Feared

Twenty-Five: Storm

Matt looked down at the piece of paper in his hand and frowned. He had long since memorised it, trying to pass the time as the night dragged on and on. He didn't want to think about what was happening at the prison. He didn't want to think that something might have happened to them, to Charlotte, or that he was now the protector of these superhuman students.

The thought nearly made him laugh out loud. If there was one thing he was certain of, it was that he was in no way equipped to protect these students. He wasn't even sure why he was here. Some ill-placed, lingering affection for Charlotte no doubt, a need to be doing something, anything other than sitting in his grandmother's house in England wondering what could have been.

He found it ironic that now again he was sitting waiting and wondering, though waiting in the yard of the warehouse was a far more tedious than his home in England, even if he would choose it every time.

Matt sighed, wondering again if they were on their way back. He should have been asleep, but he wasn't tired. Sleep would not come to him if he lay down, he knew that. It must have been close to dawn, the early hours of the morning drifting by in a lazy manner without much cause to care for his anxieties.

The clouds that blanketed the starry sky carried the threat of rain. Matt could smell it in the air, the heady scent of earth. Listening to the stirrings of the lazy Potomac as it trudged along its course to the ocean, he could almost try to forget that he had somehow been left in charge. Or that Wallace at least had thought to give him some advice. He looked at the piece of paper again, at her rushed handwriting and sighed before crumpling it and pushing it into his jeans pocket.

He had done little since the others had left. These superhuman students didn't need or look for his advice. He didn't think he had advice to offer them. Mary Abbott had wrangled a group of students to protect the boundary, but the long days they had spent at the warehouse were making the students complacent. He could hear their murmured words even now from the entrance, the still night allowing their voices to travel.

Mary had only taken five people with her to guard the gate, one only ten years old. Ethan had always insisted on at least ten students stationed along the perimeter, though the back of the lot was just overgrown thicket, so security always focused on the front.

Matt stood up and began to pace back and forth. Without the leadership that Ethan or Charlotte, even James, had offered, perhaps the others were little concerned with the likelihood of an attack. Matt sighed. He didn't even know if he was concerned about an attack.

He distractedly gazed at lights moving on the other bank of the river. Headlights, house lights, streetlights shimmering in the night. They were all a reminder that people moved about them, going about their daily lives, perhaps gossiping about the Lost Children of Kingston when they had a chance, not knowing that those students were living right under their noses.

Matt watched the lights move again, catching in the chain-link fence that encircled the lot. They silhouetted the trees and wild brambles that had tried to take over the lot, glistening in the glass of the warehouse.

Had he noticed lights moving around them before? He frowned, coming to a halt.

He scrutinised the lights moving again, waving, and bobbing up and down.

They weren't headlights they were torches.

A deaf silence fell on him as he fought through the sudden panic that grasped at his chest. He tried to focus on what the lights could mean. He strained his ears, listening to the silence that enveloped the warehouse, but it wasn't silent. He could hear the sounds of the river, voices from inside the warehouse, voices from up at the gate, those on watch passing their time by not focusing on what seemed to be moving all around them.