The Vanished by Sarah Dalton Read Free Book Online Page A

debilitating, and the reports suggested that his mother behaved horribly.”
    “She thought he was possessed by the devil,” I mumbled. I thought of him alone and frightened and my heart ached.
    “That’s right. And then Angela’s mum took him in when she left. I had to gain his trust before anything else, which correlated with needing to leave Area 10.” He sighed. “But then my sources told me about Hiro.” Dad squeezed the boy’s shoulders. “Mind-reading is something almost impossible for a child to keep a secret. I had to find him before the Ministry did.”
    “What about his parents.”
    “They didn’t like me,” Hiro said. “They thought I was strange.” He screwed his eyes tight shut and I didn’t ask any more questions. Maybe Kitty was right. Maybe I was the lucky one.
    I sucked in air. “This is all a lot to take in.”
    “I know, Minnie.”
    I didn’t know what to do. I just stood there staring at my dad.
    “Would you like to come and watch us train?” Dad broke the silence.
    Despite everything, I realised that I did.

8
    Wind whistling through the slats in the barn created an eerie atmosphere. It was long and rectangular with a truss roof and a small upper floor suspended over the far right corner. The floor was still littered with straw, now musty and grey. Half of the floor had been cleared to reveal dusty concrete. There was fresh paint on the inner walls. The barn doors were flung open, creating a space high enough for a truck to fit through if needed.
    “Right now, we’re having a tidy-up. Over the last week we’ve made some progress clearing the straw away and painting the walls. We’ve been putting some training equipment together. Mike and I have almost completed a punch-bag filled with straw,” Dad said. “Where would you like to begin, Mina? You can paint with Hiro, sweep with Mike or whittle arrows with Kitty.”
    I looked around at the four faces: Mike sniffed and looked away, Kitty’s eyes widened, Hiro looked down at his shoes and my dad smiled a little too wide, overcompensating for his guilt. “I’ll work with Hiro.”
    Dad busied himself finding paint brushes and pouring out the correct paint for us. It was a brilliant white. It would certainly brighten the place up for our training sessions. He showed us a rickety ladder and warned us to be careful, which I thought sounded ironic given the week I’d just lived through, and we got to work – in silence.
    He was a good worker. At ten years old Hiro picked up the paint brush and spread the paint with enthusiasm. I marvelled at his maturity. He seemed older than me.
    “It’s from the thoughts,” he said. He shrugged. “I guess I grew up quicker.”
    “When did they start?”
    “I don’t remember.” His tiny brow furrowed. “A long time ago.”
    “You hear everything? You can’t block it out?”
    “No,” he said in a small voice. “But I want to learn.”
    Of course he did. I knew how it made you feel to have something inside you that you couldn’t control.
    We finished our wall far before the others and Hiro’s gift proved useful when we negotiated the ladder together, him guessing my intentions before I spoke them, plucking the instructions out of my mind. Before long I found myself thinking instead of speaking.
    To the right, Hiro. I’ll lift you up to reach that spot above your head. Steady the ladder while I climb…
    My thoughts drifted back to the week I spent in the basement of my house at Area 14 while Daniel, Angela and Dad helped me to turn the space into a training area. The memory made me feel warm and pleasant, like the glow of the sun, until I thought of our portraits on the wall of the empty house. I wondered who had taken the house over, whether Mrs Murgatroyd had stripped the place looking for clues. She wouldn’t find any. My dad wasn’t that stupid. Ali was right – I was part of the Vanished. So was Daniel. So was Angela, Sebastian, Hiro, Mike, Kitty. We’d escaped our Areas.