The Disappearances by Gemma Malley

the pile of bodies he and Rab had discovered, but even so his voice still cracked slightly as he described finding the young people thrown together as though they were nothing more than rubbish. Then he told her about Rab, about the Informers. Martha listened silently, nodding, wincing and gasping as the story unfolded. Then she reached over and put her hand on his.
    ‘And you? How are you?’
    Lucas frowned. ‘I’m fine,’ he said. Then he opened his mouth to ask something else, the thing he’d wanted to ask the moment he arrived, the thing that he’d thought about ever since he’d decided to come here. But immediately he closed it again.
    ‘You’re wondering about Evie,’ Martha said, appearing to read his mind.
    Lucas felt himself redden. ‘She’s safe with Raffy,’ Martha said reassuringly.
    Lucas nodded. Smiled. ‘Well, that’s good,’ he said quickly.
    ‘You must think about them a lot,’ Martha said quietly, her eyes looking up at him in a way that unsettled him slightly. ‘You were … close to Evie, weren’t you? I know that she thought very highly of you.’
    Lucas nodded again; his heart was thudding in his chest and he was suddenly finding it hard to think, hard to breathe. ‘Yes,’ he managed to say. ‘I … I thought highly of her, too. Think highly, I mean. I—’
    He closed his eyes for a second, mentally pulled himself together, forced the desperate loneliness that had suddenly engulfed him back down, deep within him where he could suppress it, refuse to acknowledge it.
    Martha pulled a sympathetic face. ‘It must be hard. Being alone.’
    Lucas caught her eye, flushed slightly. ‘I’ve always been alone,’ he shrugged. ‘It’s no big deal.’
    Martha appeared to contemplate this. ‘I don’t think humans are meant to be alone,’ she said eventually. ‘We need to connect. We need to feel part of something. That’s why people like the Brother succeed, because people are more afraid of being alone than they are of anything else. Not many people are like you, Lucas. Not many people are as strong as you are. But don’t try to be too strong. You need people too. Everyone does.’
    Her voice cracked slightly and Lucas felt a lump appear in this throat. Did she know? Were his feelings so obvious?
    ‘Not me,’ he said. ‘I’m fine.’
    Martha shook her head sadly. ‘Like Linus. He thinks he doesn’t need people too.’
    Lucas digested this. ‘And where is he? Linus, I mean?’
    Martha raised an eyebrow then smiled wryly. ‘He’s in the mountains in a cave, working like a man possessed.’
    Lucas looked at her quizzically. ‘Working on what?’
    Martha sighed. ‘He’ll tell you tomorrow, I’m sure. And I can’t possibly explain – I hardly understand it myself. But he’s become obsessed with a camp that appeared on the coast a few months ago. A new civil-isation, quite small I think. They appeared on the surveillance system then apparently disappeared again, along with a chunk of coastline.’
    ‘Disappeared?’ Lucas asked seriously, his interest piqued.
    Martha raised her eyebrows. ‘I don’t know. He kept saying that he didn’t know where they’d come from. That they had to come from somewhere, but his satellites told him that there was nothing beyond this island, which meant that either the people didn’t exist or his information was wrong. Then when they all disappeared, well, he was like a madman, pacing up and down, muttering to himself, sitting at that computer of his for hours, days at a time.’
    ‘And then he left?’ Lucas asked.
    Martha nodded. ‘The thing with Linus,’ she said, ‘is that he’s a genius. He built the System. He sees the world differently from the rest of us; sees connections that we don’t, sees everything twenty steps ahead of everyone else. Which means that other people just weigh him down, get in the way. He needed to work, needed to get to the bottom of this … this problem. And he had to do it without us slowing him