Above the Vaulted Sky - Page 266

            ‘My dad,’ she says quietly. ‘He might be looking for me.’

            ‘We can go and find him,’ I say, happily. I’m pleased to have the opportunity to help Elle for a change. My quest to find Penny has so often left her needs aside. Now they can take the forefront.

            Sandra buts in, ‘Excuse me, don’t you think you should let everyone know what’s happening before you go gallivanting off. Teague’s fault this all may be, but these people need direction. They’ve been robbed of their home and dumped in an alien world, plain, however you want to put it.’

            ‘Sandra,’ I say. ‘I want to help, really I do, but I’m not a leader. I can’t tell these people what to do with their lives. I don’t even know what to do with mine.’

            Sandra wasn’t for convincing. ‘But you must know somewhere where they can go?’

            I wrack my brains. I look to Elle and Yates. Both of them look back, clearly searching for answers themselves and finding none.

            ‘Look, Easton,’ Sandra says. ‘I’m not asking you to find a solution. But a lot of people were willing to follow you out of the town. I hear things, people don’t keep secrets there…wherever there is now. Like it or not, whoever did this to them, you were going to leave the desert, now you have and we’ve all followed you here. You know this world…’

            ‘But I don’t!’ I respond. ‘This is sixty years from the world I knew.’

            ‘Then we can all find it together,’ Elle says. ‘But I have a suggestion. Why don’t we get away from the scorchmark and the roadblocks and all of this mayhem before people start coming.’ She looks me in the eye. I know she’s trying to tell me something and I have to search for a second before I realise what. We’re back in the real world now. Who’s to say Windermere and her friends aren’t still in a position of power. They’ll know this has happened and they won’t leave it lying for long.

            ‘We’d better move then,’ I say.

            ‘The house?’ Yates says. ‘If it’s still standing there.’ His voice is sad and I realise how much the old cottage meant to Yates, despite the years of misery he spent there.