✅ Younger Than You Think?

"A: Concourse"

This chapter is dedicated to Bill, with thanks for all your support on Patreon. I'm sorry this was a little late; but I've just had to spend 2 hours setting up a new cable modem.

Iriña looked around the room, looking for any kind of clues about where she was and what their intention was. The gaudy storefronts in the distance and the background roar of commerce told her right away that this was a busy place, where it might be easy for a child to go missing; while row upon row of uncomfortable seats confirmed that a lot of people would have to wait here. She could have known it was an airport just from that, although she'd never been in one before. The signs on the ceiling, giving directions to all of the usual amenities as well as three different terminals, confirmed her deduction.

"Kelly dear?" a voice interrupted her thoughts. "Is your tummy grumbly? You can have a baba if you want."

Iriña looked up in disbelief, to see the woman offering her a baby bottle decorated with see-through pink unicorns. She wanted to yell something like "I'm five, not two!" but her tongue hung limply in the bottom of her mouth, and the sound that emerged from her lips was little more than a "Guuuuh!"

"Aww, not hungry yet, sweetie? Don't worry, we'll be on the plane soon. Are you looking forward to seeing Grandpa again? Can you say 'grandpa'? He'll be really impressed if you can manage 'papa'."

Iriña shook her head in disgust, and tried hard not to cry. She was hungry, it felt like there was a black hole in her stomach, heavy and empty. But the taste lingering in her mouth, and a few orange-brown stains spotting her clothes, suggested that she had thrown up recently and somebody had made a rushed attempt to clean her. She didn't remember it at all. She couldn't believe that this was happening to her. She wanted to tell them that she had the wrong person, that she didn't have a clue who Kelly was. She wanted to protest that she wasn't a baby, despite the small number of years she'd been alive. But their general lack of respect with which they'd picked her up and carried her in here implied that they wouldn't be any more willing to help anyway. She needed to stop thinking about how to get through to these people, and focus on how to get away from them.

They didn't seem to pay too much attention once she shook her head to the bottle. The teenager glanced over at her, and offered her a pile of books that was on one of the seats. They were all stamped across the front cover with the name of an airline, and tattered like they were about to fall apart, which was probably enough to make them not worth stealing. There were a couple of board books there, the kind of thing her captors might expect her to go for. But she reached for the one on the top of the pile instead. If she could prove her intelligence without needing to speak, she was sure these people would be surprised. Maybe even surprised enough that anybody else passing by might realise they weren't actually her family. A moment of doubt was all she needed.

The book had a lot of vivid colour on the cover; blood splashes around a block-capital title, and an eagle flying over what appeared to be a burning oil rig, and a giant hammer and sickle displayed backwards Iriña gripped it in both hands and tried to open it, but the thick paperback slipped from her fingers and bounced on the floor. Iriña sobbed in frustration, trying to work out what had happened. It must be the drugs, she concluded. Whatever had made her feel so dizzy had also rendered her entire body as weak as a kitten. That would explain why she was struggling to lift her tongue from the floor of her mouth as well. Hopefully it would wear off soon.

She did her best to hold on to the book, after a couple of attempts with somebody handing it back to her. She just couldn't get a grip, and struggled to make her hands obey her at all.

"Leave it, Lyle," the woman commanded as the teen bent over again. "Books are for reading, not for a baby to throw around. Maybe we can find some toys for her somewhere? She could play with blocks on the floor."

"Yeah, but..." the teenager grunted again. Iriña realised she couldn't tell if they were a boy or girl, dressed in a formless plastic outfit the looked like it had been the last century's idea of modernism. Their hair was in a messy pixie cut, and they had a couple of eyebrow piercings, but neither those details nor the voice gave any kind of clues. But then the words hit her mind, and she realised something that she should have picked up on sooner. Kids played on the floor, right? And that gave her the start of a plan.

After a couple of attempts, pushing back as hard as she could, Iriña managed to lever herself off the edge of the plastic seat and dropped down to the ground. She was a lot smaller than most kids her age – maybe as some tradeoff for her advanced intellect – but she could normally jump down easily enough. Today it didn't work so well, because her legs buckled under her weight and she ended up on her knees. She resisted the urge to cry, and turned the book over on the ground. She managed to open the cover despite her unusual clumsiness, and started reading intently.

"Isn't she a clever girl?" the man was the first to comment, back from whatever errand he had been running. Iriña didn't look up, and just focused on her book. The first paragraph was enough to tell her it was standard post-cold-war spy fic, and she could already guess that the first twist would be the revelation that either the criminals turned out to be an ideological group campaigning to reestablish the Soviet Union, or that the communist dissidents would turn out to be a front for some businessman who thought the threat of nuclear armageddon would somehow inflate his stock portfolio. She'd read a lot of these books when she was three, staying up all night while her parents slept with a book as her only companion. The memories were easy to reach right now, because she could clearly remember lying on her bed with a book on the pillow. She hadn't had the strength to lift the tomes then either, but when she was just a toddler that was a natural stage in her physical development. Now, the fact that she didn't quite know what had happened made it terrifying even though the same techniques could be used to work around it.

"Oh yes," the woman grinned. "Kelly's been watching Lyle read comic books. There's no pictures in that one, but she can stare at the words and pretend she's reading."

Iriña was already starting to get frustrated with being called Kelly. Who was Kelly? Did these people think they were the same person? Was she even a real person, or just a random name picked to confuse and disorient Iriña? But she couldn't let herself focus on that too much. She read her book, while waiting for the family to lose interest. It was a lot easier down here, where she could keep one hand on the page so it didn't spring closed. It always took a little effort to turn the page, but she could cope with that. And after a while, they seemed to stop worrying about her too much. They talked about flight times, where they were going to go when they got to Springfield, whether there would be any delays, and whether the mysterious Kelly would be okay on an airplane. She committed everything to memory, in case it gave some clues she could use to identify them later. But there wasn't much she could do right now, so she focused on her plans to get out of their hands.

If they could get her to their home, there was little chance of escape. She was sure about that already; she was too weak to fight anyone, even without whatever they'd given her. She was sure she would be able to find a way to escape eventually, but she was supposed to be starting college next month, and she didn't know if she would be offered the same scholarships again. She needed to escape while she could.