Page 6 of Girl, Entangled

Chair, he thought.

He was in a chair.

Good. That was a fact. A chair was a chair.

He tried to turn his head and discovered that it turned, slowly, but it turned. He saw a wooden stand of some kind in the moonlight, painted in stripes, with pennants on it. He saw a long trestle table with a row of helmets along it. He had to look at them for a while before he understood. Old, old helmets. With slits in them, like something from the Roman Empire.

More bizarre images came into view. Billy saw recreations of old buildings made from mismatched-colored wood, like those old houses they had in forgotten villages in England. He saw what looked like a giant pig pen with javelins resting against the fence. Rows of tents. A statue of a knight on horseback.

This wasn’t any afterlife Billy knew, but it also wasn’t the world Billy knew. Where the hell was he? And who was his tour guide through this strange scene?

‘Wha… who…?’

Noises emerged from the back of Billy’s throat, but nothing that could be confidently identified as words. His head lolled to the side, and in his peripheral vision he saw a single thick, beefy forearm.

This confirmed two things. Billy was in a wheelchair – and someone was pushing him along. Billy’s cloudy brain supplied the irrelevant detail that his pusher had monster genetics judging by the size of his limbs, and Billy idly thought that maybe he could use that detail to befriend him.

The idea died as soon as it emerged, swallowed up by confusion and light-headedness. A night breeze assaulted Billy’s face to the point he had to squeeze his eyes shut, and when he opened them, he saw perhaps the strangest sight yet.

‘Is… tha….?’

It was a wooden platform, raised four or five feet off the ground, and a ramp ran up to it from where Billy was sitting. At the top of the platform two thick posts came up out of the deck, and a crossbeam ran between them, and from the crossbeam hung a rope, and at the end of the rope was a loop.

Billy understood all at once with the body first.

A boulder of dread opened up in his chest and dropped through to his stomach. He tried to scream but what came out was a wet noise. He tried again. The second sound was worse. Saliva ran down his chin and he couldn’t lift his head to keep it in his mouth. He tried to throw himself sideways in the chair and managed to get the chair to lurch slightly before the man behind him put a hand on his shoulder and the chair came straight again.

The wheels rolled on. Up the ramp now. Billy heard each plank go under him, like a heartbeat that wasn’t his. The platform leveled out and the chair came to a stop in the center of it.

Billy’s eyes were on the rope. The rope was at the right height for a man sitting down. The rope had been measured for a man sitting down. The attacker – and Billy understood now that he was being attacked – had built the rope for someone in a chair.

A pair of hands came over his head from behind. The loop went down over his face, past his ears, and settled around the front of his throat. He felt the knot at the side of his neck. He felt the rope draw up snug behind him.

The strong man then came around to the front of the chair.

Where the face should have been there was a hood. Black cloth, pulled down over the head, with two holes cut for the eyes and nothing cut for the mouth. Below it the man wore a dark tunic and his arms were bare. He stood square in front of the chair and let Billy take it all in.

Billy had gone to great lengths to avoid this figure, and now he was here.

He told his body to stand. His body took the instruction and did nothing with it. He told his legs to run, and the legs sat there like two bags of sand. Every door in him was locked up tight.

Then his attacker turned and walked, without hurry, to the edge of the platform, where a long wooden lever stood up out of the boards.

Billy’s executioner pulled the lever.

The world dropped, and the chair dropped with it. Billy Hayes was a man falling in a chair, and then the rope reached the end of itself and Billy did not fall any further.

And his final thought before consciousness faded was that he’d seen that exact outfit somewhere before.

CHAPTER TWO

It had been a week since Austin Creed sat in a chair at the Central Detention Facility and told them the woman in the cell was not Lindsey Doyle.

The week had been mandatory recovery leave. Ella had spent it at home, not recovering. Today it was over. She got out of the shower and looked in the mirror. The black eye had gone down to a yellow smudge. The split in her lip had closed. A week of leave had done that much, at least. She looked at her hair, decided it was a ponytail day and pulled it back.

Luca was in the bedroom when she came through. He had his work trousers on. His belt was half threaded and there was a shirt over one shoulder he hadn’t put on yet. Luca with his shirt off and his trousers on was, under normal conditions, one of the small reliable pleasures of Ella’s morning. Today, that pleasure wasn’t there.

‘Ponytail,’ Luca said. He was watching her in the mirror. ‘That bad?’