The Power of Five Oblivion

have to come with me,” the marine insisted. “This is my last run. If I leave you behind, you’re on your own.”
    “Get in the boat, girl!” one of the passengers called out. It was a woman who had been hurt in the fighting. Her face was streaked with blood and she was shivering. Scarlett was keeping them waiting.
    “Where can I find a Zodiac?” she cried.
    “You can’t. Are you coming?”
    “No.”
    “Then – good luck!” The marine pressed down on the throttle. The water foamed behind the boat and then it was away, rapidly dwindling into the distance.
    Scarlett looked around her. In a few minutes, she would be alone on the beach. Already, the cliff face, with its twisting ice columns and pathways, was empty. With a feeling of complete misery, she realized that Lohan had been right. For all her fine words, there was nothing she could do. There were no spare boats. If she tried to swim to Skua Bay, she would freeze to death before she had completed a dozen strokes. She couldn’t walk across the ice shelf. She had no choice but to abandon Matt. She couldn’t help him. It was time to go.
    And then she saw a boat – a Zodiac – skimming across the surface towards her. It had appeared from nowhere and, unlike all the other vessels, it was empty, with just a single driver hunched over the outboard motor. She couldn’t recognize him – like everyone else, he was wrapped up in weatherproof clothes – but as he pulled in he looked up and she saw (she had already guessed … at least, she had hoped she had guessed) that it was Lohan. He must have found a faster way down the cliff, somehow arriving well ahead of her. She had no idea where he had got the Zodiac from. Knowing Lohan, it was probably better not to ask.
    He brought the boat up onto the shingle and for a moment the two of them stood facing each other.
    “I have behaved dishonourably,” he said. “Always, from the earliest age, it was my father’s teaching that I should consider myself and my own safety to be of paramount importance. But that is not the same thing as acting like a coward. I tried to leave Matt at Serra Morte. It was a bad thing to do. And I almost did the same thing with you today. I will take you to Skua Bay and we will go together to the fortress. I am certain we will die there. But better that than to die like a rat, hiding in Australia.”
    “Thank you, Lohan,” Scarlett said. “I was about to give up. I didn’t think there was any way.”
    “We must hurry. I think we have very little time.”
    Scarlett climbed into the Zodiac and the two of them pulled away.
    Scott was ashamed of himself.
    No. It was worse than that. He felt himself being sucked into a pool of guilt and self-hatred like nothing he’d ever known. He remembered the day following the death of his foster father. Scott had blamed himself – and rightly – for the man’s death. He had actually ordered him to kill himself and he had been horrified and sickened by what he had done. It was true that Ed had been an alcoholic, violent and abusive, but even so Scott hadn’t meant to do him harm. But in the end he had lived through it. Part of him had even been glad that things had turned out the way they did.
    This was different. He must have been mad, throwing in his lot with the Old Ones. He thought of Pedro in the Castel Nuovo. He saw now that he had taken out all his anger on the Peruvian boy just because the two of them had been left behind in Peru. Pedro was smaller and weaker than him but he had never complained, he had never shown any fear. In his own way, he had tried to help. It was true that Jonas Mortlake had played tricks on Scott’s mind, using drugs, magic, hallucinations to break down his defences. But he had stood back and cold-bloodedly decided that Pedro could have one of his fingers broken simply so that he, Scott, could have a decent night’s sleep.
    And what he had done with Matt had been far, far worse. Matt was the first of the Gatekeepers, their leader. He was also the only one of them who had stood, single-handed, against Chaos. He had become their target and Scott had delivered him to them. How could he have done that? What would Jamie say? When Jonas had told him what he had to do, Scott hadn’t even tried to argue. He hadn’t wanted to lose what he had here. A comfortable room. Warmth. A sense of safety. And what would they have done to him if he had turned against them? He had been too scared even to think about it.
    But