The Dreaming 2.29
By Asynca
Thanks to ze C-Kunkletron. Kunkelator. The Kunkmeister.
I didn't sleep. At least, I don't think I did.
I was so relaxed and so comfortable right up until the point that I either half-dreamt or hallucinated there was someone's face inches from mine. I opened my eyes, my heart racing, but I couldn't see anyone. I even used the light from my phone to check before I lay back down.
All it did from that point was escalate and the alcohol made everything just so much worse. I hadn't appreciated earlier that when I snapped awake and opened my eyes everything felt normal again. This time when I sat up, the room spun and the walls melted and I kept feeling like if I let go the flat would disappear and I would be somewhere completely different.
I didn't let go, I fought it. God knows what would have happened if I hadn't. In the process, I lost hours and I don't know how it happened. All I know is that one minute I was lying there sweating so much I had to take my long-sleeved top and my trousers off, and then the next thing I could hear Bree and Min talking softly in the next room and daylight was sneaking under the joining door.
I could hardly open my eyes. I certainly didn't feel at all slept. My head...
"Morning, Sunshine," Sam said from beside me. She'd dismantled the clothing barrier and was propped on an elbow and smiling at me. She must have been sleeping, because she'd changed into a big floppy t-shirt.
I groaned. Her friendly greeting was grating; I felt like she was poking fun at me. "I assume you're being sarcastic," I said, and on reflection it was probably rather grumpy. I didn't care much at that point, though. Even talking hurt.
She chuckled. "Lara. You look like a microwaved corpse. I say that in the nicest possible way." She swung her legs off the side of the bed. "You want water?" She paused. "Or maybe brains is more up your alley right now."
"I hate you. I say that in the nicest possible way."
She chuckled and disappeared, returning with a big glass of water which she made me drink all of with a couple more painkillers. Just having all that water swirling around in my stomach made me nauseous, as well. With my nausea, the crushing ache in my limbs and the pounding in my head, there was a point at which I wondered if I'd made a horrible mistake by pursuing the Frosts and now Amanda. Maybe this was beyond me.
She sat down beside me again. I could tell from how still she was sitting that she was going to be serious. "I'm sorry I flipped out on you last night," she said. "It's just that watching Min and Bree—"
"I know, I know," I interrupted her, too tired to be having this conversation right now. "I'm sorry, I'm just a bit preoccupied at the moment."
She made a face. "I should be, too," she said. "Like, Amanda's kidnapped this small magical child, there's some dangerous stone thing in her possession and you're covered in these spirits that are obviously messing with you." She exhaled and lay back into her pillow. "And what am I doing? I'm stressing out over whether or not my girlfriend finds me attractive and wants to touch me."
I watched her. Part of me wanted to just turn onto my stomach and announce that I couldn't deal with this right now. I didn't. Instead, I said, "You know, when you said that last night I was just thinking about how beautiful you are." I thought I sounded a little snarky, but Sam didn't notice. She just blushed. That was a rare sight.
"Wow," she said, a delighted smile on her lips. "I can't even tell you how nice it is when you actually say this stuff." Privately I wondered if she would enjoy it as much if I always told her, but I didn't say anything. God, I just felt so awful. I didn't need to make her miserable, too.
She was still talking to me but I have to confess I wasn't really paying attention. My eyelids were just so heavy I was having trouble keeping them open. While I was struggling with that, I had this sudden distressing image of standing slowly up, taking a gun and walking methodically though the flat and shooting everyone, completely unaffected by what I was doing. I gasped and my eyes flew open.
Sam had stopped talking. "Hey, are you alright?"
I looked across at her, terrified I would actually see blood running down her forehead even though I knew it hadn't happened. It was such a relief that aside from looking worried, she was fine. I took a long, slow breath and exhaled. "No," I said, coming to a realisation. "And I don't think I'm going to be okay until after this is sorted and I get these awful things off me. They just won't let me sleep."
"But you were out for like," Sam checked her phone, "maybe seven or eight hours? You still need more?"
I shook my head. "I don't think I slept."
Sam didn't look convinced. "You were out of it when I came back," she said. "I mean, you were, like, twitching and moving a lot but I'm pretty sure you were asleep." I couldn't really explain that, and Sam saw my expression. "Maybe you did sleep and now you're just really hungover?"
"Maybe," I said, and then pulled the pillow over my head and groaned into it for a few seconds. Any subconscious excitement I'd had about finding out what Amanda was up to was completely gone. I just hated the whole thing and wished it would end. This was too much: I just wanted to sleep. "God, when will this be over? Can we please kill the bad guys already so we can both just go home and sleep in front of the fire for a few months? I thought this was supposed to be a holiday."
I must have yawned, because Sam did, too, but hers turned into a chuckle. "Yeah, I know what you mean," she said. Something occurred to her. "Hey! I know what will cheer you up," she said, and then rolled over and burrowed around beside the bed, retrieving her phone. "Check this out."
She cycled through a few tabs in Safari, showing me all attention that her culture jam of the Frost International ad had attracted. On YouTube there were well over six million hits, and Sam looked very proud of herself. The last one had a response, and I recognised the hair. "Is that Macca?"
"What?" Sam looked at the screen. "Oh! Oh, yeah. Macca uploaded some video of himself, and you can still see his split lip healing and his bruised nose. It doesn't even matter what he's saying, because it looks like Frost hired goons to beat him up, especially after that footage of the miners I put in the ad."
While she was showing me Macca's video, a notification popped up on her screen. She had her calls on divert and had received a voicemail. "Who's Emi Akita?" I asked her.
She made a face and snatched the phone back, dismissing the message. "My dad's PR-lawyer person. I don't really know exactly what she does, but whenever something goes wrong she gets involved. She called me a few times this morning. Whatever, though. I'm not answering."
"Maybe you should?"
Sam looked at me like I was crazy. "Are you kidding? Like we don't have enough crap to worry about, I don't want to know all the ways in which Frost is trying to sue me right now. We can deal with it when we're back in England."
There was a knock on the door. "I can hear talking!" It was Bree's voice. "Can we come in?" Why not, I thought bitterly. It wasn't like I was going to get any sleep anyway. Bree didn't wait for me to reply before she opened the door. "The shower's through here," she explained, pointing to a door I had assumed lead to a cupboard. She then proceeded to rummage around through the piles of clothes everywhere. She was so cheerful and bouncy and for some reason that really annoyed me.
Min leaned on the doorway. She didn't look very well slept, either. I wondered why.
"You look almost as bad as I feel," I commented.
"Better get me to a hospital," Min fired back without missing a beat, a smirk on her face. "I actually would suggest a doctor, but..." She looked down at my arm; there was a stylised fish swimming around on my skin. "You match my doona cover," she said. I looked down at it; it was the seascape of a coral reef.
Sam snickered. "That's one pick-up line I've never heard before."
Bree found whatever it was she was looking for and stood up, shaking her finger at us. "Don't you guys have fun without me."
With the way I was feeling? "Believe me, I can promise you that is not going to happen."
Bree disappeared into the bathroom. No sooner had the water started than Bree began singing the top ten charts, with particular focus on the most obnoxious pop music that was current on the radio. She was also getting most of the lyrics just slightly wrong.
Sam made a face. "Tell me I'm not that bad." Sam actually had a rather nice singing voice, so I shook my head at her, and then regretted it when the movement when it started pounding again.
Min had a pained expression as Bree tried and failed to hit a high note. "What were you watching?" she asked Sam.
Sam patted the bed and Min stepped over the piles of clothing and sat on the bed beside Sam. When Min swung her legs onto the bed, they were so long they extended almost to the end. Sam was tiny in comparison. The other differences were also apparent; Min sat perfectly still while Sam animatedly talked, Min said very little while Sam filled up every tiny gap in the conversation, and Sam had a very pretty, very petite face while Min... well. She would have made a very pretty man, I thought. But as a woman? Her features were neat and symmetrical, but I don't think I'd have ever described her as 'pretty'. I had a very errant thought about how Sam and Min might look as a couple and what that might involve. It would perhaps have been a rather pleasant thought if I'd had any bloody sleep in the past two nights and I wasn't profoundly hungover.
While I was considering them, Min glanced up at me and we locked eyes. She immediately looked away, and I would have as well if I wasn't so tired. I just felt rather paralysed by how exhausted I was. Sam noticed something pass between us and looked over at me. By then I was at least watching her instead. She winked at me and then went straight back into clicking on YouTube videos.
At that point, through my misery, I decided that turning over and looking at the other wall was probably the best course of action so I did, pulling the duvet around my neck. After I closed my eyes I had all sorts of disjointed thoughts related to my recent observations and at one point the fish on my arm moved and for about five seconds I was absolutely certain it was Min's hand and she was saying, "Lara," in the bottom register of her voice
I woke up in a panic to someone actually saying my name, but it was Sam. "I don't know if Lara's up to that," she was saying presumably to Min. "And it's kind of this catch twenty-two, because we probably can't get the spirits off her without Old Johnston, and we can't wake him up without the Slave Stone, which we're going to have trouble getting because of the whole spirit thing on Lara."
This sounded like the sort of conversation I should probably be involved in. I managed to force myself to pay attention, but it took a lot more effort than usual. Min was clearly having much more success in thinking clearly than I was. "How does it work?" she asked Sam. "The stone. Maybe we can do it."
Sam shrugged. "You make the person touch it with their skin, and then you have to say this stuff like, 'Listen to me, Listen to me', or something. I saw Diane try to do it to Lara. It's probably something like that to release the person, but we don't know. We'll probably figure it out, though."
When I spoke, I sounded like a pack-a-day smoker at age sixty. "Because it went so well last time we tried to just 'figure it out'," I reminded her.
Sam shot me a look. "Wow, you're totally a barrel of laughs this morning," she said. "I'm beginning to understand Amanda a lot better." She turned back to Min. "But she's right. We don't really know. We were counting on Amanda to figure it out before, but," she sighed, "but now I guess it's on us."
Min spent some time thinking about that, but before she could come to anything Bree emerged from the bathroom in hot pants and a tank-top. She'd obviously been listening to us, because she said, "Well, we could all go to Darwin. Diane's up there in a hospital somewhere."
Min's eyebrow flickered. "She's just after another free trip," she told us. Sam grinned.
Bree pushed her arm playfully. "Am not!" she said. "But one good thing about her being alive is that you can actually ask her."
"I'm sure she's likely to tell us everything if we ask nicely," I said.
Sam threw a pillow at my head. "I don't care how hungover you are," she said, and then reconsidered. "Okay, I do. But Bree's got a point. Diane would know. It's just a pity she's connected to a respirator in intensive care thousands of miles from here."
"I'm sure she'll come back to Sydney eventually," Bree said. "I mean, she's from here. We could just wait."
I wasn't keen on that idea at all. "Waiting means more nights were I don't sleep properly," I said. "It's only been two and look at me."
They did, and the outcome of that suggestion was pretty apparent. It was no-go.
"We don't need to wait for her to come back," Min said. "Frost International headquarters is here on George Street. Both the twins' offices are there."
Bree explained how Min knew that. "Min used to work there. For nearly five years."
Even in the state I was in, I did recall Min mentioning it. "Do you know how we could get inside?"
Min shrugged. "Security is pretty tight," she said. "You scan your ID card to make glass doors open so you can get in. There's always a security guard on the floor watching people. I lost my ID card just before I left and they probably disabled it now anyway, so I don't think there's much hope of us getting in the front door."
"The guard's got to go to the bathroom at some point though, right?" Sam said. "Maybe we could just all chill out the front and wait."
Min snorted. "Yeah, like that's not suspicious," she said, sounding as sarcastic as I had been feeling all morning. "There's a cafeteria on the ground floor that takes deliveries from the rear. I don't really know how that works, but I'm guessing security is pretty strong there, too. Frost has a lot of trouble with Greenpeace."
We were all quiet while we thought for a few moments. Bree was fidgeting uncomfortably and seeing the movements out of the corner of my eye was really annoying. "You right there?" I asked her.
"I'm sorry!" she burst out, a completely guilty expression on her face. She sat there for a second, and then rushed off into the living room. I looked sideways at Min who was just breathing deeply and looking at the ceiling. When Bree came back she was holding her purse. "I'm so sorry!" she said, and then undid her purse and emptied out all of the cards, wads of receipts and small change onto the duvet cover at our feet and leafed through it all.
Min guessed what she was looking for before she did. "Bree!" she half-yelled, reaching out and picking out a black and white card from amongst the mess. "You let me believe that I lost it? I copped so much flack for that!"
Bree winced. "It was the only good pic I have of you with long hair!" she said.
Min sat looking at the card in her lap for a few seconds as if it held some pretty profound memories for her. Then, she quickly showed us: it was a Frost International ID tag. I wouldn't have believed it was Min's if I couldn't have seen Min Lee printed clearly on the bottom, because the photo on it was a picture of a young, pretty Asian girl with long hair and fake eyelashes.
"No way!" Sam said, and snatched it from Min to get a closer look. "No way that's you!"
Bree looked smug. "That's her," she said. "She also used to wear heels."
I looked at Min, who had blushed a very deep red. "Shut up, Bree." She tried to take the card back off Sam, but Sam held it out of her reach and then jumped up off the bed. I didn't know what was going on until I saw her retrieve the camera.
Min didn't make any sort of attempt to follow her. "Believe it or not," Sam said as she held the card in front of the lens, "that's her." She panned the camera back up to Min. Min did not look impressed.
Sam gave the card back to Min and she tucked it away in the pocket of her hoodie without commenting on what just happened. "I guess this means we can try the front entrance," she said. "If my card even works anymore." She gave Bree a very hard stare, and then took her own turn in the shower.
While Bree and Sam had their heads together whispering about Min's transformation, I pushed myself to sit upright and planted my feet on the floor. I was only wearing knickers and a bra, but it wasn't as if either of them were particularly risqué and we were all women, after all. I leant over and retrieved a change of clothing from my case and turned back toward the other two. "You mind if I have my shower next?" I asked. "Maybe it will wake me up a little."
After we'd all showered and Sam was agonising over which clothing choices said 'I work at Frost and I'm rich', Min drove us into the city centre. The only clothing choice I cared at all about was a pair of heavy black sunglasses that I borrowed from Min.
As it turned out, Sam was the only one of us who looked at all like we had any business being at Frost, even on a Saturday. Even in her 'casual' wear it was like she had 'Trust Fund Child' plastered all over her forehead. We decided unanimously that it would be her who would stand guard at the door and let us know when the security guard wasn't paying attention. She stood there and played with her phone.
While she was doing that and I was standing in the direct sunlight feeling half-awake, sore and awfully sorry for myself, I noticed her brow crease a little as she looked at the screen. I guessed what it was about, and texted her, "Answer it."
She turned to look squarely at me, and texted back, "You're not the boss of me," and very theatrically rejected another call. She was trying to smother a grin.
Reasonably soon after that, she glanced inside and frantically motioned for us to follow her in. Because it was Saturday, the huge glass entrance hall was completely empty and our footsteps echoed off the polished concrete floors and the high ceiling. The security desk was empty, too, and all that stood between us and the Frost International offices were the glass doors that Min had mentioned. The Diamond-Snowflake symbol was painted across the divide of them, and the glass was opaque.
"Huh," Sam commented, and I could hear the grin in her voice. "'Frosted' glass. Very funny."
We all bundled up to the doorway and Min took a deep breath and held her card against the reader. After a few seconds, a little red light appeared above the reader and it beeped three times in quick succession.
"It still might be okay," she said, "sometimes it just does that."
She waved it across the reader a few more times with the same result, and then polished it on her hoodie and tried one last time.
"It looks like it's not working," a male voice commented neutrally.
The security guard had returned from wherever he'd ducked out to and was walking toward us. The first thing I noticed about him was how young he was, the next thing I noticed was that he had a two-way radio and a baton. I didn't have great associations with either of those items, and my breath caught in my throat. Normally I could have relied on myself to say something useful, but I just couldn't think.
Min could, though. "Oh, hi," she said, with total ease. "We're just down from operations up north to grab some of the docs for the Kimberley. Everything up there was destroyed and we want to make sure we know what's missing." She wandered up to him and handed him her pass. "It's been a year, two years since I was down here, though. My pass doesn't seem to work. Why is that?"
"Yeah," he began, completely buying her story and accompanying her back toward us to try the reader himself. "These old passes get demagnetized so easily." He ran it in front of the gate but it just beeped at him. "Come over here to the computer, I'll check out your file and make sure everything is okay."
He walked back towards the desk and Min looked at us with panic. My heart was beating so quickly. I looked towards the door and wondered if the security guard could disable it and trap us in here. Everything was glass; maybe we could smash it and break free if he tried to call the police.
While I was trying to imagine how it would all play out, Sam was looking at me with some concern. "I'd ask you if you're feeling okay, but you're wearing sunglasses inside." I gave her a dead stare over the rim of said sunglasses.
The security desk wasn't too far from us, and with the acoustics of the hall it was easy to hear the conversation. The guard placed the card in a scanner and leaned at the screen, reading it.
Min looked back at us and swallowed.
I could see Sam looking over at the doorway just as I had.
The security guard frowned. "Where did you say you worked again?"
"Operations in Kimberley," she said. "Doesn't it say that?"
He made a non-committal noise and tabbed through several pages. "No, it doesn't say that," he said. "It says you used to work down here, though."
I have no idea how Min managed to appear perfectly calm, but she did. "Yeah, I did. Until about eighteen months ago."
That, he nodded at. "Let me make a phone call," he said, and lifted the handset of the phone.
Min shook her head. "Look, if it's too much hassle we'll just leave," she said quickly. "It's not like I particularly need the documents on a Saturday anyway."
"Yeah, let's go have breakfast somewhere," Bree called nervously. "I really need some eggs!"
"Stay here a second," the man said to all of us, and it wasn't clear if it was a request or an order. We stayed put anyway.
He just called one number, and it was obviously internal because two seconds later a fresh face in a security uniform appeared. "What's up?"
"She says she works up north but the system has nothing on her," he said. "Do you know what's going on?"
"Oh, yeah," he said. I didn't miss Min turning away from him with her jaw set tightly. "The flood knocked out the servers up there and Singapore has another thirty minutes ETA on loading the backup," he said. "There's no sync from Ops North at the moment, so any personnel files are—" He made it to the desk and had glanced at the computer screen and double-took. "Min Lee?" He looked up at her for a moment, squinting at her. "Fuck!" he said. "It is you! I didn't recognise you with the…" He paused, looking her up and down. "Short hair," he finished, obviously wanting to say a lot more.
Min had her eyes closed for a moment. "Hi," she said awkwardly.
He looked much more pleased to see her than she was him. "Wow, I thought you quit! This is great!"
The other guard looked between them and rolled his eyes. "Since you two clearly know each other, I'm going for a smoke," he said, and walked out the back.
"I'd love to stay and talk," she said stiffly, "but we're in a rush."
The guard was beaming at her as he leant indulgently forward on his elbows on the desk. "Of course you are, with all that shit that's going on up there. What a fucking mess though, hey? Can't say I'm too sad about it to be honest, but you didn't hear that from me."
Min laughed politely and then gestured at the gate. "Could you?"
He looked surprised. "Oh, yeah. Here." Before he gave Min her pass back, he looked at it for a moment. "You look so different in casual gear," he said. "I guess it's more practical for mining, right? Bit hard to be in Ops with long hair. But hey, wouldn't it be weird if I met you out like this now? The boys here might get the wrong idea about me." He laughed openly again and gave the ID card back to her. It was a really obnoxious sound, and I could have done with some sort of weapon just then.
It had taken this length of conversation for me to finally realise through all the cottonwool in my head that Min wasn't out to her ex-coworkers. Even after all that time working for them.
He walked quickly over and opened the gate for us, leaning so close that I wasn't certain I would be upset if any of the spirits transferred to him. "Perhaps I'll see you and your friends out this weekend, yeah? If you live up there it's probably been a pretty long time since you've hit the town." He grinned at us, his eyes resting on me. "Hey, is that who I think it is?"
He had obviously been waiting for me to say something, but I was still stuck on the whole Min-not-out thing and completely didn't notice. Sam answered for me in flat voice. "No. No, it's not."
The guard laughed and let us all through the gate. "I really hope I see all of you out at The Basement tonight." His tone of voice made me feel really uncomfortable. "Great to see you again, Minnie." He laughed at the obvious contradiction between his nickname for Min and her height.
Before the glass doors had shut behind us and Sam had opened her mouth to speak, Min said very quickly, "He was just a colleague, that's all."
Sam looked at Bree, who shrugged.
We followed Min to a lift that took us all the way to the top floor of the building. The lift was another one of those ones that was filled with mirrors, and I was forced to stare at my pale, sunken face behind the sunglasses from ground floor to level thirty-six. I looked just so ill and so different. I hardly recognised myself.
Level thirty-six was just a series of huge offices, but the office that Min led us into really took the cake. It was huge, and one whole wall was a single window with uninterrupted views over the harbour and surrounds. Interestingly, the desk placed in front of it was facing away from the views. On the table was a gold name-plate that read Diane Frost, CEO.
Min saw me looking at it. "Sean's says 'Co-CEO', and he was always really pissed off that Diane's didn't." That particular memory, she smiled at.
Sam walked out into the middle of the room and took out her camera. "Okay, so," she said, filming us. "Let's search this place before Singapore syncs the personnel files, or whatever that creepy guard guy said was going to happen."
Bree was already opening Diane's drawers. "What are we looking for?" she asked.
"I don't know," I said. "Just anything unusual that might mean something related to the stone."
Bree gave me a look. "Right," she said at length. "By the way, this draw is full of money, can I take some?"
"No," Min said firmly as she sat down in front of Diane's computer. "If anything like that's missing they'll pull videos and that guy knows me."
Bree looked disappointed, but continued rummage through the drawers.
I had just been standing in the middle of the room watching them for at least a minute before I realised I should have been searching, too. I wandered over to the open bookcase. It contained the same sorts of books Dad's had; the full set of leather-bound Encyclopaedia Britannica, and all the classics. In addition to those, Diane had the last five years of Business Law International and a series of other books.
Sam made a disgusted noise. "Gina Rinehart and Clive Palmer," she said with disgust. When I turned to look at her, she had lifted a photo frame off the desk. It was a photo of Diane at a table with two overweight and unkempt middle-aged people in suits. I didn't know who they were, but Sam enlightened me. "Australian mining magnates," she said. "Clive Palmer came to one of my Dad's functions once and then started to make all these really offensive comments about cheap Asian labour and my Dad's head of media was like, 'Um, you do realize we're Asian, right?'. Just, ugh. He was so drunk."
Min swore at the computer, indicating she hadn't been paying attention. "I can't figure out her password," she said. "I was sure it was going to be something like 'die brother die', or 'sean-frost-is-a-dick'."
While I was turning back to the books, I could hear Sam walking around the room. "There's no pictures of family or kids anywhere," she said. "Like, anywhere."
"Diane doesn't have a partner or kids," Min said. "She's married to the job."
That reminded me of a certain other CEO I'd come across recently, and I felt uncomfortable.
I was so tired that I really had to look very carefully at all of the books and really think about the titles to decide if they were relevant or not. As a result the whole process took me a good five or ten minutes when it really should have taken me thirty seconds. Towards the end of the bookcase I'd crouched down and was re-reading a title I'd read incorrectly several times when Sam made a comment over my shoulder. "Hey, isn't that a book on Australian history?"
I turned stiffly toward her and then looked back at where she was pointing. It was, and I was momentarily very annoyed that I looked so stupid for not seeing it myself. I lifted it out with shaking arms and walked slowly over to lay it open the big cedar desk.
I'd been leafing through various pages before Bree, who was on the other side of the table, said, "There's a bookmark buried in it." I leant over so I could see the top of the pages; she was right. I flipped it open to a chapter about mythology in the Kimberley. It was too much to read over right now, but my heart was racing. This must be it, there must be something in this chapter.
The vibrate on Sam's phone was so enthusiastic I could hear it in her pocket. I just looked at her and she rolled her eyes. "Fine," she said. "If it will make you happy, I'll call her back." She took her phone out of her pocket and dialled voicemail, staring at me.
I ignored her, turning further through the book while Min and Bree watched from the other side of the table. The history pre-dated white colonisation and focused mainly on the spiritual beliefs and practices of various Aboriginal nations; it was actually something I thought I would probably like to read myself. If I wasn't wavering between murdering someone or jumping out the window, that is.
Sam's brow lowered while she was listening to the voicemail. I made eye contact with her, but she didn't say anything to me, she just looked at the phone momentarily and chose the call-back function.
"Hey, what's that?" Bree asked, and when I looked across at her, she had her head tilted and she was bending so she could see into the arch between the front cover and the pages. I let her reach over and push the pages together to reveal the front cover. There was writing on it.
"Hello," Sam greeting whoever was on the phone in Japanese. "You've been looking for me?"
I looked back at the writing, and it took a few moments for me to focus enough to read it.
"Di," it said, "I was given this book some time ago but the information is of no real interest to me. I've highlighted the appropriate sections; this is right up your alley. Perhaps after you've read this you'll be happy to finally 'listen' to my proposal – JN." It was dated about five years ago.
I had a really deep discomfort growing in the pit of my stomach, but I couldn't think clearly to identify what was causing it. This was what we were looking for, I was sure of it. But what was this ominous personal note in the front? I recognised the hand writing.
"What!" Sam said in Japanese suddenly enough to cause my heart to get going again. Bree and Min just stared at her, not understanding the significance of the conversation she was having because it was in Japanese. "Are you sure? Are you completely sure they got the address right? Surrey?"
Bree looked back at the note. "'JN'," she said. "Who do you reckon that is?" She was looking at Min, who then looked to me. I was only half paying attention to them, though, because Sam was staring at me with a completely stunned expression and I was worried about why that might be.
After being silent for a moment she held the phone away from her ear. She looked completely shell-shocked. "Lara, something's happened back home in England."
Now everyone was staring at me. I felt sick.
"'JN'," I said, feeling everything slowly piece together in my aching head. I knew that hand-writing, I knew it. I felt a familiar wave of terror and helplessness that I recognised so terribly well, but it wasn't until my eyes actually fell back on the gold name-plate with the letters 'CEO' on it that I realised what was going on.
"Jacqueline Natla," I breathed.
