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many unanswered questions.
    Feeling isolated and alone, I wished I could go home. I rang Mum once and left a message onher voicemail just so I could hear her voice and she could hear mine. I told her I was safe and not to worry.
    I thought again of my little sister stuck in a hospital bed while security watched out for her fifteen-year-old brother … They needed to be protecting her from people like the psycho woman and Sligo, who were all determined to discover Dad’s secret and were willing to take out anyone in their path.
    It wasn’t fair: I’d done nothing wrong, but I was serving a sentence of solitary confinement, away from the people I needed to watch over. I just needed to stay alive long enough to solve Dad’s mystery.

3 FEBRUARY
     

    332 days to go …

    I kept waking up thinking I could hear Dad’s voice calling me.
    I tossed and turned, not quite awake, but not quite asleep either. Caught in that half-asleep state I could see the threadbare toy dog from my nightmares. It hovered in my mind, heavy and bleak. I’d had so many close calls lately that I couldn’t understand why or how this image could make me feel so uneasy. Storms at sea, sharks, being thrown in a car boot, almost drowning in oil—they were all terrifying things I could understand.

    My eyes flew open. Something had completely wrenched me from sleep. I strained my ears to hear a dull thudding that seemed to be comingfrom outside. Straight away I thought of Winter, handing me and my secrets over to Sligo.
    I crouched behind one of the boarded-up windows. Someone was definitely creeping around outside; I could hear their careful footsteps crushing the long grass.
    I spotted the hole in the floor and dived into it, quickly pulling the carpet back over my head. Buried in dirt and cobwebs, I strained to hear where the footsteps had gone.
    They’d stopped. Hunched under the floorboards I began crawling on all fours straight ahead towards the light and up behind the vegetation that grew around the front verandah.
    I had to keep my head down low to avoid colliding with the sagging floor above. I cringed as my already-aching right shoulder slammed into a pylon.
    The light ahead suddenly shifted—disappearing behind a figure crawling towards me! Someone was under the house with me!
    Awkwardly, I started backing up. If I could make it back through the hole in the floorboards and drag something heavy over the opening, I’d be able to make a run for it. Unless there was someone waiting up there for me too.
    ‘Dude? It’s me!’
    Boges!
    ‘Cal?’ he asked.
    I peered ahead through the gloom under the house. As the dust settled I got a shock to find Boges’s round face peering right back at me, centimetres from my face!
    ‘Boges! Who else would be hiding down here in the dark?!’

    ‘You almost gave me heart failure!’ I continued.
    ‘Sorry, dude. There was a police van cruising the street and I thought this way would be safer. Nice place you’ve got here,’ he joked, wiping a sticky cobweb from his face.
    Boges laughed at himself as we both pulled ourselves up into the house.
    ‘Something smells damn good, for a change!’ I said, as he opened his bag and threw me a squashed paper bag of sandwiches and chips. ‘And they’re still hot!’
    ‘Yes, but don’t forget to eat your fruit, young man,’ he said in his best Mrs Michalko voice, tossing me a couple of apples and a banana.
    ‘Oh, thanks, Mama M!’ I joked.
    He pulled his laptop out last, and then we made ourselves comfortable on the floor and got stuck into the food.
    ‘What’s the latest on Gabbi?’ I asked.
    Boges stopped chewing. ‘No change. She’s still unconscious. “Serious but stable.”’
    Stable. That word made everything sound a little bit better.
    ‘And Mum?’
    Boges made an indecisive groaning sort of sound. ‘She’s kinda OK. I went round to see her last night. She was complaining about one of your dad’s colleagues—Eric somebody—saying how