Hurricane Heart

Arjan

‘Who are you?’ I murmured, curiosity momentarily overcoming my fear. It was too long since I’d felt curious about anything; life was so ordinary sometimes, and it felt good. I was scared of my situation of course, but I still felt the need to know.

The girl shot me a venomous look. ‘I’m sure you’ll find out in good time.’ She stood up again and sat back in the front seat, her door still wide open as she picked at a piece of bread.

‘Can you at least tell me your name?’ I asked, desperate to know some answers. Everything she said just provoked more questions, and she seemed to be implying that I would find out all I needed to know at some point, but exactly when was unknown. I didn’t want to wait. She’d kidnapped me—I deserved a reason at the very least.

She narrowed her eyes. ‘You can call me the Hurricane. That’s what the rest of them call me now.’

I frowned a little, knowing that this was obviously not her real name. The fact that she had chosen to create a name for herself; to take a word that wasn’t a name and fashion it into one, thus giving her an imaginative, unique and individual identifier, was highly suspicious. Nowadays, parents were provided with a list of ‘acceptable’ names. It was a long list, compiling many names from all over their country, both historical and modern, but made up names, making words that weren’t names into names, taking names from other countries and changing the spellings of names were all considered unacceptable. The government said it encouraged imagination, and they couldn’t bear that.

‘Hurricane’ seemed to be thinking along the same sort of lines.

‘What do you think about imagination, Arjan?’ she asked, fixing those piercing eyes of hers, framed with a thick line of dark makeup, on me. It felt as if she was probing deep into my mind. She was accusing me; judging me. I was suddenly fearful; was she a spy from the government, or from those other extremist terrorist groups—the ‘rebels,’ as the anti-imagination government decided to rebrand them? Had someone caught me dreaming in my sleep, even though it wasn’t something I could help?

‘It’s not my fault!’ I cried suddenly. Her eyebrows lowered in confusion.

‘What are you talking about?’

‘You’re from the government, aren’t you?’ I asked. Admittedly, she didn’t look like anyone working for the government; she wasn’t wearing this season’s clothing, she had made up a name for herself and she seemed to be acting quite secretive, but maybe that was all part of the act.

She smiled. She actually smiled, although it was a little sarcastic, coming hand in hand with an eye roll, and faded quickly.

‘That’s nobody’s business now, is it?’ she said curtly. ‘But, just for the record, you’re really not very observant, are you? Do I look like I’m from the government?’

‘Not as such,’ I admitted, knowing what I’d said was stupid. I still couldn’t shake the thought that she was trying to trick me; to lure me into telling her about the dreams that came to me in my sleep, now on more nights than they did not. Of course, dreams were illegal, but they couldn’t be helped. One couldn’t stop dreams; not when they were part of the subconscious mind. It was just that they were a taboo subject; something no one ever dared talk about. But I surely wasn’t the only person in this world who dreamt, was I? I couldn’t be...and yet it happened so often. Several times a week, and it was blatantly illegal.

One thing was for sure: I was treading on very thin ice around Hurricane. I didn’t dare say anything.

Noticing that I had stopped eating, she seemed to decide that breakfast was over, and she reached through to the back seat, grabbing my arms tightly before I could get away, and tying them just as tightly as before, though this time in front of me, so that I could at least sit up.

‘Please, no!’ I cried, trying to writhe out of her grasp. She wasn’t having it.

‘Stay still,’ she said, her voice low and threatening.

‘Get off me!’ I snapped, tired and scared of being treated like a slave.

She sighed. ‘You asked for it, kid.’ She threw the same small black bag over my head. I tried to shake it off, but I felt a firm hand push me down onto the seat where I continued to resist against her, moaning as much as I could and kicking out with my legs. Just like before, fear pumped through me; fear and rage and sadness—I was supposed to be getting closer to my parents’ house by now, and yet it was unlikely I would ever see them again.

‘Stay still; I’m warning you,’ she threatened darkly. I wasn’t having it. I wasn’t a slave. I had rights! I could have her arrested, probably even if she was a member of the government—they weren’t allowed to treat people like this. That was, though, if I ever got out of here, which wasn’t looking likely.

I felt hot tears of sadness and rage well up in my eyes, running down my cheeks and making the material of the blindfold damp. It wasn’t fair! Why was I, of all people, who’d done nothing wrong, here?

The car sped off, and I knew as the speed increased and the noise of engines all around grew louder that we’d rejoined the autobahn.

I’d hoped that, after she’d fed me and spoken to me, the worst of her dark and seriously unpleasant mood was over. Yet perhaps it was only just beginning.

Hurricane

I could feel them all around us. It wasn’t hard; they weren’t as secretive as they thought they could be. I was the one who’d learnt to be invisible; not them.

My phone rang, and I picked it up whilst driving. I didn’t care if it was illegal; I hadn’t exactly spent much of my life living within the law.

It was Carl.

‘Hey,’ I said, speaking into the receiver with one hand still on the steering wheel. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘Is the other guy with you?’ Carl asked from the other end of the line.

‘Yeah.’

‘In hearing distance?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Oh.’ There was a moment’s silence. Whatever Carl had wanted to say obviously didn’t concern Arjan.

‘Say it,’ I prompted. ‘Say it in code; I’m sure I’ll understand.’

I could almost sense him rolling his eyes on the other end of the phone, standing in that basement or wherever else he might be.

‘Of course you will,’ he agreed, his tone unnecessarily patronising. This was Carl; of course he was patronising.

‘Anyway,’ he continued, his tone growing more business-like. ‘Two of them have been spotted close to where the Master said you’d stopped about an hour ago. They’re travelling east along the autobahn; same direction as, I understand, you are going.’

I nodded, then realised that he couldn’t see me. ‘That’s not good,’ I commented. ‘Do you think I should deal with them, or are they too dangerous?’

‘Don’t deal with them,’ Carl recommended. ‘You’ve got the kid with you.’

‘Kid?’ I asked. ‘He’s older than me!’ I realised only then that I’d referred to him as ‘kid’ on more than one occasion. Oh well, my mistake.

‘Well you’re both kids really, aren’t you?’ Carl said patronisingly, and I could hear him chuckling. He was only three or four years older than me! How dare he? How I loved to hate a man like Carl...

‘Anyway,’ I continued, keeping the conversation about what it should be. We shouldn’t spend any longer on the phone than we had to; there was always a chance that we could be tracked or listened to. The government interfered with phone calls all the time; even completely innocent ones. ‘What do you think I should do?’

‘Speed up,’ Carl suggested, most unhelpfully.

‘There’s no use just trying to outrun them,’ I sighed.

‘No,’ he agreed, finally sensing that there was something serious going on here. The Soulless so rarely actually followed or tracked one specific person that it was more than a little disconcerting. ‘We’ll send someone along to try and sort them out, but they won’t reach them for a while—the Master’s still not letting anyone out of Berlin. We’ll have to wait for someone to get over there from Rotterdam or Cologne or something ridiculous.’

‘If they’re following us east then people from Rotterdam and Cologne will just have to play chase with them and hope that they eventually catch up. Why not send someone from Prague or Warsaw; that way they can meet them head on.’

There was a long silence in which I knew I’d triumphed; it was immediately obvious that Carl was just trying to come up with something to say to ‘prove’ that he had also thought of the genius idea, which he so evidently hadn’t.

‘Well, of course I thought of that too,’ he said, and I could just about mouth along with what he was saying. I’d heard it too many times from proud, arrogant, hysterically funny Carl, who had been given a leading position by the Master for reasons I could not hope to understand. ‘I was just saying the first place name that came to my head that was within reason.’

‘Of course you were,’ I said, finally my turn to patronise him. ‘Anyway, I should go. I’ve got to get to Warsaw as soon as possible.’

‘Don’t stop in Berlin,’ he advised me. ‘The government detected a couple of people going down into the train station, dressed as they would consider ‘incorrectly,’ and they’ve had men out around here ever since.’

My heart stopped, realising I had never asked the Master why the government was suddenly keeping such a close eye on them. ‘Shit,’ I murmured. ‘Who was it? Do you think they’re going to invade?’

Berlin was all I had left. Of course, I’d travelled between bases all the time, but Berlin was my true home. Not only was it the biggest Dreamer base in continental Europe; the only other ones dwarfing it being old London, before all that stuff happened barely more than a week ago, and Gothenburg, but it was where I spent the most of my time, and nearly all my friends left in the entire world lived there. If Berlin was invaded, where else would we go? That was, if any of the others made it out alive.

It had happened in London barely a week ago, and also in St. Petersburg in Russia not long before that. The Russian government had invaded their base. Ten people were killed and three kidnapped—no one had seen them since—but thankfully they’d been quite well prepared, and all the others had got out safely. They dispersed; some going to Helsinki and Tampere, some going to Estonia and some even making it to Moscow, but that was thirteen lives lost, or as good as gone, as far as the kidnapped were concerned, and not to mention a whole load of research and technology and the homes of nearly fifty people completely destroyed. And as for the Londoners...well they hadn’t been so fortunate.

It couldn’t happen again. We couldn’t let it happen again. Berlin had to be very, very careful.

‘It was Anke and Jonas and I think Mark might have been there too,’ Carl told me. ‘So they’re in big trouble. Don’t come back, especially not with the kid.’

‘Ok,’ I agreed, my heart in my mouth, no longer taking this so casually. Anke, Jonas and Mark had been seen by the government going into the base—that was a part I hadn’t heard from the Master.

‘I’ll talk to you soon,’ Carl said.

‘Yeah, see you soon,’ I murmured vacantly, my mind elsewhere. He hung up, and I put the phone down, staring straight ahead at the road, hardly even seeing anything.