The Castle Read Online Free PDF Page A

with my address hurriedly written in Dad’s spidery writing. Nothing at all.
    Mum had decided that an extra-good way to celebrate turning fourteen would be to go to the graveyard at Winchelsea Church and spend some time with his ‘ashes’. Way to go, Mum. So we did, and it was horrible, but when we got back there was a cardboard box waiting for us on the steps leading up to the Smugglers’ Inn. Inside it, shivering, was a tortoiseshell kitten with a luggage tag attached to her collar saying, ‘PLEASE LOOK AFTER ME’.
    Somebody had sent me a kitten. A stripy, grey tortoiseshell kitten, and I’d always specifically wanted a tortoiseshell. On my birthday.
    Hello?
    After a certain amount of arguing and crying (Mum did most of the crying) I was allowed to keep her. I called her Lacy after Ada Lovelace, the daughter of Lord Byron, who invented the first computer program in 1843. Dad would approve, I thought, being a maths geek who loved computers, and Lacy was obviously a present from him. I mean, your father goes missing in suspicious circumstances and a few months later a mystery kitten shows up on your birthday ? And it’s just a coincidence? Please.
    So there was Lacy. And now there was this.
    Never forget, you have the power. Those were the words Dad said to me every night he was home. Nobody else knew them, not even Mum.
    Dad was away in Africa on a secret operation the day I was born. I came ten weeks early, tiny and purple. At the hospital, they said it was touch and go whether I’d make it. When Dad rang to see if we were OK, Mum asked him to choose my name.
    Dad was always super-geeky about maths. It’s his otherpassion, apart from the army. I was born on the fifteenth of October, the tenth month of the year. He called me Peta, partly because it means ‘rock’ and rocks can be tough little survivors, but mainly because it signifies ten to the power of fifteen in maths. Just like ‘kilo’ means ten to the power of three – a thousand, and ‘mega’ means ten to the power of six – a million.
    Mum was never sure about it, because of the whole sounding-like-a-boy thing. It has its advantages, though: there are three Savannahs in my class right now, but only one Peta. She should be grateful I wasn’t born nine days earlier. I like my name, but Mega Jones? Painful.
    So anyway, that is my power. ‘Of fifteen.’ It isn’t the speed of light, or invisibility, or mind-reading: it’s my name, and my birthday, and a little maths joke of my dad’s. Never forget, you have the power was our secret code.
    They were also the words Dad said to me on the phone from his last tour of Afghanistan, the two times he thought he was in real danger and might not be coming back. As well as being his goodnight, they were sort of like his goodbye.
    He’d never said them from Baghdad, which was yet another reason I didn’t believe the news about the bomb. However, if the boy on the phone was telling the truth just now, then somebody out there knew things that only my father knew, and was using his code for danger. Danger that didn’t just affect Dad this time, but affected me too.
    I went back to the window. Far below, a van drove slowly up the road, rumbling through the quiet of the night. The sound of the engine made my chest clench again, but it was a red post van, ordinary and normal. As it drove along, its headlights illuminated the parked cars ahead of it.
    In one of them, a nondescript dark-coloured estate car parked right opposite the back of the hotel, a woman turned to look up at my window. I caught a glimpse of her pale oval face and her softly waving hair.
    Ingrid, he’d called her. The Wicked Queen. Not so stupid a second time.

SIX
    I n the morning, Granny came to check I was ready for school. She found me sitting up in bed, clutching my knees, staring straight ahead of me. She folded her arms and pursed her