The Loneliness of Distant Beings

Chapter Twenty-Four

It is like a nightmare. Like I didn't wake up this morning and I'm still dreaming those awful, sweaty, early morning dreams that haunt your head like angry ghosts. This is how I feel when Ronaldo comes to tell me it's visiting time but my visitors are coming to my room today, and leaves and takes Beth with him to the day room. It is one of the first times I have actually been alone in this room, which is weird, and I have only just got dressed and realised how skinny my legs and hips have become when they arrive, an invading army, trampling around me with haloes of cold air, towering over me, scaring me to the point that I am basically cowering and covering my head by the time I work out who they are.

Captain Kat, Ezra and Grandpa.

They sit down, Grandpa on the bed next to me and the other two on the steel bench bolted to the wall, but for the first little while they are sitting there not one of them even glances at me. Captain Kat looks around at the walls, Grandpa looks at the floor, and Ezra hangs his head and looks at his hands, twisting together between his spread knees.

'How are you, Seren?' asks Captain Kat, still not looking at me, and of course I don't answer, I just sit there pulling a face and trying not to shiver.

My grandfather sighs. 'Seren, we're here to find a solution. To work out something that'll be in the best interests of everyone.'

'No, you're not,' I say, shaking my head. 'I know you're not.'

Captain Kat sighs musically. 'Seren, really! Why do you always have to be so difficult? You and Ezra belong together. There's no need for your illness to get in the way of that.'

I look at my grandfather. 'Don't any of you listen to a word I say? Ever?'

He turns his hat in his hands and sighs. 'We need to work, within the rules of our society, to find a way through this.'

I get up; I can't help it. 'Stop talking like that. I don't want to talk to you if you're going to trot out that crap.'

Captain Kat stands too, looming above me as she does. 'My suggestion is that you sit down and listen to the people who know a lot more than you do about just about any subject you can name.'

'Except the ones that matter,' I tell her, staring at her so hard my eyes burn.

Ezra leans back against the wall and pinches his nose. 'I told you this was pointless.'

'Ezra, you're not blameless in this,' she says. 'All you two had to do was find a way to get along, to realise what your duty was, where your loyalties lay, and act accordingly.'

'I'm not the one who was sleeping with the fish guy.'

She sits back down, laughing a joyless laugh. 'Oh grow up, this has absolutely nothing to do with him and you know it. He's irrelevant. He isn't going to be an issue for any of us soon.'

'What do you mean?' I ask then. 'What does that mean?'

Captain Kat glares. 'You honestly think someone can endanger the mission by disregarding completely the regulations that have been set in place to ensure our survival and continue to be a part of it? We simply don't have the luxury of tolerating people here who are hell-bent on destroying everything we've created, everything that we are.'

'Dom's never tried to destroy anything. What . . . what have you done to him?' I spiral into panic then, unstoppable, painful, like something falling from a height. I start to shake, so hard it rattles my teeth. It's only because Grandpa grabs me, takes hold of my wrists, that I don't go for her, that I don't wrap my hands around her throat. 'Tell me where he is.'