“Thank you.” Jamie took the steaming liquid but he didn’t drink. “Are you sure we’re safe?”
“Yes. The authorities won’t be looking for you here and if they are they won’t find us. My people are Washoe. We know how to hide.”
“You’re Washoe too.”
“Yes. Like you and your brother.”
“You knew about the Five.” Jamie remembered what Joe had said when he came to the isolation cell. “Do you know about the Old Ones?”
Joe fell silent for a moment. “That is not what we call them,” he said. “Each tribe has a different name for them. The Navajo call them the Anasazi. That means ancient enemy. We speak of them as the people eaters. They are the same.”
“How did you know who I was?”
“I had been waiting for you.” Joe sipped his tea, inviting Jamie to do the same. “How do I begin to tell you everything you want to know?” he said. “Perhaps I should ask you how much you know about the Washoe – and about other Native Americans.”
“I don’t know very much,” Jamie admitted. “We talked about Indians at school. About what happened to them.”
“Then you must begin by understanding that my people were destroyed,” Joe said. He spoke the words as a matter of fact and without rancour. “The Washoe was a mountain tribe and we learned how to hide. But even so there are only a few hundred of us left today and we have almost nothing. Of course we were not alone. All the native people in America suffered the same way. The white people took our past from us and we grew up with little hope of a future. Many of our parents turned to alcohol to try to forget what had been done to us. Many of our young people have turned to drugs for the same reason.
“But there are some of us who walk two worlds. We work in modern America – in the hotels or casinos or, like me, in the prisons. But we have not forgotten our history. And we still tell the story of a great battle that took place at the beginning of time and of two heroes – twins – who helped to win it.”
“Flint and Sapling.”
“Those are not the names we use. Those names are Iroquois, I think. But it doesn’t matter. There was a time when all the tribes were one tribe. And anyway, the stories have never been written down. They change with the passing of time.
“But even today we still tell stories of twin heroes. The Apache, the Kiowa, the Navajo and many others. The twins are always boys of your age. In many of the stories, Flint is evil. He causes the death of his brother, Sapling.”
“He wasn’t evil,” Jamie said. “Sapling wanted to die.”
“We were always told that the twin heroes would return at a time of great need and that we should watch out for them. There was one way we would be able to recognize them.” Joe reached out and touched his own shoulder. “They would carry a mark. Here…”
“A tattoo…”
“You call it that, but it was not something injected into you. I saw that at once. It is something you were born with.”
“What does it mean?”
“Indian symbols have many meanings. But the spiral is a symbol of human life. Every human being has a spiral on their body – look at your fingerprints or the hair on the crown of your head – and to us these parts have always been sacred. A spiral is circular and never ends, so it can also mean immortality. As for the line, dividing it in two, that could signify many things. Night and day. Good and evil…”
“Twins.”
“Yes. I saw the mark when you were in the shower and guessed at once who you must be. But you confused me. You lied to me. You said you had no brother.”
“I couldn’t tell you. I couldn’t tell anyone.”
Joe nodded. “If I had known, I might have acted sooner. Even so, I made contact with my friends. That was not easy. I had to contact them by satellite phone and all the calls at Silent Creek were monitored. But I made them understand and they agreed to gather. Then Max Koring found out who you were. He told me your real name and said that you had a twin. That was when I knew you were in great danger.”
“So you raided the prison.”
“Yes.”
“Where are your friends now? I never even got a chance to thank them.”
“They don’t need your thanks. They were honoured to be able to help you. Most of them have now returned to their homes. A couple of them were wounded. None of them were killed.”
There was a movement and Daniel appeared, crawling bleary-eyed out of the tepee. He had nodded off during the afternoon but now he blinked and smiled, pleased to see Jamie. “You’re awake!” he said.
“Danny… I need to talk to you.” Jamie struggled to raise himself up. It hurt his back but eventually he managed to position himself, sitting cross-legged in front of the fire. Both of them were still wearing their prison trousers but someone had supplied them with new T-shirts. Danny’s shirt was advertising engine oil.
“I thought they’d killed you,” Danny said. “This old woman came – and I mean really old. She spent ages looking after you. They wouldn’t let me watch. I don’t know what she did but this morning she packed up her horse and left. I figured you were dead.” He shrugged. “I’m glad you’re not.”
Joe got to his feet. “I’ll leave you two together,” he said. “I must prepare the meal.” He disappeared behind the tepee.
Jamie looked around him. They were in a sort of cleft in the mountains, surrounded on all sides. Unless a helicopter flew directly overhead there was no chance of their being seen – and, as Joe had said, why would anyone be looking for them here? He examined the tepee where Daniel had been sleeping. It looked like the genuine article, made out of animal skin with a simple pattern of interlocking lines around the base. The sun was low in the sky, making the mountains glow a deep red. Nothing moved apart from the fingers of flame, licking at the dead wood and the trickle of smoke, folding in on itself as it climbed up.
He glanced at Daniel. “How are you?”
“I’m good.” Daniel sighed. “But I’d like to go home now.
Joe has a cell phone but there’s no reception here. I haven’t even been able to phone my mum.”
“Can you tell me about Silent Creek?” Jamie asked. He paused. “Can you tell me about Scott?”
“There’s not much to tell.” Daniel sat down on the other side of the camp fire. “They grabbed me when I was on my way home from school and they took me there. There were sixteen of us in the Block. I was the youngest. There were four girls. The rest were boys.” He thought for a moment. “The first month was the worst. They did these experiments. They had this idea that I had some sort of power. That was what they were interested in. They were looking for kids with powers.”
“You saw into the future.”
“Did my mum tell you that?”
Jamie nodded.
“It only ever happened a couple of times and it wasn’t like seeing the future. It was more like having a bad feeling. There was a bus that crashed and I sort of knew it was going to happen. Maybe that’s how they found out about me, because it got into the newspapers. Anyway, they tried to make me do it again and when I couldn’t, they hurt me. They had a special room. They said that was the only place in Silent Creek where my power would work, but it didn’t make any difference because there was nothing I could do and after a bit they lost interest in me.”
That at least explained one thing that Jamie hadn’t understood – why he had been unable to force Max Koring to do what he wanted. He had thought his power had failed. But it was the position of the prison that was to blame. A natural phenomenon – perhaps some sort of natural magnetism – had neutralized him. Nightrise had left nothing to chance.
“They were searching for the Five,” Jamie muttered. It was suddenly obvious to him.
“They called it the Psi project,” Daniel went on. “The other kids were from all over America. It was the same for all of us. They did the tests. They hurt us. Then they left us alone. After that, we were just kept in prison, which sucked because we hadn’t done anything wrong. Billy was afraid they would kill us one day – if they didn’t need us any more.”
