Once we have the girl in our hands, we can use her to draw the rest of them into a trap. One at a time, we will bring them to The Necropolis. And once we have all five of them, we can hold them separately, imprison them, torture them and keep them alive until the end of time.
Everything is now set. The Gatekeepers have no idea how strong we are, how far we have advanced. Our eyes are everywhere, all around the world, and very soon the battle will begin.
We just have to find the girl.
Ja sakkath. Jak sakkakh. Ja sha xul.
ROAD SENSE
The girl didn’t look before crossing the road.
That was what the driver said later. She didn’t look left or right. She’d seen a friend on the opposite pavement and she simply walked across to join him, not noticing that the lights had turned green, forgetting that this was always a busy junction and that this was four o’clock in the afternoon when people were trying to get their work finished, hurrying on their way home. The girl just set off without thinking. She didn’t so much as glimpse the white van heading towards her at fifty miles an hour.
But that was typical of Scarlett Adams. She always was a bit of a dreamer, the sort of person who’d act first and then think about what she’d done only when it was far too late. The hockey ball that she had tried to thwack over the school roof, but which had instead gone straight through the headmistress’s window. The groundsman she had pushed, fully clothed, into the swimming pool. It might have been a good idea to check first that he could swim. The twenty-metre tree she’d climbed up, only to realize that there was no possible way back down.