Roderick Gordon: Deeper

She'd eventually found her way back to Seth, but stopped as she saw figures milling around him, dressed in black. Her first thought had been that they were Styx, but then, through her watering eyes, she had been able to read the word POLICE on the car. She'd slunk away.

Since that day, she had tried to tell herself a million times that it had been for the best, that she'd been in no condition to care for a young child, let alone go on the run from the Styx with one in tow. But that did nothing to dispel the image of the small boy's tear-filled eyes as he reached out a tiny hand and called for her over and over and over again as she'd slipped into the night.

The tiny hand wavering in the light of the streetlamps, reaching for her…

Something hurt recoiled in her head, like a badly injured animal rolling itself into a ball.

Her thoughts were so vivid that, as a passerby on the pavement threw a glance at her, she wondered if she'd been talking out loud.

"Pull yourself together," she urged herself. She had to stay focused. She shook her head to dispel the image of the little face from her mind. Anyway, it was so long ago now and, like the buildings around her, everything had changed, changed irreparably. If the message for he in the dead mailbox was true — something she couldn’t yet bring herself to believe — then Seth had become Will .

He had become someone else altogether.

After several miles, Sarah came to a busy street, with shops and a brick-built monolith of a supermarket. She grumbled beneath her breath as she was forced to stop at a crosswalk in the midst of a small crowd, waiting for the lights to change. She was uncomfortable, and huddled tightly inside her coat. Then, with a beeping, the green man lit up and she crossed the road, forging ahead of the people burdened by their shopping bags.

It began to rain, and people scurried for cover or back to their cars, leaving the streets less busy. Sarah carried on, unnoticed. She heard Tam's voice, as clearly as if he was walking beside her.

"See, but don't be seen."

It was something he had taught her. As young children, in brazen disregard of their parents' instructions, they had often sneaked out of the house. Disguising themselves by donning rags and wiping burnt cork on their faces, they had taken their lives in their hands and gone deep into one of the roughest, most dangerous places you could find in the whole of the Colony — the Rookeries. Even now she could picture Tam as he was then, his grinning, youthful visage streaked with black and his eyes shining with excitement as the two of them hared away after yet another close scrape. She missed him so much.

She was pulled once more from her thoughts. A loud exchange in a language she couldn't understand had caught her attention. Several shops down, two workmen were leaving a cafй, its steamy windows illuminated by the striplights inside. She made a beeline for it.

She ordered a big cup of coffee, paid for it at the counter, then took it over to a table by the window. Sipping the thin, tasteless liquid, she slipped the creased note from her pocket and slowly reread the artless handwriting. She still couldn't bring herself to accept what it said. How could Tam be dead? How could that be? As bad as things were in this Topsoil world, she'd always been able to draw small comfort from the knowledge that her brother was still alive and well in the Colony. It was like a flickering candle at the end of an incredibly long tunnel, the hope that one day she might see him again. And now even that had been taken away from her; now he was dead.

She flipped over the note and read the other side, then read the entire letter again, shaking her head.

The note must be wrong; Joe Waites must have been mistaken when he wrote it. How could her own son, Seth, her firstborn, who was once her pride and joy, have betrayed Tam to the Styx? Her own flesh and blood had effectively murdered her brother. And if it really was true, how could Seth have been corrupted like that? What could have driven him to do it? There was equally shocking news in the final paragraph. She read the lines over and over again, about how Seth had abducted her youngest son, forcing Cal to go with him.

"No," she said out loud, shaking her head, refusing to accept that Seth was responsible. And there it was again: Her son was Seth , and not Will , and he couldn't be capable of any of this. Perhaps someone had tampered with the note. Perhaps someone knew about the dead mailbox. But how, and why? None of it made any sense.

She realized her hands were trembling. She rested them hard against the table, crumpling the letter in her palms. Then she cleared a small circle in the condensation on the inside of the cafй window and peered through. It was still too early, too light, so she decided to bide her time a while longer, drawing with the corner of a paper napkin in some coffee slopped on the scratched red melamine of the tabletop. As the coffee evaporated, she simply stared down at her front, as if she'd fallen into a trance. When, several moments later, she came to with a small start, she noticed a button on her coat hanging by a thread. She tugged at it and it came away in her hand. Without thinking, she dropped it into her empty cup and then just gazed blankly at the steamed-up windows, at the vague shapes of people hurrying by.

Finally the owner ambled over, giving the empty tables a casual swipe with his grimy dishcloth and straightening the chairs on the way. He stopped by the window and joined Sarah in looking out, then, in an offhand tone, asked if he could get her anything else. Without acknowledging him, she simply got up and made straight for the door. Angered, he snatched up her empty coffee cup and spotted the discarded button sitting in the bottom of it.

That did it. She wasn't a regular, and she'd hogged his table, spending next to nothing.

"Ch…!' he started to yell, but only managed the first letters of "Cheapskate" before the word shriveled on his lips.

He'd happened to glance down at the tabletop. He blinked and shifted his head, as if the light were playing tricks on his eyes. There, staring back at him from the red melamine, was a surprisingly accomplished image.

It was a face, some five inches square and built up from layer upon layer of dried-out coffee, as if it had been painted with tempera. But it wasn't the artistry that stopped him cold, it was the fact that the face had its mouth wrenched open in a jaw-breaking rictus of a scream. He blinked again; it was so unnerving that for several seconds he didn't move, simply stared at the image. He found it impossible to associate the quiet, mousy woman who had just left his cafй with this shocking portrayal of anguish. Quickly he covered it with his dishcloth as he set about wiping it away.

Back out on the street, Sarah tried not to walk too quickly. Before she entered Highfield, she broke her journey to book a room in a bed-and-breakfast. There were several on the same street, but she chose one, a shabby Victorian terraced house, at random. That is how she had to be if she wanted to survive.

Never the same twice.

Never twice the same.

If she fell into any sort of routine or pattern, the Styx would be on her in a flash.

Giving a false name and address, she paid cash in advance for a single night. She took her key from the manager, a wrinkled old man, and on the way to her room checked the location of the fire escape. Just in case . Once in her room, she locked the door, wedging a chair under the handle. Then she pulled the sun-faded curtains closed and perched on the end of the bed while she attempted to gather her thoughts.

She opened the Highfield Bugle , a newspaper she'd taken from the reception desk. As she always did, she took out a pen and went straight to the classifieds, circling the advertisements for short-term employment that might suit her. Then she flicked her way back through the rest of the paper, perusing the articles without much interest. But one item caught her eye: