Scorpia Rising

whom he had in mind.
    “Let’s try again,” Dr. Flint said. For the first time in her career, she was beginning to wonder if there was any point in this. She had been working with this child for months and she had made no progress at all. She touched her lip. “Mouth.”
    “Throat.”
    “Drink.”
    “Poison.”
    “Bottle.”
    “Message.”
    “Letter.”
    “Bed.”
    She stopped a second time. “That was a little better,” she said. “You were thinking of a message in a bottle, I suppose. But why did you say ‘bed’?”
    Julius was cursing himself. He couldn’t get the message out of his head. He had found it under his pillow when he went to bed. Someone must have placed it there during the day. And now he had almost let it slip out of his mouth, throwing out words without thinking.
    “Actually, I’ve got a slight headache. Do you mind if we don’t play this anymore?” he asked.
    “Of course, Julius. Do you want to have a rest?”
    “No, Dr. Flint.” Only a few minutes of the session had passed. They still had a whole hour together. Julius wondered if he would be able to get through it without screaming at her or even trying to break her neck. He had thrown himself at her once, early on in his therapy, and after he’d been dragged off, they’d put him in the punishment block for a week. That couldn’t happen now. The message. The secret friends. They wouldn’t keep him waiting long. He just had to hold everything together until the right time.
    “All right. Why don’t we draw some pictures together? I’d like you to draw some imaginary place, and then you can take me through it and tell me what you can see.”
    Julius had an imaginary place. It was a forest with Alex Rider hanging from every tree. A whole world of Alex Riders, each one of them suffering in a different way.
    “Can I draw an amusement park?” he asked.
    “Of course, Julius.”
    Even as he picked up the child’s crayon that had been supplied for him, he thought about the moment he had lifted the pillow and seen the single folded sheet of paper beneath. He had known at once that it was something special. Nobody ever came into his room when he wasn’t there. The other prisoners weren’t allowed. The guards and the cleaners made a point of asking his permission.
    He had unfolded it and read:
    WE ARE YOUR FRIENDS. WE ARE PREPARING TO HELP YOU ESCAPE FROM THIS PLACE. GO TO THE LIBRARY TOMORROW AT TWELVE O’CLOCK AND YOU WILL FIND FURTHER INSTRUCTIONS.
    The words had been neatly typed. Instead of a signature there was a little emblem printed in silver at the bottom of the page.
    A scorpion.
    Julius had read the note a dozen times, then crumpled it into a ball and swallowed it with a cup of water he had drawn from the tap. After that he had gone to bed—but he hadn’t slept.
    WE ARE YOUR FRIENDS.
    Who? He had no friends. Could it be some of his brothers? Julius had never found out what had happened to them after the Point Blanc Academy had been shut down but had assumed that they were, like him, prisoners. Perhaps he had been contacted by people who had known his father. They might be from the old South Africa . . .
    TOMORROW AT TWELVE O’CLOCK . . .
    Tomorrow was now today. It was already ten past eleven. Just fifty minutes to go. Julius Grief forced the image of Alex Rider (with a kitchen knife in his chest, his bones exposed, lying in the grass, under the grass) out of his mind and began to draw a merry-go-round. Dr. Flint watched him and of course she didn’t know. Nobody knew.
    This was the day he was going to escape.

5

    OVER THE EDGE

    THE LIBRARY WAS THE MOST modern building in the prison, and although it was unusually small and compact, it could have been lifted out of almost any provincial town in England. It was low-rise with red bricks and sliding glass doors and contained about three hundred books—half in English, half in Spanish—for the guards and their families used it too. There was a desk where books had to be signed in and out, a newspaper and magazine section (although all the publications were carefully censored), then the books themselves, divided into the usual classifications. The crime and horror sections were the most popular with the prisoners. New books appeared occasionally, mainly sent in by charities. When Julius Grief had arrived, the warden had personally set up a children’s section, purchasing the first books—a complete collection of Roald Dahl—with his own money.
    Julius