The Power of Five Oblivion

just empty but wrung dry. As he stood there, breathing in the fresh morning air, he knew he was lucky to be alive.
    It sometimes seemed to Pedro that he had been alone all his life – and never more so than now. He wondered why it was that many children around the world had parents, brothers and sisters, and friends, but not him. He had been fighting from the day he had been born … for food, for friendship, for shelter, simply for survival. Why was that? It was strange that the thought had never occurred to him before. What was it that made him different from everyone else?
    Was this what it meant to be one of the Five?
    He wanted to rest but he knew he must keep going. He wanted to see Matteo again. Somehow when he was with Matt and the others, he understood things a little more … or at least accepted them. The thought of it gave him new strength. He could do this. There was a passage that the shape-changers and the Roman police didn’t know about. It led from the Vatican Museums into St Peter’s Basilica. Inside the church he would find a doorway that would take him to Antarctica. Matt had said it was there. So it must be.
    The sun had only just risen but to Pedro it seemed very hot and the light was hurting his eyes. He was aware of walls soaring above him, of tall windows and archways. In the far distance, he thought he could hear organ music but he might have been imagining it. There were several doors leading into what might be offices or state rooms but they weren’t going to be any use to him.
    But he had a problem. How was he meant to find a secret passage when even the name told him it was supposed to be secret? For a moment he was confused, as if the poison had seeped into his brain and made him forget what he was looking for. He remembered that he hadn’t eaten or drunk anything since he had emptied his stomach. He thought he might faint.
    The cleaner, pushing his trolley and sweeping his brush over the cobbled surface of the Cortile Borgia , saw the boy staggering towards him. His first thought that he was a refugee who had somehow broken into the Vatican. The whole city was swarming with them, many of them dying on their feet. This boy looked worse than any of them. His skin was white and drawn tight over his bones. There was a dreadful tinge of yellow in his eyes. He was clearly racked with pain.
    The cleaner’s name was Leonardo Emilio Tasso but everyone just called him Tasso. He was sixty years old and he knew that he was very lucky to be employed at the Vatican. How else would he be able to support himself and his family in these terrible times? As he hurried over to the boy, his first thought was to summon the Swiss Guard and to have him ejected. That was the right thing to do. But at the same time he wondered if he shouldn’t call a doctor first. The boy would die if he was simply put out on the street, and Tasso, who had two grandsons of his own, would be responsible.
    “Where have you come from?” he demanded as he caught hold of Pedro. “What are you doing here?”
    Pedro didn’t understand anything he said. All he knew was that he had failed. He had been discovered before he could find the passageway. “Please, help me,” he said in English.
    The choice of language took Tasso by surprise. He had been expecting Croatian, Polish or Russian. English was not often the language of the refugees. “Who are you?” he asked. He spoke a little English himself.
    “My name is Pedro. I have to go into the Basilica.”
    “You cannot go into the church. It is not allowed.”
    “There’s a door. I have to find the door. A door with a star. Do you know it?”
    Tasso had spent almost all his adult life in the Vatican. He knew the gardens, the buildings, the priests … and he knew the stories. The door with the star was something that people sometimes talked about – but always in whispers. It was in the church, behind the altar. It was half the size of a normal door and it looked completely different from the rest of the building. It led nowhere. Behind the door, there was a short corridor and then a brick wall. And, just as the boy had said, there was a five-pointed star above it. The symbol was very strange. It had nothing to do with Christianity – so why was it there?
    There were those in the Vatican who wanted to destroy the door, to break down the wall around it and then to brick the whole thing in. But for some reason that had never happened. People said that there was something