.