The Power of Five Oblivion

bothered him, eating the cold and congealed pieces of fat that had been scraped off some rich man’s plate. He needed to live. That was how it was.
    But this was different. He was like an animal in a cage, starved not just of food but of hope. With every day that passed, he found himself accepting his fate, his one hour’s exercise, the endless hours on his own. Even when they had broken his finger, he had barely fought back. There was a time when he would have bitten and scratched and kicked and done anything to protect himself, but this time he had been too slow. That was what scared him. He was dying on his feet.
    He had just one advantage over them. They thought nothing of him. They saw a small, malnourished boy who didn’t even speak their language and who probably cried himself to sleep at night. A stick insect. What they didn’t know, what they had no way of understanding was that he had survived for two years in Lima, one of the most dangerous cities in South America. He had lived in a shanty town, sharing a room with a dozen other boys who would have put a knife in him to steal a single dollar. There had been the police, rival gangs, criminals controlling their little patch of turf, rich men who would bundle you into their car if they could and do things to you that you didn’t even want to think about. To live in Lima without money, you needed to be strong and Pedro was strong in ways his guards couldn’t imagine.
    Breaking out wasn’t the problem. Pedro knew that he was in the basement – the dungeon – of some sort of castle and that it was in the middle of a city. He had heard the noise of people passing – not traffic, there weren’t any cars, but the dull murmur of crowds, occasionally punctuated by shrill police whistles. There seemed to be a lot of police. He was near a kitchen. The more starved he was, the greater his sense of smell and he would have been able to name everything that had been cooked in the past week. This building was more than a prison. People lived here in the rooms upstairs. But the two guards – Ape and Weasel – came in from somewhere else. Pedro knew this because of the ash on their uniforms every morning. For some reason, the sky was full of ash and every morning there would be a fresh coating on their shoulders and sleeves.
    He could trick Ape and Weasel and he could get out of the cell – but the problem was, what would he do next? He had no friends. He had no money. He was in a strange country that could be anywhere in the world. Almost certainly, he wouldn’t even be able to speak the language. And he didn’t know where to go. The best thing would be to find the door that had brought them to the Abbey and to use it to return to Peru. But he had no idea where it was. On his own, he would have no hope of finding it.
    And then there was Scott. He couldn’t leave him behind. Somehow he had to find the American boy and take him along too.
    One thing at a time…
    Pedro had been watching his guards carefully, examining them as he walked around the yard, and he had noticed something. While he was pacing out his endless, pointless circles, Ape just sat there, occasionally smoking a roll-up cigarette. But Weasel had a hobby. He was carving something out of a piece of wood. It might have been a little statuette or a chess piece but that didn’t matter. What interested Pedro was the Swiss Army knife he was using. When the hour was up and they escorted him back to his cell, Weasel slipped it into his right-hand jacket pocket. The knife was everything Pedro needed. It was a key. It was a weapon.
    And he knew how to get it.
    The next time they took him out, he was ready. His finger was already feeling a lot better. For anyone else, it would have taken a month to heal – but Pedro was not anyone else. From a very early age he had learnt how to survive and now all his energies were channelled into exactly that. He took a shower, standing naked under the dribbling cold water, idly watching it swirl around and drain out of the manhole set in the floor. He dried himself with the dirty rag that they gave him as a towel. He got dressed again and followed the two men into the yard.
    As usual, he spent sixty minutes walking between the blank walls and beneath the dirty, black sky. He wondered why it always smelled of burning. Perhaps part of the city had caught fire – but surely it couldn’t still be smouldering more than a month later? Well, he would find out soon enough.