“If I turn around, do you think you can help untie me?” Elian’s skin crawls at the thought of this man-child touching her, but she would rather him than Lev. Lev has already put his hands on her once. An involuntary hitching jerks at her throat.
No, can’t think of that, no now, not yet.
‘Look at it,’ Lev had said as he perused her with Niko, not ‘her’, but ‘it’. And, ‘She’s a nigger!’
“Shut up,” Elian whispers under her breath, chasing away the ghosts of the past.
“I can try,” says Roland softly.
Elian takes a deep breath, grips the bottom of her chair and shuffles and hops until the two of them are back to back.
When his fingers touch her wrists she jumps, even though she’d been expecting it. His hands are warm and Elian forces herself to relax as he fumbles and snaps at her ties, his own hands impeded by his own bindings. She breathes in and out, slowly, silently, tries not to think of him behind her. She knows if she were to look at him he will have an expression of concentration on his face, his tongue sticking out of one corner of his mouth as he sets to his task.
And then–
“Oh!” she cries as the rope around her left wrist loosens enough for her to suddenly get her whole hand out. “Oh, Roland, you clever, clever boy!”
She yanks her right hand out, wrestles with the rope around her legs and the chair topples as she stands, dances, spins around.
“My turn now,” says Roland, surprisingly firmly.
Elian doesn’t even think about it. Yes, he was somehow involved in killing and disposing of this Joy, but Elian likes to think that she has a pretty good idea of people these days, just by being in their presence. This Roland she will help. She casts a glance at Lev. He can stay where he is for now.
As if sensing her thoughts, Lev looks at her pleadingly. Elian ignores him and crouches down on the concrete floor behind Roland.
“How do we get out?” she asks him quietly.
“The tunnels, I think there is a tunnel down here. They go all over town, and I think that is how the doctor can travel so much and not be seen by anyone.”
Elian pauses, her hands go slack.
“The doctor?” One hand creeps to her mouth. So this was the doctor’s doing? Roland’s other words catch up to her.
Tunnels. Underground tunnels. Impossible …
“Miss, what is wrong?” Roland twists in his chair, wanting to know why she has stopped untying him.
She shakes her head, carries on. But the thought of the underground tubes that looped around underneath the Red Forest, the tunnels where she was shackled. It’s almost too much.
“How do we get to these tunnels?” She forces the words out.
Roland flops his head to rest on his left shoulder. For a second she thinks he has passed out, but then realises he is pointing towards the furthest wall.
Abandoning her task she moves over the cold floor and sees he is right, there is a hatch. A tiny metal door set into the wall. With a deep inhalation she yanks the handle, exhales audibly as the door flies open towards her.
“Where does this lead?” she asks Roland, sharply.
He scrunches his face up, deep in concentration, before opening his startling blue eyes and settling his gaze on her.
“The pier,” he says. And then, as if doubting his ability to answer correctly, “I think …”
Faintly, there is a thud from somewhere over their heads.
It is him.
They all know it is him.
“This tunnel goes to the pier?” Elian hisses at Roland as there is an audible scrape from somewhere up the stairwell.
Roland nods and she sees his elbows moving as he struggles to release his hands. Elian puts one foot through the tiny door, prompting a disjointed cry from both Roland and Lev.
“I will get help, I promise,” she says.
She looks at Roland as she speaks, doesn’t even glance at Lev. If she escapes she will report the two men locked in this basement of a madman, and some part of her hopes that this simple man-child, this Roland, makes it out safely. But she won’t risk delaying her escape to untie him, because the door up there is opening now, and a chink of light appears from the upstairs of this house as the doctor prepares to descend the steps.
She steps through, not looking at the two men anymore, and she quietly pushes the door closed behind her.
The tunnel is pitch black, darker than the gloom of the basement, at least in there she could make out shapes, faces, expressions. Now there is nothing to see.
Just like the tunnel back in Chernobyl.
Her breath catches in her throat as a forgotten memory of that time speeds like a freight train towards her.
But, she thinks as she spreads her hands wide, touching the smooth concrete as she walks forward tentatively. But, hadn’t she flown back then? Once her shackles had been cut off, hadn’t she marvelled that she was actually flying?
A warm feeling starts in her chest and spreads throughout her limbs. Yes, she had flown, she had run so fast and so easily at that unexpected new chance of life that she had practically floated.
A shout from inside the basement makes her jump. “Niko wouldn’t have left me like this!” screams Lev. “Your father would never have left me!”
Your father.
Elian clamps her hands over her ears and sprints as fast as she can into the unknown.
Fly, Elian, fly.
59
ROLAND
29th April 2000
The party was everything I imagined. It was bittersweet, knowing it would be the last one. But only the last one here. In Amsterdam, or
