If only it hadn't ended like this.
'He shouldn't have done that,' Annie interrupted his thoughts.
'What?'
'Joseph. He killed his brother. There must have been another way. There's always another way.' Her voice sounded tearful as she spoke, and Ben couldn't tell if she was angry with the old man, or sad for him.
'Yes,' Ben muttered. 'Yes, I suppose you're right.' But in his heart he wasn't so sure. It was unavoidable, what Joseph had done; and it was true that innocent people could have been hurt in the explosion. But what if Lucian had rebuilt Vortex? What then?
Sometimes, he realized, things were not black and white. They were shades of grey.
And what was it Lucian had said was the motto of Spadeadam? Si vis pacem, para bellum. If you wish for peace, prepare for war. He continued to stare at the scene of destruction. Joseph, he finally understood, had been fighting a war in his mind for most of his life. What they had just witnessed was the final battle; only now was he at peace.
Ben took a deep breath, and turned his attention back to Annie.
'What that soldier just said was right,' he told her. 'It won't be long before this place is crawling with RAF. If they catch us, we're going to have some pretty awkward explaining to do.'
'Like what?' Annie asked.
'Like what we were doing wrecking one of their tanks. Like what we were doing blowing up one of their trucks.' He glanced back towards the bunker. 'Like what we had to do with what's going on over there. Listen, Annie, I don't think we're out of trouble yet. Any evidence to do with Vortex has been destroyed; the people involved will deny all knowledge of it. If we try and tell the authorities, they'll never believe us — they'll think that we're just making it all up, that we're trying to wriggle out of what we've been up to here. We're compromised, Annie. We're in a corner. Even your dad wouldn't be able to get us out of this.'
'But we've done a good thing, Ben. We've… we've saved lives, haven't we?'
'I know, Annie. And I know it bites, but we're just going to have to keep it to ourselves.'
Annie's eyes widened as the truth of Ben's words struck her. 'So what do we do?' she breathed.
'There's only one thing we can do. Try and get out of here without being caught. Nobody knows our names; if we can get back to the youth hostel without being collared, nobody will be any the wiser.'
'Do you think we should go now, before the RAF get here?' But as she spoke, there was another noise in the background that answered their question. They peered out from the foliage to see two helicopters approaching. 'They're the same choppers that chased us earlier,' Annie murmured. They landed at a safe distance from the burning bunker, and as their doors opened, a swarm of armed RAF men jumped out. Suddenly there were trucks everywhere, driving up the road to examine the burning vehicle and erecting a human perimeter around the area of devastation.
'I guess that's a no,' Annie whispered.
'We'll have to wait till dark,' Ben said. 'It's our only chance of sneaking out unseen.'
Annie nodded. 'Makes sense,' she said. 'But we've got a long time to wait.' She re-manoeuvred her body against the harsh bark of the tree. 'And this isn't the place I'd choose to be hanging around.'
The day passed unbearably slowly. Ben and Annie kept watch on the movement of the RAF and the emergency services who were swarming around the site — half to distract them from how uncomfortable they were, half because they wanted to keep tabs on where everyone was before they tried to make their escape.
Morning turned to afternoon, and afternoon to evening. They tried not to think about how long it had been since they had eaten, and their lips seemed to stick together with thirst. As the light began to fail, Ben grew increasingly anxious, and he could tell that the same was true for Annie. Helicopters and trucks were still all over the place, their powerful lights beaming out into the countryside. Ben had the distinct impression that they were looking for something — or someone. Anyone.
'They probably think it's a terrorist attack,' he whispered.
Annie nodded mutely.
'Still, we can't stay up here for days. I reckon we've got another twenty minutes of light. As soon as it's dark, we go, OK?'
'OK.'
The day might have been slow, but the next twenty minutes passed more quickly than Ben would have liked. Almost before he knew it, it was fully dark and they were preparing to leave. Ben descended first, stepping over the gun that was still lying at the foot of the tree — that was the last time he wanted to see a weapon of any kind for a long time — then waited for Annie to join him. Then, treading carefully in the treacherous dark, they started trekking deeper into the forest, away from the focal point of activity. It seemed strange, walking in the opposite direction from where they had left Joseph, almost as though they were deserting him; but Joseph had chosen his own path, and there was nothing they could do about that now.
They walked blindly in the silence and the dark, their hands held in front of them to stop themselves from bumping into trees. Neither Ben nor Annie had any idea where they were going, and soon they were wildly disorientated.
The sounds were strange in the forest. The sounds of night. Wild animals called to each other, and there was mysterious shuffling all around them. All they could do was ignore it and press on, hoping that they would come out of the forest on the other side and find some way of orientating themselves. They held hands in order to stop themselves from getting separated; more than once, one of them tripped and had to be held up by the other. It was a frightening journey.
Gradually, however, they became aware that the trees were starting to thin. Desperate to be out of the forest, they upped their pace; in the end they practically ran, hand in hand, out of the woods and onto the grassland beyond. Ben blinked. The moon was startlingly bright — so bright, in fact, that it cast shadows on the ground as sharp and distinct as if it were a summer's day. They stood for a moment, breathing heavily with relief, only now admitting to themselves how scared they had been in the woods. Once they had calmed down, Ben started to look around.
'Over there,' he said, pointing away from them. 'The boundary fence.'
Instinctively, they started running towards it. But they had only moved a few metres when Annie called to him.
'Ben! Stop!'
His heart jumped. 'What is it?'
He turned to look at Annie, expecting the worst.
But his cousin's face had a mysterious smile as she pointed up into the sky. There, silhouetted against the fat, silvery moon, they could see the shadow of a bird, swooping gracefully in the night sky. Time seemed to stand still as they watched it, solitary and magnificent, unaware that it was being admired, and unworried, for the moment at least, by the presence of humans.
'What is it?' Ben whispered.
'I don't know,' Annie replied. 'An owl of some kind. But whatever it is, it's beautiful.'
And so it was. The two cousins continued to watch it until suddenly, without warning, it drifted away on some unseen eddy of wind, leaving Ben and Annie alone once more.
They stood together in a kind of respectful silence, aware that they had been privileged to share that moment with the mysterious, phantom-like bird. Ben found himself wondering if Annie, too, was thinking about Joseph, and how he had entered briefly into their lives and then, like the bird, disappeared, never to be seen again.