The Forest

-16-

"Hey!" She yelled, "Hey-" but she didn't have any name to call him by, "-boy, wait a minute-" three dismal beeps went off in her ear, letting her know she was yelling at empty air. The call was over.

Sydney groaned and slammed her phone down against her desk. What the hell was that? Sitting in her disaster of an office with mounds of paperwork to go through and towers of boxes still to unpack, she thought her stress levels could rise no higher. What an innocent mistake that had been. With a brother like Michael and a forest full of tiny flying people, she should have expected no less than... whatever that had been.

The woman considered calling the number again. Her phone had automatically saved it onto the long list of recent calls, she could see the familiar numbers staring back at her. But she turned her phone off. Not his phone, the boy had said. The boy. Who was he? A friend of Lucius? And she still hardly had any idea of who Lucius was, only that he was a boy her brother had taken a shine to and was now keeping like some guard-dog pet in the woodlands.

Arrested...

Words swum in her head. Her temples ached from drinking too much coffee, or maybe because she wanted more. This was beyond strange. All of it. Did Michael actually know anything about this boy he was harbouring in the woods? Like, oh, I don't know, does he have a criminal record? Where exactly does he come from, why is he at leisure to camp in a forest for months on end without any family members getting worried? Minor details like that.

Sydney clenched her jaw. She was going to slap that idiot the next time she saw him. He could take his 'he's just a kid' and 'I don't want to ask him about his family' straight to their parents and see how they reacted. She was sure that conversation would play out  wonderfully: hey mum, I quit my job again and I'm spending all my time lounging at home and wandering around a forest. Oh, and by the way, did you hear about the runaway child I've been hiding? He could have killed someone for all I know, but don't worry, he's just a kid. Anyway, how's dad?

Sydney rubbed her eyes, and smiled tiredly. Michael... always the same. What am I going to do with you?

Then all of those thoughts drifted away from her head, because her ear pricked to the sound of a distant throbbing loud enough to penetrate five solid walls and a closed door. She sat up. It was no hyper-caffeinated hallucination. The sound was a rhythmic thing, starting and stopping in bursts, almost like the stomp of some enormous creature dancing on the roof. It only took her a moment to guess its source. Nica.

Mike would have laughed at her had he been there to see her nostrils flare in the way they did when she got annoyed. Sydney slammed her palms on the desk and shot up, chair scraping backwards with an awful screech. Her initial fear had been that there was something going wrong in the new building, One of the over-expensive machines overheating, or maybe a sparking wire somewhere in the tangle of fuses and electrical circuits. The source of the incessant throbbing was nothing quite so worrying.

Sydney flung open the door to her office and could immediately hear other sounds overlaid on the bass that was making her building vibrate. The woman neglected to shut the door behind her, something she would usually never forget, and stormed down the hallway. Every footstep made the music louder and her anger itch more violently. By the time she reached the door to the labs, Sydney was seething. She twisted the handle and flung the door open.
"Veronica!"

It was a marvel that the girl heard her over the deafening blasts of music. The culprit of the offensive sounds was a pink speaker, disproportionately small compared to the noise it was producing, cylindrical and standing upright on the worktop beside her. A sticker of a cat in heart-shaped sunglasses smiled stupidly at Sydney.