Read Soul Seekers for Free Online Page B

behind him while on the other side of the trunk lay Jude and Emily.
    Cas took his hands off the rope coiled in front of him and dropped it down off the limb. It uncoiled until it almost reached the ground, and one by one they used it to climb back down out of the tree.
    Cas grabbed the end of the rope and hurled it up out of sight into the branches.
    ‘That’s bought us some time,’ he said.
    ‘Yeah,’ Siren admitted. ‘But they’re in front of us now and they’ll soon figure out that they’re chasing four planks of wood.’
    ‘Doesn’t matter,’ Cas said. ‘The army’s too big to move until dawn so they’re stuck here. Once they’ve given up the search we’ll head for the city. That way we’ll arrive before they do.’
    Emily shook her head.
    ‘And then what? I’m hungry, thirsty, cold and tired. How are we going to survive?’
    Cas thought hard for a moment. ‘We’ll figure that out when we get to Boston.’
    A fresh chorus of voices shouted out from somewhere further down the reservoir.
    ‘Looks like they’ve found the planks,’ Jude said.
    ‘Let’s move,’ Siren snapped. ‘I don’t want to be here when they get back.’
    * * *

10
    Boston, Massachusetts
    The sound of a very loud bell woke Cas from a deep and dreamless sleep. He blinked his eyes open, fully expecting to see his bedroom wall like he always did, filled with posters of the aeroplanes that his father flew.
    Instead, he saw the rickety wall of a barn that was shot through with slivers of bright sunlight that shafted through the musty air. His back tingled from where countless shafts of straw were poking into his skin, his whole body ached from the cold and his stomach rumbled from hunger and thirst.
    ‘There are people outside.’
    Cas turned to see Siren on her knees and peering through gaps in the barn wall. He dragged his weary body up into a sitting position and rubbed his eyes.
    ‘What time is it?’ he asked.
    ‘Beats me,’ Siren replied. ‘My watch vanished when we got here.’
    Cas looked for at his own watch, a gift from his parents on his eighth birthday that had never lost time or failed him but it was no longer on his wrist, vanished after the accident inside the base had happened. It all seemed so long ago already and yet in reality it wouldn’t happen for more than two hundred years.
    Beside him Emily and Jude awoke, both looking haggard.
    The barn was filled with hay bales and leather saddles, some kind of tannery that they had found in the early hours of the morning. Exhausted, they had staggered into the building and collapsed on to the soft hay and fallen asleep within moments.
    ‘We need to get out of here,’ Cas said as he remembered the pursuit of the previous night. ‘The army must be close to us by now.’
    ‘Something big is happening out there,’ Siren said. ‘We should take a look.’
    Cas joined Siren beside the doors of the tannery and peeked through a gap.
    A large town square was dominated on one side by cattle pens that looked as though they were being used to auction off animals. A man in a red velvet suit and a big white wig was shouting out bids and waving bits of paper in his hand as he did so, a large crowd gathered before him. A huge building with a clock tower loomed over the square, and beyond rows of wooden buildings Cas could see the towering masts and rigging of old sailing ships anchored in the docks.
    Across the square marched groups of soldiers, some armed, others off duty.
    But it was on the other side of his view that the biggest crowd had amassed, and Cas felt a chill of apprehension rush through him as he recognised what he was looking at.
    Boston Common looked bigger than he remembered it, lined on two edges with rows of trees and the estuary of the Cambridge River providing the backdrop. On the common were hundreds of tents. Cas realised that the army they had left behind had marched early and must have arrived in the city at dawn while they slept. The crowd was amassed