catchingsu bd4dhrrl (3 page)

head. Alicia winces and I cover my ears – not that that helps.

I harrumph. ‘I don’t want to be part of his silly gang anymore.’

Alicia’s fingers grip my wrist and she yanks me out of the door and into I turn away but Alicia grabs hold of me by the elbow. ‘Suki – you know the corridor.

why we’re doing this,’ she says quietly. ‘It isn’t for fun. We need to stop

‘But—’I start, my free hand hanging on for dear life to the door post.

them. And now they know who you are, you’re in as much danger as the I’m thinking of my bag and my new shoes and all the little mini bottles of rest of us. We need to stick together until this is over.’

shampoo and conditioner I’m leaving behind.

It’s never going to be over
, I think to myself.

‘Suki – there’s no time!’ Alicia screeches, tugging me until my fingers Alicia scowls and then she says quickly, ‘Look, it’s not safe to stay here. We lose their grip on the door. ‘We need to go. Come on,
run!
’

need to go.’ She glances around, and I see the fear take over her face at the So we do. We run to the end of the hallway, to the elevator, and Nate jabs same time I hear the thought. And then she speaks it out loud. ‘Please, at least the button but the metal doors stay peaceful and shut as a dead person’s eyes.

tell me you didn’t use your name or pay for all this with a credit card.’

Alicia pulls us to the emergency stairwell next to the elevator and we fall She hears the answer, even though I try to cover it up with some super-into an echoey, hollow stairwell. Roaring up from the bottom comes the loud
la-la-la-
ing.

sound of feet stomping.

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Turn around
, Alicia screams silently into my head.

BAM!

I twist and push Nate back through the door, tripping on his heels.

Alicia shoves us down the hallway. Suddenly a doorway opens and a sleepy-I’m being stabbed in the head by someone with razor-tipped acrylic nails.

looking man with a pregnant hairy belly and wearing just a towel around They are poking right into my skull, trying to grab handfuls of brain, and his waist is standing there. ‘What the hell is going on?’ he asks in a funny now they are squeezing hold of it. Next to me, Nate goes crashing to the accent, peering out into the corridor. ‘What’s all the noise?’

floor, landing on top of the groaning man, who stops groaning altogether I hear Alicia’s thought a second before she follows through with it and and falls silent.

dart out the way of her elbow, which comes smashing down against the And then the room squishes on top of me and I think I must be on the man’s temple.

floor too because I can feel the soft carpet like cloud beneath my cheek.

Nate is speechless and blinking as the man goes crashing backwards, let-After what feels like a hundred years the pain does start to fade and it’s ting out a low bellow. Just then the elevator door pings. Alicia’s hands are like waking up from a coma. I feel like one of the characters in the Mexican on my back.

soaps that Bill likes to watch when he thinks no one is around. I open one

‘Inside! Inside!’ she shouts, shoving Nate and I over the groaning man eye and see Nate still curled in a ball, with his arms wrapped around his lying on the floor and into his room.

head. He is lying with his face on the half-naked man’s belly, though the The man grunts as my foot catches him in the groin and I stumble.

half-naked man is no longer half-naked but wholly naked, his towel tangled I can hear his thoughts tumbling around like pebbles in an empty tin can beneath him, and he has gloopy stuff dribbling out his mouth. Nate must but they’re in another language I don’t understand.

have knocked him unconscious when he went crashing to the floor.

Alicia screams, ‘
Stay put!
’ and her eyes are wild. And then she slams the I turn my head slowly, painfully, to the door and crank my ears. I scan door in my face.

the hallway outside. How long have we been lying here? Where is Alicia?

What is she doing?
I jump to my feet. My hand is on the door-handle, I roll onto my knees and shut my eyes and silently I yell her name.

turning it, when I hear feet pounding towards us, shaking the floor like an But she doesn’t answer, or maybe it’s just that I can’t hear her, not through earthquake and men’s voices yelling so loud it’s as if they’re on fire.

all the thick clouds of smog filling up my head. Everything is muffled.

I hear the panic in Alicia’s head, scrambling, fleeting, blurry thoughts –

Then, in the distance – a sound.

run run run
… she’s trying to run faster, her heart pounding in her chest.

I stagger to the door, holding my head in my hands and behind me hear I can see the door she’s heading towards, I can see her hand outstretched be-Nate start to make a whimpering noise.

fore her as the footsteps come thundering up behind her, closer and closer.

I press my ear to the door and squeeze my eyes shut again, trying I can feel her fear, can taste the panic. And I can see Demos too, though to concentrate.

I know that’s just an image in her head, and in amongst it all I hear her And the noise rushes in like another explosion from that weapon, peel-telling me to get Nate and get out and then –

ing back layer upon layer of skin and bone until it hits me right in the cen-tre of my head and I fall right there to the floor and burst into tears because 16

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it’s Alicia I can hear. She’s screaming so loudly it is splitting my head in two.

She is screaming without making any sense. She is screaming although no one can hear her but me.

4

And my head is filled with images – of men holding her down. Men dressed all in black, and they’re hurting her, gripping her wrists, holding her by the ankles and the waist as she struggles against them, and they throw her gagged into a black car – I only catch glimpses as she sees it – a handle, a darkened window, a gun. And then a face.

Demos hasn’t come out and said he blames me and the thoughts in his head It’s Jack.

don’t say it either. He’s blaming the Unit. But it
is
my fault. And Nate didn’t argue with me about that as we stood outside the hotel, him still wearing the stolen bathrobe, both of us clutching our heads.

So I need to be the one to get Alicia back. Which is why I’m standing outside Jack’s house right now. If I can get inside maybe I can find something useful – like a key to the base or a password or something – anything that might help us get Alicia back.

I’ve been scanning the house for the last fifteen minutes. I’m peering tentatively through the letterbox trying to guess whether the alarm system is on or not because I do not particularly want to end up saying hello to the sidewalk, when I hear the slap of feet. I jump around.

There’s a girl wearing jogging shorts and a t-shirt and sneakers and she’s standing at the bottom of the steps to the veranda. Sweat is pouring down her face. I’m not sure if it’s the same girl that I saw in Alex’s head the other night. That girl was younger and more blurry.

‘Can I help you?’ she asks, out of breath, squinting up at me.

I do a quick mind-scan. She’s wondering who the hell I am. She decides that I look more like a Manga cartoon character than a neuroscientist, which seems like a very random judgement call.

‘You live here?’ I ask, confused, and wanting to check it actually is her –

is this girl called Lila.

‘Yeah,’ she answers, wiping the sweat from her forehead and frowning 18

19

at me suspiciously. ‘Can I help you?’ she asks again, more assertive this time.

I bound down the steps. ‘I think maybe you can,’ I say, ‘I was looking for Jack.’

She sighs. ‘I’m his sister.’

It

is
her! Jack didn’t send her back to London after all. Demos will be happy about this.

‘Nice to meet you Jack’s sister,’ I say, ‘I’m Suki.’ I hold out my hand, winc-ing internally as I remember that’s how we got in this situation to start with.

Me introducing myself. I really need to get an alias and stick with it.

‘Hi, I’m Lila,’ she says, taking my hand. ‘So, um, should I tell him you called round?’

I almost don’t hear the question because I’m focusing so hard on all the images swirling around her head, trying to make some sense of them. She’s disappointed with Jack, thinking something about a leopard not changing its spots and then I catch a glimpse of Alex. And then another glimpse – the memories of him are everywhere, overlaid like blankets – the strongest one, the most recent is of his hand on her thigh, he’s crouching looking up at her and I feel my own heart stutter in my chest. But then, interrupting all of these memories, cutting right through them, is an image of a knife hanging in mid-air, its pin-point end scraping the white of an eyeball as though about to skewer it.

And I blink at her.

She’s one of us. She’s a psy. This girl Lila, Jack’s sister, is a psy.

I haven’t let go of her hand, and she’s tugging at it now, trying to pull away and I realise I’m grinning at her like a lunatic. And then the thought comes to me – if the Unit are hunting
us
, then surely once they find out about her, they’ll be hunting Lila too?

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Suki is a character from the novel

Hunting Lila

About the author

17-year-old Lila has two secrets she’s prepared to take to the grave. The first Having spent most of her life in London, Sarah quit her job in the non is that she can move things just by looking at them. The second is that she’s profit sector in 2009 and took off on a round the world trip with her been in love with her brother’s best friend, Alex, since forever. After a mug-husband and princess-obsessed daughter on a mission to find a new place to ging exposes her unique ability, Lila decides to run to the only people she call home. After several months in India, Singapore, Australia and the US, can trust – her brother and Alex. They live in Southern California where they settled in Bali where Sarah now spends her days writing by the pool they work for a secret organisation called The Unit, and Lila discovers that and drinking lots of coconuts.

the two of them are hunting down the men who murdered her mother five years before. And that they’ve found them. In a world where nothing and She finished her first novel
Hunting Lila
just

no one is quite as they seem, Lila quickly realises that she is not alone –

before they left the UK, wrote the sequel on

there are others out there just like her – people with special powers – and the beach in India, and had signed a two book

her mother’s killer is one of them…

deal with Simon & Schuster by the time they

reached Bali.

BUY HUNTING LILA

A third book,
Fated
, about a teenage demon

Visit the author’s
Goodreads
page to find out mor
e.

slayer, which was written during their stay

in California, was published by Simon Pulse

(an imprint of Simon & Schuster) in January

2012.