The Lost Girl Read Online Free PDF Page A

don’t know,” says Sean.
    His voice gives nothing away, but I am looking at his eyes, which are honest and very green, and they’re troubled. I believe him. He doesn’t know what they’ll do to us. But he knows that because I belong to them, they have every right to dispose of me if I defy them.
    Sean might not belong to anybody, but that doesn’t mean he’s in the clear. Guardians are not allowed to help us. To interfere with the laws. The Weavers can punish them, too.
    “They won’t find out,” I say.
    “Course they won’t,” says Sean. “So finish your broccoli, it’s good for you.”
    I have trouble sleeping all night. Tonight my dreams are mine, which is not always the case. Sometimes I dream of things from Amarra’s life, bits of memories and emotions that slip through the cracks from her consciousness to mine. Like the time the dog bit her. It preyed on her mind for weeks, the memory of that terror. Or the time she had an enormous crush on a pop star and I dreamed of his face for days. Erik says it’s normal: when they made me, they had to put bits of her into me. This means that sometimes traces of memories and feelings cross over from her to me.
    I dream of strange things—not of zoos, like I’d expected to, but of an abandoned carnival in a deserted dark city. Men and women in green, swinging back and forth on trapezes. Elephants rearing up on their hind legs. Brightly painted clowns. Each time I wake, my heart races with a mixture of fear and excitement. In my dreams, the clowns and the Weavers look eerily alike.
     
    On the train the next day, I am too excited to sit still. I bob up and down in my seat, jostling Sean, who gives me a look that mingles amusement with exasperation. I can’t contain myself. I haven’t left Windermere since I arrived as a baby. As the familiar town disappears, the English countryside meanders in. It’s like a snapshot lifted off a postcard, with endless fields and sheep-dotted hills.
    “It’s so beautiful,” I say softly.
    Sean points things out, like the low stone fences that he says are a northern thing, you don’t see many of them in the south.
    “Have you been to the south much?”
    “Now and then,” he says. “London, mostly. Cornwall, too. My parents used to take me there on holiday when I was younger. Except for one year when we went to Egypt. Echoes are illegal there, too, so Dad had to lie about his work whenever anyone asked. I met some kids in Cairo who weren’t even sure echoes actually exist.”
    “So you and your mum don’t go on holidays anymore?” I ask.
    He shakes his head.
    “Is she all right?” I ask tentatively.
    He shrugs. “She misses him.”
    “You do too, don’t you?”
    “Yeah. Do you?”
    “I try not to,” I confess. “But I keep thinking about that rhyme Mina Ma used to sing for me. You know, about the five little ducks? And how they went out one day, over the hill and far away. And the mama duck quacked, but only four came back.” I try to smile, but there’s a lump in my throat. “It’s silly, but I keep thinking Jonathan’s the one that didn’t come back. And in the song it goes on until none of them come back.”
    “You know how it ended, don’t you?”
    “I always made Mina Ma stop because it upset me so much.”
    “Silly,” he says. “In the end, the mother duck followed them, over the hill and far away. And she quacked and quacked, and all five little ducks came back.”
    “Really?”
    He laughs. “Yes, really.”
    I laugh too.
    When we pass through Lancaster, I pay special attention to it. I can’t quite imagine how Sean lives his everyday life in this place, with its storybook castle and cobbled streets and old bridges. I’ve never known Sean in any setting except our cottage by the lake.
    It’s almost noon when we finally pull into Blackpool. Sean seems to know his way around, so I follow him out and down the street to the nearest bus stop. I can smell the seaside, all salt and fish and