The Power of Five Oblivion

forgotten the wound on his head. Then he noticed me watching him. “It’s broken,” he said.
    “What’s broken?”
    “The door. It should have sent me back.”
    “Whoa! Slow down.” I stepped forward and almost grabbed hold of him, then thought better of it. “It’s just a door. It opens and closes. What else is it meant to do?”
    “I just told you. I want it to take me where I came from. I have to find my brother. I have to go back.”
    “Go back where?”
    “Hong Kong.”
    I had been worried that the boy might need to see a doctor for the wound in his head, and that would cause all sorts of problems because he would have to explain how he’d arrived in the village and they’d probably beat him up and interrogate him before they even thought about treating him. But that was only half of it. It seemed that he was delirious. He said he had come from Hong Kong, which was on the other side of the world, and even if there had been any commercial planes flying, which there weren’t, that would have been impossible.
    And there was something else that I only noticed now. His accent. He certainly wasn’t from the village or anywhere close by. He didn’t even sound English.
    I had more or less made up my mind by this point. It was time to be on my way. The boy was hurt, foreign, deranged and uninvited – all of which added up to serious trouble. But it didn’t need to be my trouble. I would continue home and leave someone else to look after him. But even as I was about to make my move, he glanced up at me as if he had somehow read my mind and suddenly he looked so hopelessly lost and afraid that I knew I couldn’t leave him.
    “Hermione?” he asked.
    I couldn’t remember telling him that. “That is my name,” I said. “But my friends call me Holly.”
    “Holly…” He looked dazed.
    “How did you hurt yourself?” I asked.
    He put his hand to his head, then examined the blood on his fingertips as if noticing it for the first time. “I don’t know. I guess something must have hit me. The whole place was being torn down … this temple in Hong Kong. There was a typhoon. You must have seen it on TV.”
    “There is no TV. Not any more.” There was something else that didn’t add up. “When were you in Hong Kong?” I asked.
    “Right now. Just a minute ago.”
    That was when I knew he was crazy and I would have been on my way except at that moment I heard voices: two men crossing the graveyard from the north side. I knew at once who they were – Mike Dolan and Simon Reade. They worked together on the outer perimeter and must have been on their way there now as they were both carrying guns. If they saw the boy, it would all be over. He was a stranger. He had no place here. They would blast him full of holes without even asking him his name – something that, incidentally, I hadn’t yet done myself.
    “You have to get out of sight,” I whispered.
    “What?”
    “Just do it!” I shoved the boy away and he crouched down right in the corner, where the ancient wall jutted away from the church. It was dark there, out of the sun, and a shadow fell over him like a piece of tarpaulin. A second later, the two men saw me. “What are you doing out here, Holly?” Dolan asked. “Shouldn’t you be at home?” That was typical of him. Just because he carried a gun he thought he had the right to boss everyone around. He was a big, thick-set man with a beard and dirty clothes. Well, we all had dirty clothes but his were worse than most. I’d never much liked him.
    “I was just on my way,” I said.
    “What’s that you’ve got on your hands? Have you hurt yourself?”
    I looked down and saw the boy’s blood. I must have got some on myself when I pushed him. “It’s nothing,” I said. “I cut myself.”
    “On an apple tree?” They both laughed.
    Then Reade turned on me with laser eyes. He was the smaller of the two, thin and pale. He liked hanging around with Dolan because it made him feel important. He was suspicious of everything, like a dog always sniffing at your feet. “Did I hear you talking to someone?” he asked.
    “No.”
    “I think I did.”
    I didn’t know what to say. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see the boy scrunched up in the corner and I wondered why I was lying on his behalf. What could I possibly have been doing here that would make these two men leave me alone? My mind scrabbled for an answer and it was given to me by the church. “I was praying,” I