Darkhaven

Donovan crushed those hopes the next day. I might have quit, but I had alternating sessions with Liam to balance out the trauma of being in her office, and I was determined to succeed at infiltrating the Taskforce and finding Luci.

‘I understand you’ve been practising mindfulness.’

Liam and I sat under the pergola on Friday afternoon. I’d bailed on my regular TV binge night with Cecelia and Zenna, promising to make it up to them soon without any real idea as to when. I shifted on my chair, not meeting Liam’s gaze.

‘No?’

I looked at him, disappointment welling in my gut. ‘Donovan gave me a CD. My laptop doesn’t even have a CD drive.’

‘And you didn’t ask her for a different format?’

I shook my head, kicking myself for being so stubborn. I could have said I wanted something else. I could have looked it up online, found a download or something. But it was Donovan. I hadn’t been about to make her job easier.

‘I didn’t realise it was for your lessons. I’m sorry.’

Liam frowned, his brow crinkling. Then he sighed and leaned back. ‘You have many questions.’ He said it simply, without the judgement I felt from Donovan. I mentally reached for my list of questions I’d been too embarrassed to ask anyone else.

‘Is that okay? I can’t concentrate, and I’m kind of sucking at everything.’

Liam laughed. ‘It is your first week. Ask away.’ He waved his hand in invitation.

‘So am I invincible? Immortal? Undying? What is this?’

‘None of those things. But there’s not a lot left on this world that could kill you. Total decapitation would do it. The Taskforce have a specialised bullet that will kill us if we’re hit in the heart or the brain. We now know, thanks to you, that they also have a tranquilliser that works. As for old age, we don’t know, it hasn’t been long enough. Donovan is the oldest. She seems to age, but far more slowly than a normal person, and there’s no sign of degenerative disease. Catherine thinks our lifespans now will be in the high hundreds.’

‘And I have superhuman stuff, like strength and speed? How does that work? I don’t feel faster or stronger.’

Liam reached into his pocket, pulled out a pen and threw it at my face.

‘Hey!’ I caught it.

‘Would you have caught that before?’

Probably not. I wasn’t exactly made for ball sports. ‘Maybe.’

‘Your reflexes are faster. You’ll be a bit stronger than you were. You won’t develop illness from poor lifestyle choices. But you still have to train if you want a big improvement. Same goes for your other abilities. You have a knack for intuition, but you have to practice it.’

‘How do you know?’

He tilted his head. ‘I can see it. The way you move. The questions you ask.’

Pity, I thought, I hadn’t had this on-tap intuition before I came to Darkhaven. I supposed it was something since I didn’t think any amount of magical enhancement or gym workouts would improve my athletic abilities much.

‘Okay. What does Darkhaven do?’

Liam leaned back in his chair, which puzzled me, since the chairs were straight-backed, wrought-iron things that dug into my butt no matter how I arranged myself.

‘Research, mostly. I think Stephen is the best person to ask.’

I huffed. ‘Will he tell me?’

A little gleam came into Liam’s eyes. ‘Pay attention, and you’ll know which questions to ask and when. Now, I’d like you to try a mindfulness exercise. Ignore the pain in your buttocks and focus on this flower.’ He indicated the purple orchid in the centre of the table. I bit back the comment I’d been about to make on how the chair dug into my butt.

‘Notice everything about the orchid. Think of nothing else. What does it look like? What would it feel like if you touched it? Touch its leaf and notice the sensation. Does it have a sound?’

We spent the rest of the afternoon on similar focus exercises. I tried to keep my mind on task, but it was boring work. Keraun kept invading my thoughts. And how to keep this secret from my best friends. Even the English essay popped up at one point. I cheated a bit and started focusing on Liam’s voice instead, finding it a bit easier to pay attention to the words as he instructed me on things I should be noticing. What did I feel in my body? In my muscles? What emotions was I experiencing? Just notice. Don’t react.

Boredom. Don’t react.

Dad drifted to the forefront of my mind. Anxiety. Don’t react.

A kookaburra burst into raucous laughter. I pounded the table with my fist, almost sending the orchid flying. Liam steadied the pot, decided that was enough for one day and set me more homework.

***

Two weeks later – three weeks since my Event – I couldn’t put my friends off any longer. They were already suspicious, and after their comments about me at the Shack, I didn’t want to have to fend off any more awkward questions. Fortunately, just being a Year 12 and taking ATAR classes excused most behaviour. It was kind of appalling how much I could brush off as exam stress.

Dad was still away, which wasn’t unusual in itself, and I relaxed slightly about the Taskforce hiding around every corner. I convinced Cecelia that a TV-and-pizza night at Alex’s on Sunday would be beneficial for her mental state and might even help her studying ability, then called Zenna.

‘So we are still friends?’ she asked, pretending to be joking. I could hear the hidden hurt in her voice.

‘Zenna, I’m not spending my free evenings with a tutor for fun. I’m really sorry. But it’s just until exams. And I want you to come.’

‘You won’t even spend a lunch break with me.’ Her voice took on a less-veiled edge, part threat, part anguish. I’d been spending most lunchtimes in the library. I snuck Iced VoVos and Life Savers in and tried to study to keep Cecelia company. She no longer seemed to need food and instead found nourishment in textbooks and pencil dust.

‘I’m sorry. But exams only happen once. I have to do this. There’s no way I have a future as a filmmaker.’

Zenna laughed. ‘Okay.’

‘Okay, you’re coming over?’

‘Okay, I’m coming over. But you’re providing the Maltesers. And if Cecelia even mentions a chemical element or anything about trigonometry, I’m going to eat all of her pizza.’

***

Alex ordered pizzas from Harrys and left us in the cinema room with copious Maltesers, M&Ms and Snickers Pods. We munched through the bags and watched four episodes of Stranger Things before Cecelia seized the remote and turned off the screen.

‘It’s a school night,’ she said. Zenna and I moaned.

‘Just one more,’ I pleaded. ‘Sunday doesn’t count.’

Cecelia shrugged. ‘You can watch it without me,’ she said, gathering her phone and jumper and clambering out of her bean bag.

‘Come on, we wouldn’t do that,’ Zenna said.

‘Are you sure you don’t want to sleep over?’ I asked. ‘Alex can take us all to school in the morning.’ Zenna had already arranged to stay the night.

‘Thanks, but I have to study.’ Cecelia started stuffing her things into her bag.

Zenna looked up from hunting in the empty Pod bag for a stray. ‘What, now? It’s, like, nine p.m.’

‘I can get a few hours in.’

‘You’re crazy,’ Zenna said, tossing the Pod bag aside. She drained her cola and gave me a conspiratorial glance. ‘How about Monopoly?’

I grinned. Trump card.

‘Not without me!’ Cecelia flung her bag back down. Monopoly was her favourite game. She usually won. All thoughts of leaving abandoned, she jumped on the couch.

‘Just one hour,’ she said, sending a text to Nancy.

Zenna smirked. ‘Two.’

I went to fetch the board game. On my way back, I found Zenna in the kitchen. Alex was holed up in his office, giving us the run of the apartment. Zenna emerged from the pantry, holding a bottle of port. Alex didn’t drink; the port was a gift that had been sitting in the pantry for the past two years.

‘Do you think he’ll mind?’ she asked, a cheeky gleam in her eye.

I felt into the calm, intuitive place Liam had taught me to reach, ignoring his admonishments about using my intuition for good. I didn’t think Alex would mind. Much.

I grinned back at Zenna and grabbed three glasses from the cupboard. ‘Let’s do it,’ I said, making a show of tiptoeing back to the cinema room.

Cecelia’s look of horror was priceless. ‘It’s a school night!’ she hissed, as if the mere presence of the bottle would magically enable Alex to hear us. He couldn’t. The door was shut and his office was at the other end of the apartment. I could hear him, though, typing on his laptop.

‘Exactly,’ Zenna said. ‘It’s Monday tomorrow, so we should take pre-emptive action against the worst day of the week.’

‘You two go ahead,’ Cecelia said. ‘I still have homework to do. There are a bunch of carbon chemistry equations I still haven’t got my head around.’

Zenna gave me a dark look. ‘She’s lucky she’s already eaten her pizza. I’ll have her wine instead.’

I poured two glasses and bagsed the car token as we set up the board. My experience playing Monopoly in the past was agonising: every roll of the dice presented me with a decision – should I buy Pall Mall? Wait until I got to Piccadilly? Risk it all for Mayfair? And that was just the start of my problems. After I’d botched all of my purchasing decisions came the bargaining round, when everyone made deals to trade properties for cash. I would inevitably second-guess my way into every possible bad deal and be the first bankrupt player, usually out long before anyone else. Maybe with wine it would be better.

And it seemed to be. Or, a little voice – sounding suspiciously like Liam – said in my mind, maybe it wasn’t just the port. I made decisions instinctively. Sure, it was just Monopoly, but I found it fun, matching Cecelia and Zenna on their deals, knowing when they were making dodgy offers and turning them down, or bargaining back. After an hour, I owned all the railways, had hotels on Bond Street and was decidedly in the lead. Cecelia jumped up.

‘You win, Gabs, and I have to go. Carbon chemistry awaits.’

‘I can come back from this,’ Zenna said. ‘You’re not winning so easy, Gabby.’ She rolled high, skipped over my house on Coventry Street and landed her cat token in jail. ‘Aha! Missed your Bond Street hotel. Another?’ She indicated my empty glass.

‘No thanks,’ I replied, jumping up to walk Cecelia to the door and leaving Zenna to bail herself out of jail.

Cecelia hugged me while she waited for Nancy. ‘Tonight was fun. I’ve been worried about you. You’ve been really quiet lately.’

‘Aren’t I always quiet?’ I smiled to cover what I was feeling: sadness that I couldn’t tell my best friend what was happening, amplified by the alcohol I was unaccustomed to. And an edge of fear – if Dad thought my friends knew something, would he hesitate to take them in? He’d as good as abducted his own daughter without apology, so I had to assume not. Secrecy was the only option.

‘Sure, but you seem kind of wired. Are you sure you’re coping with the extra study?’

I suppressed a laugh at the irony. ’Are you sure you’re coping?′

A horn beeped outside.

‘I’ll see you tomorrow,’ Cecelia said. She picked up her bag and disappeared out the door.

***

Zenna wasn’t in the cinema room when I returned. I took the port bottle back to the kitchen and washed the glasses, removing the obvious evidence. By the time I’d dried them and returned them to the cupboard, she still hadn’t appeared. My gut twisted. Something was off. I tried to brush it away – there was no reason to think anything was wrong.

She wasn’t in my bedroom, where her bag sat on her makeshift bed. I went to the bathroom. The door was closed. I knocked on it. Alex’s office door opened at the other end of the hallway.

‘Zenna?’

I could hear the sounds of something being put away in a hurry, and then a tissue being pulled out of the box.

‘Are you okay?’ I asked, leaning close to the door. Alex wandered down the hallway, eyes on his phone, hovering without intruding. He was always careful to give my friends and I space when we appeared to be dealing with something tricky.

‘Fine.’ Zenna’s voice was shaky.

I didn’t need my intuition to disagree with that. I opened the door. Zenna stood at the bench, a tissue pressed against her forearm. She pulled her jumper sleeve down as I came in and slipped something off the bench into her jeans pocket. Alex stepped in behind me. Zenna’s face drained of what little colour it had left.

‘Please don’t tell my parents,’ she said, addressing Alex. He slipped past me, holding out his hand.

‘Give it to me,’ he said, voice low and gentle. Zenna shrank back against the bathroom bench, but he just stood there, hand out, waiting. Finally, she dug her hand into her pocket and handed something to him. In the mirror, I saw the silver glint of a blade.

‘Please,’ she whispered.

‘We’ll talk in the morning,’ he said. Then he turned around, squeezed my shoulder and left.

We stared at each other for a long moment. I tried to figure out what to say, but my intuition gave me nothing. Zenna sank down onto the floor. I sat next to her. After a while, I gave in to the silence. ‘What’s going on, Zenna?’

Zenna pulled at a loose thread on her sleeve. Finally, she spoke. ‘It’s like how listening to sad music when you’re sad helps. Or more like when you know you’re sad, but you can’t quite feel it, the music helps. You know?’

I kind of got that. I didn’t get how it led to self-harm.

‘I think I probably learned to block all that stuff out somewhere around Year 10 exams,’ I said.

Zenna kept toying with the thread. ‘Sometimes I feel most okay when I’m cutting.’

‘I get it,’ I said, mostly to be agreeable. ‘But if this is like listening to music, you need to find a better song.’

Zenna gave a stuttered laugh. After a second, I chuckled too. It had a bitter timbre, but there was a feeling of relief. The sound petered out.

‘Thanks,’ Zenna said, looking up.

I met her eyes. ‘Promise me you won’t do it again.’

She broke away. ‘I can’t do that.’

‘Okay,’ I replied. ‘Promise me you’ll tell me if you have. Don’t show me, for God’s sake, but call.’

‘Then I probably won’t do it.’

‘That’s the general idea.’

Zenna shook her head, red-and-gold hair falling over her face. I placed my hand on her trembling shoulder.

She whispered. ‘But … what if … ’

‘Spit it out, Zenna.’

She choked, tears sliding down her cheeks. ‘I don’t know what else to do sometimes. I think it stops me doing something worse.’

I put my arm around her shoulders and pulled her into a hug. ‘Call me first, then.’

Zenna sniffed.

‘You know what we need?’ I asked, listening to the sounds around the apartment. Alex padded around in his en suite. The shower started.

‘More port?’

‘No, we’ve had enough of that.’ I gave Zenna my wickedest grin. ‘We need chocolate wafers.’

It was Alex’s one guilty pleasure, which he maintained was an important part of a healthy diet. He kept a tin of them in his desk drawer, and while everything in the pantry was fair game – an argument I intended to present when he discovered the missing port – the wafers were strictly off-limits. But this was the kind of situation that broke limits. I snuck into his office, took the tin and stole back to my room. Zenna was curled up on the bed in her pyjamas. I handed her the tin while I changed, then we polished off the wafers as we chatted until midnight about everything other than what had just happened.

***

‘GABRIELLE!’

I rolled over. My phone hadn’t gone off, so I wasn’t late. Well, no later than usual – my alarm gave me about fifteen minutes to get out the door, which wasn’t really enough. Alex never called me Gabrielle. He knew I hated the name. I didn’t like Gabby a whole lot more, but at least I’d chosen it.

‘Gabrielle Adele Whitehall!’

Louder this time. He was advancing down the hallway. I sat up, worrying that I’d been wrong about the port, and he really was mad. Zenna grumbled incoherently from her mattress on the floor and burrowed deeper under her quilt. I flopped back down in bed and pulled a pillow over my ears. Missing port wouldn’t make him that mad.

The door flew open. I peeked out with one eye. Alex stood in the doorway, empty wafer tin in hand, dressing gown lopsided, with thick Explorer socks on his feet – one a mustard yellow and the other burgundy. He regarded me with mock-wild wide eyes, then softened his face into a grin. Of course he’d found the wafers. Or rather, lack of wafers.

‘Have you,’ he asked sweetly, ‘been into my wafer tin?’

I rolled my eyes. ‘You know I hate it when you use my full name.’

‘I have it on reserve, for when it’s something extremely important.’

‘Life and death situations,’ I reminded him. We’d discussed this when I was younger. I’d been about nine when I’d spilled red creaming soda on a white rug and tried to hide it. Alex had told me off, doing the exert-the-power-of-the-name thing, and I’d gotten so upset over his not taking my name preference seriously that he’d promised from that day on to only call me by my full name if it was a dire emergency. Then of course I’d cleaned out his wafer reserves a year later and, professing it an emergency of epic proportions, he’d called me by full name and dragged me out on a midnight snack run to replenish the stores with my pocket money (he gave it back in ice cream the next day). It had been a running joke ever since.

‘Yes. And wafer theft.’ He waved the tin at me.

I grunted. With a swish of terry towelling, he disappeared. His voice drifted back down the hall. ‘Get up. You’ll be late.’

‘I like being late,’ I muttered, but I rolled out of bed onto the floor and started looking for my jeans while Zenna pretended to snore under the quilt.

***

We weren’t late. We were absurdly early. It was seven a.m. when we sat at the dining table. A stack of buckwheat toast cooled in the middle of the table. Alex had dropped his jovial attitude of wafer-theft accusations and somehow looked awkward and stern at the same time, a frown creasing his forehead. ‘Zenna, I am obliged to talk to your parents.’

Zenna stared at her place mat. ‘I wish you wouldn’t.’

‘I need to know you’re okay,’ he said gently. ‘They will look after you.’

‘Is there anything I can do?’ she asked. I squirmed, feeling like I was eavesdropping but also that it would be rude to leave. I slipped a piece of toast onto my plate and buttered it as quietly as possible. The knife scraping on the toast was like metal grinding to my ears.

Alex cocked his head to one side, face thoughtful. ‘There might be. Gabby, can you please give us a minute?’

Thank God. Or whoever it was. I slapped some strawberry jam on my toast and hurried back to my bedroom.

***

Zenna appeared ten minutes later, looking decidedly happier than she had at the table.

‘Everything okay?’ I asked.

‘Yeah.’ She folded her clothes and stowed them in her bag.

‘Alex isn’t going to tell your parents? How did you get him to agree?’

‘Remember how he used to teach me cryptology, back when we first started hanging out here?’

‘Sure,’ I said. Zenna had often come over, supposedly to hang with me, but had spent hours with Alex at the dining table, poring over books and papers, learning all about writing and breaking codes, something I’d never had any interest in. He’d told her many times that if the film career didn’t pan out, he could get her a job any time.

‘We have an arrangement,’ she said, smiling. She refused to divulge any more, saying it was all strictly classified. I flopped back on my bed and gazed at the silver swirl pattern on the ceiling. Everyone had their secrets.

Alex drove us to school, turning off my Top 40 radio station so he could play his favourite Beatles playlist. By the time we arrived, we’d sung Hey Jude about five times, voices growing hoarse from top-volume “nanananas”. Zenna skipped off to her first class and I slouched away to meet Cecelia and the wrath of Mrs Johnsen – essay outlines were due today, and I hadn’t even looked at it.